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White House Thrusts David Axelrod Into Fire
President Barack Obama seemed to be getting it from all sides last week. Republicans blasted him for trying to cut a backroom deal on health care and for putting international concerns about climate change before American jobs. Meanwhile, environmentalists panned an international climate change deal he brokered, abortion rights supporters and opponents complained he was ignoring their concerns, and his own base accused him of selling out to special interests and moderate lawmakers on health care.
So on Sunday, the White House dispatched messaging guru David Axelrod to three of the five top Sunday shows to answer those criticisms, absorb fresh broadsides and tamp down some controversy of his own making.
Last week, Axelrod emerged as the administration’s go-to defender of Democratic efforts to win Senate passage of a health care overhaul bill before Christmas.
But, in the course of defending compromises the White House and Senate Democratic leaders struck to win the support of individual lawmakers, Axelrod inflamed progressive activists by blasting a re-emergent liberal champion in the health care fight: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.
On Thursday, Axelrod said Dean’s criticisms of the bill were “predicated on a bunch of erroneous conclusions” and that “to defeat a bill that will bend the curve on this inexorable rise in health care costs is insane.”
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Axelrod said, “I didn’t say he was insane. I want to make that clear.” Though he conceded that his attack was “probably an unfortunate choice of words,” Axelrod again dismissed some of Dean’s criticisms, namely that stripping from the Senate bill both the so-called public option and a proposed Medicare expansion would stifle any real reform by leaving insurance companies in control.
“Gov. Dean’s main concern was that he called this a giveaway to the insurance companies, but his facts were wrong,” Axelrod told Stephanopoulos. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Axelrod told host David Gregory that “when you look at the bill in its totality, it doesn’t square up with his critique.”
On NBC, Dean also got his moment at the megaphone and said the left has been “very disappointed” by the Senate’s shelving of the public option. “We don’t think that there has been much fight in the White House for that,” he said, asserting that the Senate bill falls well short of the type of reform Obama promised during his campaign and could make an already difficult Democratic 2010 election cycle even harder.
The Medicare expansion, which would have added millions of people to the federal programs rolls within months of enactment, “would have made 2010 a lot easier for us,” said Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman.
But Axelrod dismissed such predictions. “I think we’re gonna have a good result next — next November,” Axelrod told Gregory.
Axelrod pushed back against criticism from both supporters and opponents of abortion rights over language inserted into the bill to appease Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) that would strengthen restrictions on federal funding of abortion.
“The fact is, it really doesn’t change the status quo,” Axelrod told Gregory. “And that’s what we’re after.”
Echoing criticism from both Republicans and open government advocates, CNN’s John King, host of “State of the Union,” pointed out that the agreement to win Nelson’s support — which also included a boost in Medicaid funding for Nebraska, as well as deals that brought on board wavering Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) — were reached “behind closed doors, pretty much traditional Washington politics.”
During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to make government more transparent and less beholden to special interests, and King asked Axelrod, “Is it what the president promised during the campaign?”
“John, I don’t think that there has been a more intensely covered debate than this health care debate,” Axelrod said. “So I challenge the notion that it hasn’t been a transparent process.”
King also asked Axelrod to respond to criticism that the deal Obama brokered late last week in Copenhagen to limit climate change — which the White House touted as a major breakthrough — contained no sanctions for noncompliance.
“Nobody says that this is the end of the road,” Axelrod said, suggesting that the talks may have collapsed without Obama’s intervention.
Sources: Politico, MSNBC, Meet The Press
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