President Barack Obama is now acknowledging that his if-you-like-your-plan-you-can-keep-it promise shared something in common with “bad apple” insurance policies: You had to read the fine print. 
 
 If the White House is lucky, his apology will help the president maintain credibility with the public and allow him to pivot away from an effort to play down the impact of millions of Americans seeing their health insurance plans canceled after he promised that wouldn’t happen. 
 
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 Before that, Obama was explaining — and he was losing. 
 
 (See POLITICO's full Obamacare coverage) 
 
 While the failure of the HealthCare.gov website cast doubt on the administration’s competence, the broken promise threatened to damage the president’s personal credibility — the trump card that has saved him in the darkest days of two presidential campaigns and five years in the Oval Office. 
 
 He was in a bind: To preserve trust, he had to distance himself either from the promise or the policy. He chose the latter, framing plan cancellations as an outcome he didn’t expect. I’m sorry, he said. I’ll fix it. 
 
 “The majority of folks will end up being better off,” Obama told NBC News on Thursday night. “But even though it’s a small percentage of folks who may be disadvantaged, you know, it means a lot to them. And it’s scary to them. And I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” 
 
 (WATCH: Obama laments HealthCare.gov, but not cancelled plans) 
 
 He vowed to try to find a solution for consumers in the individual insurance market who are both ineligible for subsidies and facing a premium increase — one that wouldn’t require the act of an increasingly peeved Congress. 
 
 It was a stunning turn, not just in Obama’s rhetoric but in his policy. His signature health care law aimed to cancel low-grade plans to provide better coverage for the under-insured — too often, he has said, Americans find out their insurance doesn’t cover their medical bills only after they get sick. 
 
 The apology didn’t sit well with some Democrats on Capitol Hill, who feel that there’s now another layer between them and communicating the benefits of the law to the public. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: W.H.: Politics? What politics?) 
 
 “Democrats woke up this morning hoping the top headline would be either the Toronto mayor’s crack-smoking rant or the very positive jobs report, not an apology from the president,” said one miffed senior House Democratic aide. 
 
 But Obama was also facing pressure from another cohort of Democrats to come up with a strategy to extricate himself – and congressional allies who had repeated his words — from the political flypaper of a broken promise. 
 
 For two weeks, Obama and his aides tried to finesse the point. Worried that television news reports would falsely alarm the vast majority of the population that would experience no change in their plans, they suggested that it was a minor problem. 
 
 They noted that only a subsection of 5 percent of Americans were subject to having their insurance policies canceled. But that formulation sounded to some like the president was dismissing several million Americans. 
 
 In partial damage control, the president stuck an asterisk next to the four-year-old promise. 
 
 “Now if you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law, and you really liked that plan, you’re able to keep it,” Obama said in Boston on Oct. 30. “That was part of the promise we made. But ever since the law was passed, if insurers decided to downgrade or cancel these plans, what we said under the law is you’ve got to replace them with quality, comprehensive coverage.” 
 
 The president was simply trying to get his arms around the problem, and to make sure Americans understood that not everyone was losing their health insurance, before offering a solution, said one White House official. 
 
 This week, Obama told politically vulnerable Senate Democrats that he would seek an administrative remedy to soften the blow of the insurance cancellations, and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough carried the same message to House Democrats. 
 
 It stands to reason that the White House would make adjustments on the fly as problems with the health care law present themselves, the official said, contending that the president stands with the majority of the public in wanting to watch the law play out and fix things that aren’t working as they crop up. 
 
 White House aides declined to say what Obama might be able to do – without Congress — to provide relief for those negatively affected by plan cancellations. 
 
 But there are plenty of ideas on Capitol Hill, including a bill written by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) that would allow people on the individual market to keep their current policies. That’s due up for a vote on Friday, and Democratic and Republican aides expect that it will attract more than the 22 Democrats who voted for a delay in the law’s individual mandate in July. 
 
 “Next week, the House will vote on the Keep Your Plan Act … which fulfills the promise that the president repeatedly made and then broke,” said Rory Cooper, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. “Beyond that, the House will continue to review new problems with Obamacare and decide if legislative action is necessary on a case-by-case basis.” ||||| President Obama talks about the importance of growing the U.S. economy while at the Port of New Orleans in Louisiana on Nov. 8. (Larry Downing/Reuters) 
 
 President Obama, beset by problems with his health-care rollout, sought again Friday to reassure the public that he is personally involved in the administration’s effort to fix the program’s malfunctioning Web site by the end of the month. 
 
