Reacting to Haley Barbour's quip that the liberal media has given President Obama "the longest wet kiss in political history" after last week's passage of ObamaCare, Ed Schultz made clear on MSNBC this morning that he feels President Obama deserves it for all the fierce criticism he and Democrats faced during the months of debate over the legislation.
The MSNBC host and liberal radio talker was interviewed by colleague David Shuster shortly after 10:30 a.m. EDT today.
Shuster introduced the segment with a clip of the Mississippi Republican governor's quip on the March 28 edition of ABC's "This Week" and went briefly over some polling data before asking for Schultz's thoughts [MP3 audio here]:
DAVID SHUSTER, MSNBC host: Ed, is it smart for the president to be talking about health care and the implementation [of it] instead of immediately moving on to jobs and the economy?
ED SCHULTZ, MSNBC host: No, I think you got to close the deal with the American people. Just because it's signed, sealed and delivered legislatively, David. The big thing now [is] the president has to go out and combat the kind of things that were said yesterday by Lindsay Graham, who says that it's a lie, that it's not a deficit-reduction package, it's a Ponzi scheme.
This is going to be an ongoing process by the White House and the president himself to take authorship [sic] of this and sell it to the American people, that this has been the biggest legislative lift in this country in 50 years, and he should get a big wet kiss. Because all the negativity that the president's had to put up with, and Democrats, for the last year. Trying to get the Republicans into the fold to do something on health care. It's time to go out and tell the story about what has really happened.
Not everybody pays attention to the news the way we do and the way some people do, but the fact is [that] those novice voters and those novice news consumers out there now are going to be paying attention to the president and they're going to want to see results.
Schultz later puckered up to the prez by insisting that "as a small businessperson, I can tell you that this administration has done more when it comes to small business than any administration inside of 18 months of starting up." What's more, Schultz played fortune teller by forecasting "an uptick in jobs" over the next few months that would help to boost President Obama's approval rating by November to "at least a 57, 58 percent approval rating."
