The Carter Administration -- By JamesTaranto, The Wall Street Journal

Shop till you drop (your insurance carrier). 

The first ObamaCare enrollment numbers were coming out, and the guys at TalkingPointsMemo.com were expecting bad news--"bad" in this case meaning very small numbers, as TPM is pro-ObamaCare. So early this morning the site's Dylan Scott published "Your Guide to Understanding the Obamacare Enrollment Numbers."

"The administration was expecting 500,000 enrollments in October," Scott notes. "For context . . . that was the baseline before the rollout went awry."

What was the baseline after? "Obamacare supporters say that freak-out threshold doesn't exist," Scott helpfully explains. He quotes one expert who pretty much says it all: " 'I think there's no number that's too low,' Tim Jost, a Washington and Lee law professor and supporter of the law, told TPM. 'The main thing that we're going to learn is that the website isn't working.' "

Oh, so that's all. Whew!

As low as supporters were setting expectations, though, the administration still felt obliged to inflate the numbers. The Wall Street Journal reports that "fewer than 50,000 people had successfully navigated the troubled federal health-care website and enrolled in private insurance plans as of last week."

How many fewer is anybody's guess, because, as the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff reported yesterday, the Obama administration isn't limiting its count of enrollees to people who have actually enrolled in a health-insurance plan. Instead, "it will use a more expansive definition." Get ready for it: "It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid."

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