Plenty of Democrats have been asked and sounded off on arguably the most infamous, unbending presidential guarantee since “Read my lips: no new taxes,” but the public discussion has now made its way into Obama’s inner circle.
Journalists have grilled former Obama advisers David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs about the president’s talking point, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan — period,” and they have struck an imbalanced mix in their responses: 5 percent that it probably was a bad line to use, 95 percent that what we really need to be talking about are all of these terrible ‘substandard’ health insurance plans that Americans had.
“You were advising the president on the kinds of things he should say. Why did not you or somebody else say to him, ‘Mr. President, don’t say, ‘No matter what you’re going to keep your health care plan?”” NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory asked Axelrod Sunday.
“Hindsight is 20/20,” Axelrod managed to say before a bit of crosstalk with Gregory. “There is a small group of people, David — the vast majority of Americans, that statement will hold true for. For this small group of Americans, it hasn’t.”
Despite trying to frame the discussion in terms of how much better off those who have lost health insurance will be under Obamacare, reporter Bob Woodward challenged Axelrod further.
“I remember early in the Obama presidency, when you were there, and there was some dispute about a cabinet nomination and the president came out and said, ‘I screwed up.’ Why not just be straightforward?” Woodward asked.
“Yes, I agree,” Axelrod said, before offering a token, well-spun of line of contrition. “I don’t think there’s any shame in saying, ‘We didn’t anticipate this one glitch. We grandfathered a lot of policies. We didn’t anticipate this one glitch.'”
On Monday’s Morning Joe, Gibbs offered the sort of ‘straightforward’ talk for which Woodward was searching, but even he couldn’t resist putting the ‘if you like it, you can keep it’ line into the desperate context that people ultimately will be in so much better shape for having lost their ‘bad’ insurance.
“[D]o you agree it was a wrong move?” host Mika Brzezinski asked Gibbs of the decision to roll with the ill-fated line.
“Certainly,” he admitted, before catching himself and shifting from straight talk to crooked explanations. “I don’t think anybody dealing with this today finds what was said — I do think some explanation in terms of the fact that policies that were in place at the point in which the president signed them were grandfathered in for this. Insurance companies have then changed those policies and they’re not in the grandfathered set of insurance policies.”
Gibbs wrapped up by saying that Healthcare.gov will wind up being a Christmas present to those who received lumps of coal by way of cancellation letters from insurance companies.
“But again, I do think you will have an understanding — and this is why the website is so important, and why it has to get fixed sooner rather than later — and that is, so many people in this individual market will find a better policy at a better price. They can’t see that right now because the website is down.”
Gibbs had stated earlier in the segment that it was a “good question” as to why the rollout of that website wasn’t delayed, given the technical concerns.
Clips via RealClearPolitics and the Washington Free Beacon below.
