Last night, however, I was flipping through the channels and decided to watch "The Ed Show" on msnbc. John Harwood was on. Here is a transcript of how the segment went before I threw my remote at the TV.
SCHULTZ: Now, $34.7 million, in my world, that's a heck of a lot of money. That's how much the Chamber of Commerce has spent lobbying the Congress in the third quarter alone.
Is the White House-do they have the proper strategy to push back? It seems like Rahm Emanuel says any time we've got a problem, we just send the president out to sell hard, he was selling hard this weekend.
Is that going to do it?
HARWOOD: Well, look, I think you can't second-guess the White House strategy at this point because they've now gotten the bill out of all the committees, they're headed for a floor debate in both the House and Senate in a couple weeks. And I think they're on track to get a very significant bill.
Now, the question is going to be, what do you judge significant? I know you favor the public option. A lot of people on the left favor that.
They're not likely to get it, in my view. So if that's the standard, then you could say their strategy is off. But if your standard is trying to get essentially near universal coverage, get everybody in the system, reform the insurance market, I think they're on track to get that.
SCHULTZ: John, when do the numbers matter? "Washington Post"/ABC News poll out today, 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option while 40 percent oppose it.
Now, that's up five percentage points since August. I mean, the momentum is definitely going.
Why can't the Democrats just get what they want?
HARWOOD: You know, I think polling in health care only gets you so far because the issues are so complicated. And once you join the issue, depending on how the question is framed in the poll, you can get very different answers.
You say you want a public option on health care, that's one thing. If you say you want government takeover of the health care system, that's quite another.
SCHULTZ: All right. I want to talk about jobs just quickly here.
Well, no shit you'd get a different answer if you asked people if they favored a "government takeover of health care". The majority of people oppose a government takeover of health care. That's why NOBODY IS ACTUALLY PROPOSING IT. The public option is NOT a government takeover of healthcare, and the American people know it isn't.
So what that means, is that either Harwood is too stupid himself to realize that a public option is not a "government takeover" of health care, or he thinks the American people are too stupid to tell the difference. Personally, I think it's probably a little of both.
Oh, and what's up with Schultz not bothering to call him on that nonsense? It was an easily provable falsehood. Of all people, you should know enough to not let him get away with spewing that kind of nonsense.