 “I wanted to go in and fix it myself, but I don’t write code,” he said during a speech at a port in this Gulf Coast city. But he pledged that despite the troubled start to the Affordable Care Act, the law will ultimately benefit millions. 
 
 “I know health care is controversial, so there’s only so much bipartisan support we’re going to get,” Obama said, “until it starts working really well and they stop calling it ‘Obamacare.’ ” 
 
 The stop here came a day after Obama apologized to millions of Americans who had their low-cost health coverage in the individual marketplace canceled despite his promises that they could keep their plans. White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters en route to New Orleans that the president has instructed his aides to examine potential administrative solutions to the matter, but the spokesman offered no details. 
 
 Obama had hoped to use the remarks in New Orleans to push his proposals to increase U.S. exports and send a message that his administration has not been sidetracked in its bid to improve the economy. 
 
 A look at four past presidents who stepped forward to accept responsibility for events that happened on their watch. (The Washington Post) 
 
 “The feeling that you can make it if you try has been slipping away,” he told a few hundred supporters, speaking outside, with oversized port gantry cranes rising above him. “My driving focus is to restore that sense. That should be Washington’s focus, too.” 
 
 Even as Obama sought to refocus the conversation on economic growth, he could not escape the political fallout from the health-care mess. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) joined him aboard Air Force One, but she did not appear with him at the port event, citing a conflicting engagement elsewhere in the state. 
 
 Landrieu, who is expected to face a tough reelection campaign next fall, has called on Obama to extend the March 31 deadline for the uninsured to purchase health coverage under the Affordable Care Act or face fines. She was among a group of 16 Democratic senators who expressed concern to Obama during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday. 
 
 But the president assured the Democrats that the health-care Web site will be fixed by the end of the month and said he has no plans to push back the deadline. The public will still have four months to enroll through the Web site, Earnest said, calling it “a really long time.” 
 
 The White House has tried to fight back. On a conference call with reporters Thursday evening, administration officials, joined by elected officials from Louisiana and Florida, criticized the Republican governors of those two states for failing to use a provision in the Affordable Care Act to extend Medicaid benefits to more uninsured residents. 
 
 Obama was scheduled to visit Miami for three Democratic fundraisers after speaking in New Orleans. 
 
 The president’s appearance in the Big Easy was intended to help him keep the pressure on Republicans as Congress begins to negotiate a potential budget deal. Democrats are seeking relief from mandatory federal cuts known as sequestration in exchange for permanent “structural changes” to federal health programs such as Medicare. But Republicans are balking at the Democrats’ demand for new revenue through the closing of tax loopholes. 
 
 Obama has tried to make the case that the sequester puts the pace of economic growth at risk, and he has pushed for greater investments in infrastructure, education and scientific research. 
 
 The Port of New Orleans is thriving, with statewide exports up 3.4 percent during the first six months of the year, compared with the first half of 2012. 
 
 But ultimately, the president knew he could not ignore the health-care woes in his remarks. 
 
 “There’s not as much bipartisan progress in fixing our broken health-care system,” Obama said. “We took it up knowing it would be hard. There’s a reason no other president has done it.”
– President Obama may have apologized to the American public over ObamaCare, but he took a decidedly different tone with senior staff, reports the New York Times. In a piece whose headline begins "A White House in Crisis Mode," Michael D. Shear reports that a "seething" Obama summoned senior staffers to the Oval Office over the website debacle and let them have it. “If I had known, we could have delayed the website," he told the group, according to an aide present. The president's anger seems to have worked, suggests the story, given the all-out press to get the website fixed this month and the story off front pages. “I think they do realize that this is Defcon 1,” an outside adviser tells the paper. The trick is avoiding the perception that the White House is ignoring other matters as well. As the Washington Post reports, Obama was in New Orleans yesterday for a speech that was supposed to be all-economy. Instead, he had to talk ObamaCare. “I wanted to go in and fix it myself," he said of the website, "but I don’t write code." Both the Post and Politico say the White House is working on some kind of "administrative" remedy for those affected by policy cancellations, but no details were available on what it might entail.