While a guest on Thursday's edition of NBC's Late Night With Seth Meyers, Rachel Maddow complained that she's disappointed with the Democrats' “weird strategic move” of avoiding contact with president Barack Obama and his signature legislation during the midterm election campaigns.
After stating that the odds are usually stacked against the president's party during midterm elections, the host of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show said that Republicans have spent the last six years “decrying ObamaCare as the end of the world.” However, even though the Affordable Care Act is “kind of working,” Democrats have decided: “OK then. We don't want to talk about it, either.”
Meyers began the segment by noting: “A lot of Democratic candidates are distancing themselves from Obama. Do you think this is something that they will regret when the election's over? Do you think it's the right strategic move?”
Maddow responded:
I think it's a weird strategic move only because if you, you're facing an election in which you know the odds are stacked against you, and they always are against the president's party in the midterm, you sort of have to decide what you have to work with.
Here's a thing the Democrats have to work with: Republicans spent the last, mm, six years decrying ObamaCare as the end of the world. Now we have ObamaCare; it's kind of working.
“Lots of people are signed up” and “the sky didn't fall,” she continued. “Literally, it's working the way it's supposed to. Millions of people have health care who didn't have it before. So the Republicans' reason for living has just disappeared. The main thing they like to talk about, they can no longer talk about.”
Referring to GOP candidates, Maddow asserted: “They have nothing to say, and so that has evaporated completely for the Republicans. And the Democrats have decided: 'OK then. We don't want to talk about it either.'”
When Meyers agreed that the Democrats' actions are “very strange,” his liberal guest claimed:
If your opponent loses the thing that they’ve been using as a crutch for six years, and you just let them walk away from it like it never existed, maybe you don’t deserve to win.
They just don’t have the killer instinct it takes to make their opponents pay for a big mistake, and I don’t understand why the Democrats are doing that.
Referring to the November 4 election, Meyers then stated that “this will change who is in Congress. One of the things the current Congress has been complaining about is ISIS [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria]; there's this great fear about ISIS and, um, yet at the same time, Congress doesn't seem to want to do anything” about the terrorist organization.
“They're very happy to let the president handle it,” he noted, “and it seems like the plan is it will either go well, and they'll say 'You should have done something sooner,' or it won't go well, and they'll say it was his fault. Do you feel that Congress is doing ... how do you feel about their approach to this?”
Maddow answered that “the thing that I think takes a lot of gall -- that's the nice word for it -- is to say 'I would rather complain about this and make you feel very afraid about it than do something about it.'”
“And so, Congress decided to give themselves all of October off,” she continued. “They worked a total of, like, seven days for all of September.”
Meyers then joked that each member of Congress is instead busy picking out a Halloween costume since “you've got to shop for it. You know, if it's a funny one, you sometimes have to sew it because they don't have it.”
“Exactly, exactly,” Maddow agreed. “And the ISIS costumes are very complicated.”
She then stated: “So they gave themselves all this time off so that they could go home and run campaign ads about how terrible ISIS is, and how terribly we're handling it, how we're mishandling it when one of the things they could do, had they decided not to go home, was actually take a vote on what we ought to be doing about ISIS.”
“And so, to be that 'wussy' and that cowardly politically while then still trying to score political points on what you're being such a wuss about is why people feel the way they do about Congress,” she said before the audience responded with applause.
Maddow should indeed feel good about the affirmation she got from Meyers' audience since MSNBC's ratings are so low that the people there might add up to more than those who watch her weeknight show.
