DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made ludicrous accusations against Republicans before and the media have failed to admonish her, but CNN's Piers Morgan stomped on her argument on Wednesday night that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's policies were "extremist."
"If you keep calling him an extremist but you accept that he won, what does that say about the people of Wisconsin? Are they all just a bunch of mad extremists?" Morgan challenged Schultz. [Video below the break. Audio here.]
Schultz laughably tried to spin from Gov. Walker's victory in a recall election by noting that the state senate will probably be controlled by the Democrats – even though more seats are up for election this November and the legislature is not scheduled to convene before then.
And Morgan challenged her other claim that Walker was punished with an expensive recall election for his "extremist" policies. "You could argue, of course, that Scott Walker's probably thrilled that he had to go through it now because it's made him a national superstar," Morgan told her.
A transcript of the segment, which aired on June 6 on Piers Morgan Tonight at 9:37 p.m. EDT, is as follows:
PIERS MORGAN: So I don't know if you were listening to Donald Rumsfeld there, but he concluded that the only possible reason President Obama didn't go down to Wisconsin to try and win this thing is because he knew he'd lose. Your thoughts?
Rep. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (D-Fla.), DNC chair: Well, I wouldn't -- it's not really surprising that the Secretary would say something like that. The President deployed his entire machinery, grassroots machinery on the ground in Wisconsin, 40 offices, more than a million and a half dollars, our key neighborhood team leaders and volunteers. And we put an unprecedented effort of grassroots into this recall.
We came up short, but at the same – of the ultimate goal, which was to make sure that Governor Walker couldn't adopt his extremist policies and continue to hurt middle class and working families. But we did apparently succeed in flipping the state Senate. The state Senate is likely now to be controlled by the Democrats.
And so we're going to be able to stop Governor Walker from being able to really continue to pursue those extremist policies. So ultimately we were at least in part successful. And we're – what we demonstrated, Piers, was that Democrats are not going to just lay down and allow the middle class and working families and workers to get run over when an extremist governor has run amuck like Scott Walker does –
MORGAN: You keep calling him this great extremist who everyone apparently, is terrified of and everything else, but the reality is he won. And he won pretty convincingly. So the only people laying down, it would seem to everybody else, are the Democrats on this. So how are you claiming some kind of weird victory out of all this?
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Well there's nothing weird about flipping the state senate. Last year, there were recalls of state senators that were put on the ballot and there were recalls last night. And as a result of those victories, the state Senate has gone from being Republican to very likely being Democrat now. And really I'm certainly not going to call it a victory. Like I said, we lost the actual recall of the governor, but –
MORGAN: Let me just jump in there. I mean, that is my point. If you keep calling him an extremist but you accept that he won, what does that say about the people of Wisconsin? Are they all just a bunch of mad extremists?
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No. What it says is that voters look at a recall very differently than they look at a straight-up election. And if you look at the exit polling, about 70 percent of the voters that cast ballots yesterday were uncomfortable in some way with the actual recall of a governor.
So while they didn't like his policies, they didn't think that they were comfortable with a recall. At the end of the day, I think if you asked any Republican governor in the country if they would trade places with Scott Walker for the last year, and if they would, if they had it to do it over again, take the same steps that Scott Walker did and had to go through a full recall and raising $31 million –
(Crosstalk)
MORGAN: You could argue, of course, that Scott Walker's probably thrilled that he had to go through it now because it's made him a national superstar. It's revved up his party. He's the hero of the hour. So I would imagine he's thinking, bring on the recalls. Let's move on to something else –
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No, I can't imagine that he would be saying that. And that more would – most governors in the country would trade places with him having to raise 31 million dollars, and really having to spend the last year defending policies that were --
MORGAN: We will agree to disagree. I suspect Scott Walker's chuffed to bits tonight.
