Gregory Hails Booker for Delivering Pizza, Suggests Calamities Justify More Federal Spending

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Submitted by Jer on Sun, 08/28/2011 - 6:16pm.

MR. GREGORY: All right. Let me turn to politics and the domestic agenda, particularly the economy. The president has announced plans for some additional infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy, he also would like to give some business tax breaks that the corporate world has responded very favorably to. Should these become law, should they get passed, what impact do you think they could actually have by November?

MR. AXELROD: Well, I don't know that, that--look, the goal is, is not to have impact by November; the goal is to have impact and to get this economy moving again. I know everybody's looking at this--in Washington--is looking at this election at the, at the economy through the prism of the election, but when people are sitting around their kitchen table, they're not looking at the NBC News poll, David, they're looking at bills they can't pay...

MR. GREGORY: What...

MR. AXELROD: ...they're concerned about their future, they want to know that we have policies that are not only going to get the economy accelerating in the short run but will lay a foundation for future growth...

MR. GREGORY: Well, right, but so the White House has an economic strategy...

MR. AXELROD: ...and that's what the president is after.

MR. GREGORY: The White House has an economic strategy, but the White House is also tactical and is indeed looking at the November election when you announce some of these policies at a point when most people agree it's not going to get passed by November. David Wessel in The Wall Street Journal wrote this in his column on Wednesday, let me put it up on
the screen, that "Obamanomics Is Recast as `Recovery Summer' Fades. On both politics and economics," he writes, "the president's moves are late. There was ample warning earlier this year that economic recovery lacked vigor and that the oomph of fiscal stimulus was about to wane. Had these policies been proposed in the spring, Congress might have adopted
them--and the economy would have been feeling the lift by now. Instead, the president looks like he checked the economy"...

MR. AXELROD: Well...

MR. GREGORY: ..."off the to-do list prematurely, and instead turned to financial reform, energy, immigration, and" the "Middle East peace - and now regrets that." Response?

MR. AXELROD: I strongly disagree with that. In fact, we've been doing things all along to accelerate this economy. Earlier in the year, we passed a higher act to give additional tax breaks to people who hire--to firms that hire unemployed workers. We passed a bill to keep teachers and firefighters and police who were going to lose their jobs on the job; it was important for the public, important for the economy. And we've been trying for months, as you know, to pass additional tax breaks for small businesses on top of the eight we've given them and to expand lending. That has been held up by politics in the United States Senate.
We're hopeful next week we may be able to break the log jam. Senator Voinovich, a Republican, said it's time to stop playing games, he said to his own party, and we agree with that.

So we've done things right along to keep this recovery moving in the right direction. We've had eight straight months of, of positive job growth in the private sector. We need to accelerate that pace, and that's the reason the president has proposed these additional ideas.
Whether they--we're ready to pass them tomorrow, David, if the Republican Party in the Senate allows it, if they pass the small business tax bill. And if they want to move on others, we're ready to go. If they want to wait until after the election, then we'll have to wait until after the election.

MR. GREGORY: When you talk about the economic progress that has or has not been made, there's been some critics who have looked at how the president has talked about the economy, and, and we compiled some of what the president has said about the economy going back to last April. Let's look at that.

(Videotape, April 10, 2009)

PRES. OBAMA: What you're starting to see is glimmers of hope across the economy.

(August 7, 2009) That's why we're turning this economy around. I am convinced that we can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

(August 8, 2009) This month's job numbers are a sign that we've begun to put the brakes on this recession. The worst may be behind us.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: And here is what the White House--the Web site from the White House touted earlier in the summer, it was "Recovery Summer," as it was billed by the White House in campaigning across the country, as the "Administration kicks off ‘Recovery Summer,’ Groundbreakings and Events Across the Country." And yet here is the economic record, which is still quite bleak: 9.6 percent unemployment, you have had 19 months--or 16 months of straight--of 9 percent or higher unemployment; 54,000 net jobs lost in August; 14.9 million unemployed; 6.2 million of which are long-term unemployed. And just today in The New York Times, a reminder of the real cost of this, a story that we see, "As Economy Tumbles,
Numbers of Families in Shelters Rise." You've had a rise in the number of families actually going into homeless shelters. So it's a question of the president's rhetoric vs. reality; are those things out of sync?

