In the wake of Romney’s “47 percent” comments and less than positive polling from key swing states, every squishy Republican in the liberal media's stable of acceptable Republicans went into full panic mode. But just yesterday, President Obama made a huge admission when he admitted that his biggest miscalculation was that he thought he could change Washington from the inside.
Republican strategist Alice Stewart raised that point during a chat with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts this morning, blasting Obama for it and saying that he had two years in his term in which his party ran both houses of Congress. That's an indisputable fact, but Roberts insisted that Stewart was wrong on the length of time that Democrats in Obama's term controlled both the House and Senate: [See video below break. MP3 audio here.]
THOMAS ROBERTS: All right so let’s say good morning and bring in today’s Power Panel we have Perry Bacon MSNBC contributor and political editor for The Grio, Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis, and Republican strategist Alice Stewart. It’s great to have all three of you here.
Alice – I want to start with you because the race is becoming this kind of tape gotcha game – the president’s campaign responding to Romney’s remarks by digging up something that Mitt Romney said back in 2008 that basically parallels what the president said.
[Buzzfeed tape]
ROBERTS: So – Alice Romney was slammed for jumping on the situation in Libya – jumped on the redistribution remarks kind of pulling them out of context now he’s giving another knee jerk reaction by seizing on the change remarks – when basically he campaigned that way in ’08 – why does that seem so different from Mitt Romney in his own words in ’08 from what the president said on Univision the other day.
ALICE STEWART: Well – there’s a big difference in Romney saying it and President Obama saying it – when Obama saying that the biggest thing he’s learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside – newsflash he’s been on the inside for the past four years and we have a terrible economy. We have a terrible crisis overseas and he’s had not only that – he had control over the House and Senate for the first two years while he was in office and he failed to make things better for the American people.
ROBERTS: Alice technically it wasn’t the first two years it was for only several months because of the ongoing political races that were still taking place – you know that right. It wasn’t for a full two years.
STEWART: He had control of the House and Senate for the first half of his presidency and he had the opportunity to put polices in place that would help create a strong economy and create jobs for the American people – and at the end of the day the American people cannot say that their lives are better off than when he took office and he said himself if he can’t turn the economy around and he can’t create jobs it’ll be a one-term proposition and it’s looking more like that everyday.
ROBERTS: Alice – according to the calendar that’s factually not true that he had control for two years, but I’ll move on.
The ObamaCare debate, in which the Democrats had majorities in the House and Senate, lasted longer than several months. In fact, it took up almost a whole year. During Obama's first two years, his Democratic allies in Congress passed not only Obamacare, but Cash for Clunkers, Cash for Caulkers, Dollars for Dishwashers, Dodd-Frank, and the massive debt-ballooning stimulus.
Democrats won big in 2006 -- when they took the House from Republicans -- and 2008. They had a 60-seat supermajority in the Senate during much of the first two years of President Obama’s first term and a sizable majority in the House. Roberts's use of Congress's many recesses to dismiss the two-year number is patently ludicrous.
