Hours after the Senate Finance Committee rejected the public option as part of the proposed health care “reform” plan, CNN’s Campbell Brown couldn’t seem to find any conservatives to discuss the vote on her program on Tuesday. Her discussion segment brought three liberals to the table- former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, Roland Martin, and senior political analyst Gloria Borger.

Brown first turned to Borger, who flatly stated that she thought the public option is dead: “I think it’s pretty dead, Campbell. I think it’s safe to say that right now it looks like it’s a goner.” The analyst continued that “the President has to settle for something less- something that may be a down payment on a public option, if the insurance companies don’t behave themselves. So, I think the President’s going to have to settle for less, and I think he’s signaling that he will settle for less.”

Some very friendly assessments of President Barack Obama's health care address Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress, most gathered from the quick analysis in the short time between Obama and the Republican response: 

♦ MSNBC's Keith Olbermann hailed it as “a broad and forward thinking speech” with “a touch of greatness.” (MP3 audio)

♦ On ABC, George Stephanopoulos saw “a pretty remarkable speech” and suggested “this might have been the most emotional speech I've seen President Obama give” as “there was even a catch in his voice” because “this is very close to President Obama's heart.” (MP3 audio)

♦ Chuck Todd, on NBC, recited how Obama endorsed an insurance mandate for all citizens, “came down pretty strongly for the so-called public option” and proposed paying for it all by “taxing benefits for the wealthiest.” Yet after that liberal litany, Todd insisted the address was “about re-branding the President himself as a centrist and a pragmatist.”

♦ CNN's Gloria Borger trumpeted how “there was something in there for everybody” before David Gergen lamented Obama's lost opportunity: “Had he given this speech three months ago, when there was a glow about his presidency, I think he could have swept the country...”

♦ [UPDATE] Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, during a 11:15 PM EDT edition of MSNBC's The Ed Show, celebrated: “The great news tonight is this bill is on track for passage. Historic change is coming to the United States.” (MP3 audio)

On yesterday's The Situation Room, CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger spoke with host Suzanne Malveaux about polling done on ObamaCare:

MALVEAUX: Gloria, I want to start off with you.

One thing that the polls were showing is that most Americans, they support this idea of this public option, but they also believe that the president wants the government to take over the health care system.
Well, how does that -- how do you make sense of that?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, in fact, 53 percent believe that Obama wants to take over the health care system, and 42 percent say no. And I think what this shows is that the Republican PR about President Obama being big government, big deficit, big spender, has really taken hold over the congressional recess. People believe that he wants big government.   

What Borger is missing here is that the principal reason Americans view Obama as a big government, big deficit, big spending liberal is because he is.  "Republican PR" might emphasize that simple truth, but the facts speak for themselves and many Americans would have arrived at the same conclusion regardless.

Today on The Situation Room, CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger discussed President Obama's rapidly declining approval ratings.  A question was posed by host Suzanne Malveaux:

MALVEAUX: What does it mean, Gloria, for the president to be losing out on these Independents?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: I think it's a real possible for him. Remember that President Obama won the election with 52 percent of Independent voters. That number is down considerably to 43 percent, and Independents are the margin of difference here for him.

Now, the key to keeping those people is, right now, they are worried about the deficit. They see the president as a big spender. They see him aligned with so-called liberal leaders in the Democratic Congress. So, what he's got to do when -- after Labor Day is kind of show them that he is the kind of so-called post-partisan president that many of them thought they were electing.

The good news for President Obama in this is that they are not realigning themselves with the Republicans yet, because the Republican Party still has very high disapproval ratings.

Three of CNN’s political analysts- Jeffrey Toobin, David Gergen, and Gloria Borger- all gave President Obama B’s or B-pluses on the economy and overall job performance during the network’s special “The National Report Card: The Second 100 Days” on Thursday. These grades from these “non-partisan” analysts lined-up with the A’s and B’s that Democrats Paul Begala and Donna Brazile gave the president.

CNN conducted a non-scientific poll by phone and on the Internet of how the American people graded the President mainly on several issues, and others such as Hillary Clinton, Vice President Biden, and the news media in general at the 200-day mark of Obama’s presidency. As Wolf Blitzer and his so-called Best Political Team on Television presented the polling results, anchor Campbell Brown polled the “front panel” of Toobin, Gergen, and Borger, as well as the “back panel” of Begala and Brazile, and Republicans Alex Castellanos and Bill Bennett, for their personal grades of the subject in question. All of the participants held up placards with their grade, and explained how they came to that conclusion.