MR. AXELROD: No, they're not out of sync. And obviously in April, we were on a slightly greater scheme than we, we were over the summer because you had a Greek fiscal crisis that took 15 percent off the stock market and caused businesses to retrench further. But the reality remains, David, that when we took office, we were losing 800,000 jobs, in the month of January, when we took over from the last administration. We lost four million jobs in the last six months of the last administration. We've had eight months of private-sector job growth. We have to accelerate.

Listen, the hole that this recession created was huge, 8 million people lost, lost their jobs, and that's on top of a decade in which the middle class was treading water. And there's a lot of pain out there and a lot of--and people are frustrated. They deserve to be frustrated. We're
frustrated. We want to move this economy forward more quickly, we, we would like some cooperation to do it.

But the real issue is, since you raised--put this in a political context, the real issue for people this November is going to be, what direction do we want to go? Now the other side, and you had Pete Sessions on your show, the head of the congressional campaign committee for the
Republicans, said, "We wan to go back to the very same agenda we had before this president took office." That agenda was a disaster. That agenda turned the Clinton surplus into a record deficit of $1.3 trillion, gave free rein to the special interests, and led to the biggest--at the
expense of the middle class and the economy--and led to the greatest economic collapse...

MR. GREGORY: Let me...

MR. AXELROD: ...since the Great Depression. Why would we want to go back to that?

MR. GREGORY: But let me ask you when you think, as a practical matter, when does the economic team think that Obama administration economic policies will have a sizable impact on the unemployment rate in this country?

MR. AXELROD: David, there was a study that was released just a couple of weeks ago by a couple of economists, one Republican, one Democrat, some of the leading economists in the country, who said the things that we did not only saved--or created three and a half million jobs, in other words, three and a half more million people are working, but we would have
lost--if we hadn't taken all the steps we had taken, we would have lost twice as many jobs as we did during the recession. I--the hole was tremendous, the damage is great. It took 10 years to create that problem...

MR. GREGORY: Right, but my question is...

MR. AXELROD: ...it's going to take--nearly 10 years--it's going to take some time...

MR. GREGORY: ...when is the expectation that the unemployment rate can come down in a meaningful way?

MR. AXELROD: ...it's going to take some time to fix it. Well, we're, we're, we're, we're moving toward that with every step that we take. Obviously, 750,000 new private-sector jobs created this year is a start. We need to accelerate that, and it will come with growth. That growth's
going to come with the steps we've taken, and it's going to come with a revitalization of the middle class, which is why, of course, we want to extend tax cuts for the middle class.

MR. GREGORY: But the, the, the fundamental belief of the American people has to be that things are going to get better. This administration said that with the stimulus plan you'd have unemployment at 8 percent. That proved not to be the case. You've had some real big bites of the legislative apple here with successes--healthcare reform, financial regulation, a very large stimulus plan, which the president argued was necessary. And yet, here we stand, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, disapproval of the president's handling of the economy is at 56 percent. But here is what is in, in many ways more damning than that, the judgment of whether people are optimistic about the future. And here it is, from the same poll, will things get better or worse or stay the same? Fifty-one percent think they'll stay the same or get worse. This was a president, Mr. Axelrod, who was, who was elected on the promise of transformation of Washington and better handling of the economy. Isn't the lack of confidence in him on the economy the ultimate judgment that you were trying to avoid?

