– U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said the timing of the government shutdown coalescing with the rollout of the federal health care marketplace was a strategic error for Republicans hoping to build public opposition to President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Speaking with Missouri reporters by phone on Thursday, Blunt pointed to the covers of front pages across Missouri and the nation on last week, which told readers the government was shutdown and that the federal health care law was kicking in to gear.

“There would be so much more attention on the difficulty of the government trying to manage 16 percent of the economy and have a substantially new role in people’s health care,” Blunt said. “If that was the focus, the top of the page headline would have been ‘Obamacare launches with real problems’ instead of ‘the government is shutdown.'”

The federal health care exchange – which aims to allow Americans living in states, like Missouri, that have opted to not set up a state-level health care exchange to participate in a health care pool – has had a bumpy rollout. The Obama administration has said the servers for HealthCare.gov (the website where Missourians can enroll in an exchange) have been overcapacity, leading to the site being taken down to build in new servers.

If it weren’t for the fact that much of the federal government is shutdown, Blunt believes that the fact that the website has been having so much initial trouble would have received a lot more attention.

“The discussion of what can and is going wrong is very much more below the fold,” he said.

It is unclear how many Missourians have tried or successfully enrolled in the federal health care exchange. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said earlier this week that they would be releasing only monthly numbers on enrollment.