Just after the beginning of the 8 pm Eastern hour, Brown turned to the CNN analysts’ panel for their grade on President Obama’s handling of the economy. Senior legal analyst Toobin unsurprisingly replied, “I’m giving him a B. You know- he’s off to a decent start. He got a stimulus package planned. It passed. It seems like it’s having some impact, but the economy stinks and he’s the president and the buck stops there.”

Network anchors and reporters didn't hesitate to apply strong ideological labels (not just quoting others) to President Bush's two Supreme Court nominees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Will they be as willing to tag President Obama's nominee, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, as “staunch,” and “hardline” and “ultra” liberal, or at least as “very liberal”?

In July of 2005, on the night Bush announced Roberts, ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Ted Koppel both described him as not just conservative, but as “very conservative.” NBC's Brian Williams called Roberts “a kind of 'bedrock conservative,' not what is called a 'movement conservative.'”

The next night, CBS Evening News anchor John Roberts (now with CNN) wanted to know of his namesake: “Has President Bush attempted to move the court further to the right with this pick?” On NBC, Chip Reid (now at CBS) highlighted how one liberal activist “says he worries that Roberts might be a stealth candidate, moderate on the outside but as conservative as Justices Scalia and Thomas on the inside.”

During a segment on Tuesday’s Situation Room program, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer characterized the ongoing post-election identity struggle in the Republican Party as being between moderates who are “more tolerant on fiscal and social issues” and “staunch” conservatives “who don’t want the party to become more moderate.” Later in the same segment, Gloria Borger, one of the network’s senior political analysts, labeled some of the moderate Republicans being considered for 2010 congressional races as being “very pragmatic choices.”

Blitzer introduced Borger’s analysis by highlighting the “serious battle...brewing in the Republican party....On the one side, moderates more tolerant on fiscal and social issues -- on the other side, staunch conservatives who don’t want the party to become more moderate.” The analyst herself focused on how this struggle was affecting statewide races, specifically in the northeastern states of Connecticut and Delaware. She argued that Republicans in Connecticut “need to put up a moderate candidate in that state to go against Chris Dodd.” She also cited unnamed conservative recruiters in the GOP who were supposedly saying, “we need moderates in the state of Connecticut.”

CNN's on-staff political analysts and reporters -- not just the left-wing political operatives (Paul Begala and Donna Brazile) were in awe of President Barack Obama's press conference performance. Just after it ended Wednesday night, senior political analyst David Gergen hailed how “in terms of mastery of the issues, we have rarely had a President who is as well briefed and speaks in as articulate a way as this President does.” Gergen enthused: “He's  nuanced. He's very complete. He's up to speed on the issues” and “he's taken it to a whole different level in the way he speaks about issues.” So, “I thought he was an A in terms of material, but given” Obama's inaccurate assurance he's opposed to bigger government, “I gave him an A-minus.”
 
Former CBS News reporter Gloria Borger, now also a senior political analyst for CNN, endorsed Gergen's grade, “I'm totally with him on that,” before recalling how Obama “reminded the American people that he's accomplished a lot, but he has a lot still left to do” and, she reverentially asserted: “That's because he has so much more that he's got to do than Presidents in recent memory.”

Up next, Roland Martin, the fill-in for Campbell Brown as anchor of CNN's 8 PM EDT hour, awarded Obama an A and then Washington correspondent Jessica Yellin declared Obama “is tackling so many issues at once and in such a capable way that it leaves the Republicans unable to target any one issue.”

Is there any political caricature more threadbare than casting the Republican Party as "the Confederacy?" CNN analyst Gloria Borger tossed that one on Thursday, with all its pejorative assumptions about hidden or not-so-hidden racial animus, noting New England states had no House Republicans.

Perhaps that's because a CNN panel was discussing RNC Chairman Michael Steele's promise to bring some hip-hop to the GOP, causing Steve Hayes to make hip-hop Hatch jokes:

WOLF BLITZER: What do you think about that, Steve?

STEPHEN HAYES, Weekly Standard: Well, when I heard him make that appeal to the hip-hop generation, I had this flash of Orrin Hatch on the Senate floor wearing the Flavor Flav clock around his neck. (LAUGHTER)

Anchor Campbell Brown’s show on CNN is subtitled “No Bias, No Bull,” but the show displayed plenty of bias during a Wednesday night segment about Attorney General Eric Holder calling America “a nation of cowards” on race issues. Brown praised Holder for “cutting through the bull,” and a panel discussion was utterly unanimous: Gloria Borger, Soledad O’Brien, and Roland Martin all toed the liberal line and praised Holder for lambasting the nation. Martin wholeheartedly agreed with Holder’s characterization. Borger defended the first black attorney general, stating that he was “trying to be provocative on purpose,” while O’Brien thought the Obama appointee was trying to start a “honest conversation” on race.