MR. AXELROD: No. Look, I'm not worried about the judgment of him, I'm worried about moving this economy forward. That's what he's worried about. We walked into something that nobody anticipated. We knew the situation was bad. No one knew how bad it was. It was the greatest downturn since the Great Depression. And our job since that time is to work day in and day out to move that forward. We are--the economy is growing now instead of shrinking, we're gaining jobs instead of losing them. We have to accelerate that. And yes, people are discouraged. They've gone through, not just a hard recession, but for many people
they've been treading water for, for a decade and, and, and, and salaries and wages have flatlined and so on. But the, the answer is to do the array of things that we have to do to invest in our infrastructure, to give business the incentive to grow, to give middle-class people money to spend to get our economy moving again, to have the best educated work force, to do all the things to--to expand exports. All the things that we're working on are going to move this economy forward. But, of course, people are discouraged. It's been a tough time.

MR. GREGORY: But if, if this is an election about choices...

MR. AXELROD: I'll tell you--wait, I'll tell you...

MR. GREGORY: Wait a minute, I'm sorry. If...

MR. AXELROD: Let me, let me, let me just say one thing. Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: Well, this is the question of...

MR. AXELROD: Let's talk about the choices.

MR. GREGORY: If this is a question about choices, Americans have lost confidence in this president's direction to fix the economy.

MR. AXELROD: Listen, you look at your same poll, and I've looked at your poll, obviously, and the thing that people said that made them most uncomfortable with a candidate was whether they supported the economic policies of George W. Bush. And you listen to--and the policies that existed before, before this president took office. You listen to what John Boehner, the man who would be speaker, has said about what he wants to do about the economy. He says he wants to restore those tax cuts for companies that ship our jobs overseas, he wants to cancel the Obama tax cuts that were part of the Recovery Act for the middle class and raise
taxes on 110 million families. And yet, he wants to borrow $700 billion to give millionaires and billionaires another tax cut and add to our deficits. And then this morning we read that the lobbying community has rallied to his “Boehner for Speaker” campaign and spent millions of dollars so that they can go back to writing the rules themselves. They say, "We don't need to buy access to Mr. Boehner, we already have that."

MR. GREGORY: OK.

MR. AXELROD: "We want him in power so that we're in power." We don't want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward.

MR. GREGORY: All right, so let me ask you a more specific question about this debate about tax cuts, for instance. You mentioned Leader Boehner for the Republicans, who is saying in an interview that, in fact, he would support the middle class tax cuts if--the extension of which, which is what the president wants. He said on Friday, don't hold those hostage. What I'm asking is, is there any room to compromise with Republicans to extend, even if it's for two years, as your formerly departed budget director called for, those on upper-income Americans, those tax cuts from the Bush era?

MR. AXELROD: Well, if you read carefully what our budget director said, he said he'd prefer we didn't move forward on the upper-income tax cuts because he doesn't believe that they're really stimulative and he doesn't believe we can afford it, but he thought for political reasons we might have to accept it. So, you know, that--let's, let's lay, let's lay that aside. But Mr. Boehner, no one believes that Mr. Boehner--you know, they called the last set of tax cuts temporary. They're going to continue. I think we have to assume that they're going to keep pushing this forward.

But let me make one point clear. What we're proposing is a tax cut for 100 percent of Americans up to $250,000 of their income. So if you make under $250,000, you'd get a tax cut on all your income. If you make more than that, you'd get it up to $250,000. So if you're a millionaire, you'll get what everybody else gets up to $250,000. Not the $100,000 a
year that Mr. Boehner wants to give it. David, we just can't afford it. And really, what we ought to do is, as the president said, we agree on the middle-class tax cuts. Let's not hold them hostage while we debate whether we're going to give this very small number of people at the top a, a tax cut that we can't afford.

MR. GREGORY: It was striking to me hearing the president on Friday, when he talked about the economy and the choice in this election, he did not mention anything in his opening remarks about healthcare reform, which he and you and others have, have billed as a signature achievement of this administration. In fact, you have said that once people know more about
health care, the more popular it will become. And, in fact, we see reporting this week in Politico that, in fact, there aren't any Democrats who supported this who are out there touting that vote. Only those who opposed it are touting it in the election. And it's striking because in
March, Senator Chuck Schumer was on the program, and this is what he said about health care.