As for ‘cutting through bull,’ Brown should have corrected O’Brien when she repeated the old radical line that somehow Black History Month is the shortest month on the calendar due to some racial slight, which completely mangles the facts. It began as “Negro History Week” and was founded by African-American historian Carter Woodson in mid-February to honor Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays are on the 12th and the 14th respectively.

CNN’s two senior political analysts, Gloria Borger and David Gergen, reacted favorably to President Barack Obama’s performance at his first press conference on Monday night. Borger highlighted how the Democrat apparently “came across as real pragmatist.” Later, Gergen stated that it was a “classic and shrewd exercise of presidential power.”

The two analysts participated in the network’s post-press conference programming, which took up the entire 9 pm Eastern hour on Monday night. Five minutes into the hour, Borger made her “pragmatist” comment, and continued with what she gathered from the president’s remarks: “What I heard tonight was somebody who kept saying I can’t afford to see Congress play the same usual political games. But the interesting fight that we’re setting up here is whether the new president really understands the role or can cope with the role that ideology now plays in our politics today.”

Within an hour of the conclusion of Wednesday night’s presidential debate, CNN’s political panel began sketching out John McCain’s political obituary, with senior analyst David Gergen drawing a round of laughter when he replied “beats the hell out of me” when asked by anchor Anderson Cooper what McCain could do next. Gergen bleakly suggested McCain had no chance and should end the race with his “honor intact” (which means no more attacks on Barack Obama):

I think you have to do everything you can to help save as much of the Senate and the House as you can for your party. I think you have to need -- you need to see if you can leave this with your honor intact. I think you need to go positive about what you do on the economy and get rid of this stuff about Bill Ayers and all this garbage that we've been going through now.

[See update below for how Toobin did the same thing later in the evening.] 

CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin brushed aside the issues of Barack Obama’s affiliation with left-wing terrorist William Ayers and the liberal group ACORN during a roundtable discussion on Wednesday’s Situation Room program: "Who cares about ACORN? Who cares about Bill Ayers? I mean, I just don't get this. What is the point of raising that?" When CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger countered by trying to show the relevance of these affiliations, that "he has given lots of different stories on Ayers, and that his affiliation with ACORN, as a group that they think now has been discredited," Toobin went further: "But he doesn't have an affiliation with ACORN." When both Borger and host Wolf Blitzer both affirmed that he did have ties to the organization, Toobin backtracked: "...I stand corrected on that, but I just don't see why that is going to move voters?"

Toobin must not be watching his own network, for CNN investigative correspondent Drew Griffin outlined on October 6 how "the relationship between Obama and Ayers went much deeper, ran much longer, and was much more political than Obama said," including how the two worked together on the board of the Annenberg Challenge Project and the Woods Foundation, and how Obama’s political career began during a meeting at Ayers’s house. While the network omitted ACORN’s name from an October 9 news brief about a raid on the organization’s Las Vegas office, the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s story about the raid acknowledged how ACORN "has a liberal political agenda and ties to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama."

An astounding thing happened on CNN Monday evening: not only did Lou Dobbs say that Democrat Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden makes "many more misstatements than Sarah Palin," but he also chided Wolf Blitzer and the "Situation Room" crew for failing to point it out during their Bash Sarah session.

In preparation for the upcoming vice presidential debate, Blitzer brought on CNN analysts Gloria Borger and Jeffrey Toobin, as well as "The Weekly Standard's" Steve Hayes, to handicap the event.

As you might expect, Palin was the butt of many jokes leading Dobbs to marvelously inject the following during a mid-segment promo for his upcoming program (h/t NB reader Kevin Groenhagen):

What is it with Democrats and their grotesque slurs upon the intelligence of their political rivals?  Last week it was Charles Rangel calling Sarah Palin "disabled."  Tonight on CNN, Paul Begala called President Bush "a high-functioning moron."

Begala was on an Anderson Cooper-led panel with Republican Ed Rollins and CNN's Gloria Borger to discuss the state of the possible federal financial bailout.  Cooper took the first shot at the president, analogizing his performance in this crisis to that during Hurricane Katrina.

ANDERSON COOPER: Watching the president last night give that speech, it was like watching him in Jackson Square in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I mean, he did not seem to be there.

On last night's Election Center, CNN Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin, Senior Political Analyst Gloria Borger and CNN Anchor Campbell Brown continued to promote the Obama talking point that John McCain had lied in an ad about Barack Obama's record on a sex education bill in the Illinois state Senate.

McCain's ad says Barack Obama's "one accomplishment" as a state senator was "legislation to teach ‘comprehensive sex education' to kindergarteners."

Toobin listed it among several "outright falsehoods" from McCain, and Borger claimed the Obama-backed bill was "about teaching children to recognize sexual predators."

The Obama camp and many media have repeated the line that the bill was only about protecting kids from sexual predators. But the McCain ad is correct. The bill, SB 99, is a radical expansion of sex education, ratcheting down the initiation age from sixth grade to kindergarten, and eliminating moral language that supports marriage and abstinence. Only a tiny portion of the bill addresses how kids can be protected from unwanted sexual advances.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani faced liberal lines of questioning from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Gloria Borger during the 6 PM EDT hour of The Situation Room before the network’s Thursday night coverage of the Republican convention. In particular, Borger pressed Giuliani on his differences with Sarah Palin on social issues: "Last night, you spoke before Sarah Palin, a woman who -- with whom you have very little in common on the social issues, right? She's pro-life.... [L]et's just say she's a heroine to the right wing of this party, and you're not their hero, okay?... [M]y question is, has the big tent of the Republican Party, which you always talk about -- has that gotten a little narrower?"

Click here for mp3 audio.

During the two minutes between Roland Martin and Jeffrey Toobin’s two attacks on Sarah Palin after her speech at the Republican convention on Wednesday night, veteran journalist Carl Bernstein also criticized Republicans, since in his view, the Alaska governor’s speech demonstrated "that the Republican Right is running this election." CNN correspondent John King then reacted to Bernstein’s assessment, and offered some constructive criticism of the difference in coverage between the two conventions: "...[L]anguage matters in what we do, and I don't necessarily disagree with the point of what Carl was saying -- but we do speak a different language when we talk about this party [the Republican Party], and I think that's why we're often criticized." He then scolded the media in terms of labeling:

KING: To say the Right is running the Republican campaign -- if that means these people are the Right, then Carl's exactly right. But we didn't say, during the Democratic convention... all those delegates down on the floor -- you know, many of them were members of the Left.

Click here for mp3 audio.

Minutes after Republican vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin finished her speech on Wednesday night, CNN’s Roland Martin and Jeffrey Toobin went on the offensive against the Alaska governor. Co-host Anderson Cooper first asked Martin for his reaction. He first stated that "she gave a solid speech" and then focused on Palin’s dig at Barack Obama being a community organizer in Chicago: "...[S]he mocked community organizers, and this audience laughed at them. Don't be surprised if Obama and Biden says, you know what, it's community organizers who are keeping people from losing their homes in [the] subprime crisis.... It's community organizers who are the ones trying to save your job. They're going to say the GOP does not give a flip about community organizers -- it means they don't care about you...."

Two minutes later, co-host Wolf Blitzer went to Toobin for his reaction. The senior legal analyst for CNN first complimented Palin: "Well, let's just start with an obvious point that I don't think anyone has made yet. This speech was a heck of a lot better than Joe Biden's speech. I mean, it just was much more dramatic, much more interesting, much more entertaining." He then continued with a more blunt analysis of the speech: "But it was also, I thought, very smug, very sarcastic, very cutting. And you know what? The Republicans had been trying to portray her as a victim for the last couple days. Well, she's not going to be a victim anymore. She's going to be a target..." As if she hasn’t been a target since John McCain announced her as his running mate?

Click here for mp3 audio.

Post-Palin Speech Update: How's that poll going now, Bill?

Imagine it's a few days before the Dem convention. In a big—BIG—surprise, Barack Obama names Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy his vice-presidential running mate. You're a partisan Republican.  Do you?:

• a. demand that Obama drop Kennedy from the ticket; or
• b. sit back and enjoy the, uh, ride. 

I'm guessing the great majority of red-blooded Republicans would answer 'b.'  Why wouldn't you want a weak link on the opposing ticket?  So what kind of scare has Sarah Palin has put into the MSM that various of its members, like Jack Cafferty, are floating the notion that McCain should consider dropping Palin?  Do they sense she could be a real game-changer?

View video here.