(Videotape, March 28, 2010)

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): So I predict, David, by November those who voted for health care will find it an asset; those who voted against it will find it a liability.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: The opposite has turned out to be true. Why is it that the president has failed to win the argument about the benefits of healthcare reform?

MR. AXELROD: Well, first of all, I don't think health care is driving this election, David. And I think the economy is driving this election. People have anxiety about that economy. I'll tell you what they don't want, though. They don't want to go back to a...

MR. GREGORY: Then why did you do health care and spend so much of last year on health care?

MR. AXELROD: They don't want to go back. They don't want, they don't, they don't--well, you know why we worked on health care, because health care was a huge--is and was a huge problem in this country in terms of the cost of it to people and the government, in terms of the relationship between people and their insurance companies. No one wants to go back to a situation where, if you have a pre-existing medical condition, you, you can be deprived of coverage. No one wants to go back to a situation where, if you get seriously ill, you can get thrown off your insurance. Seniors don't want to go back to paying more for their prescription
drugs. No one's calling for that, David. And if the Republican Party wants to make the argument that that's what we should do, then they should make it openly and honestly.

MR. GREGORY: But this administration made the argument that part of economic recovery was passing healthcare reform, part of getting the economic fiscal house in order in the government was healthcare reform.

MR. AXELROD: Yes.

MR. GREGORY: And yet Democrats are not campaigning on it because it's so politically toxic. You said that wouldn't be the case. You said it would get more popular...

MR. AXELROD: Well, listen.

MR. GREGORY: ...not less.

MR. AXELROD: I, I think it, I think that health care over time is going to become more popular. But people are focused on this economy right now. They've got anxiety about this economy. That's what's, that's what's driving the vote right now, David. And, at the end of the day you, you mention the fiscal, the Congressional Budget Office and every objective observer who's looked at it has said that this will save a trillion dollars over the course of the next couple of decades or more in our, in our--in budget deficits. And that's an important part of this. So we have to think long as well as short.

MR. GREGORY: Before you go, Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff, whether he's eyeing the mayoral run in Chicago. If he were to take some early steps toward that, maybe raise money, look into it, can he do that with the president's blessing while he's still chief of staff?

MR. AXELROD: Well, I think the president's been clear that while the--Rahm is chief of staff, he's going to be focused on his duties as chief of staff. He's looking at it. He loves the city of Chicago, there's no question about it. And he's going to--and he has a hard decision to make because he has a, he has a lot of responsibilities here and he enjoys working with this president, he enjoys serving the country in this capacity. But he's going to make a decision, and after he makes his decision, I'm sure that he'll make subsequent decisions about, about
when and, and, and--when it's appropriate to begin doing that campaigning.

MR. GREGORY: All right. David Axelrod, as always, thank you very much. Enjoy the steak fry this afternoon in Iowa.

MR. AXELROD: Good to be with you. Looking forward to it. Thank you.

source

Jer

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/10/24/reliable-sources-p...

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Yeah, there was a trace of hyperbole in the limb-ripping

Submitted by Jer on Sun, 08/28/2011 - 5:59pm.

reference. I needed an attention-grabbing phrase. Plus, I figured some of the Gregory critics would appreciate the imagery anyway.

Jer

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You're absolutely right. The

Submitted by Martin2717 on Mon, 08/29/2011 - 2:48am.

You're absolutely right. The LSM knows this, but wanted to paint the picture that Bush is an untrusting and uncaring president because they hated this guy so much and were so bitter about him getting reelected. Unfortunately, it worked and was one of the reasons why his poll numbers took a nosedive and his party lost control of Congress the next year. The LSM is nothing but pure slime including this piece of crap, Gregory.

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So he's a small L liberal? I

Submitted by amyshulk on Sun, 08/28/2011 - 8:32pm.

So he's a small L liberal? I thought they were extinct!!!

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