During Tuesday's edition of Morning Joe on MSNBC, co-host Joe Scarborough criticized the GOP for having “the lowest approval rating ever” but stated that the failures of ObamaCare could elect more Republicans and members of the Tea Party if they “just get out of the way” while Democrats continue making serious blunders.
Ted Cruz, a GOP senator from Texas who tried to filibuster the Affordable Care Act, “has gotten out of the way,” Scarborough stated. “The Republicans have gotten out of the way. They've learned their lesson. And now, the spotlight is on ObamaCare. It would have been on ObamaCare two months ago if they had gotten out of the way.”
The co-host said he told Republicans over the past three months “the truth about what Ted Cruz's strategy was going to lead to. I wasn't alone. A lot of us predicted this, and it happened, and the Republicans now have the lowest approval rating ever.”
However, Scarborough then turned his attention to “my Democratic friends” and said that the “Tea Party didn’t just come and drop down on Earth from Mars.” Instead, “they got elected because of the excesses in 2009 and 2010.”
But now the members of the conservative group are “the children of ObamaCare,” he asserted before adding that “the overreach” of government that led to GOP victories in the previous midterm election “is impacting politics today in Washington, D.C.”
The co-host then hammered Barack Obama's handling of the controversy regarding the Affordable Care Act:
Why does the president need to back up? Why does he need to catch his breath? Why does he need to stop sounding like Richard Nixon in a bunker, trying to explain why he didn’t lie to the American people when New York Magazine has a tape of him doing just that 26, 27, 28 times?
And if this continues much longer, yes, the website will be fixed. But the scar tissue politically is going to elect a lot more people in 2014 that will look like the people that were elected in 2010. This doesn’t all happen in a vacuum.
“If you look at Democratic support, even with all of the horrible leadership some Republicans have shown over the past couple months, it's Democrats who are suffering right now,” Scarborough declared, “and will continue to suffer if the president doesn't take a leadership role.”
“That’s why Senate Democratic candidates from red states are going to the president right now and saying, ‘We're in trouble. You need to help us,’” he continued.
At that point, fellow co-host Mika Brzezinski joined the fray by stating:
I think you can hone in on that potential problem for the Democrats especially in the midterms maybe, but you're not considering the shutdown. You're not considering the negative impact of the Tea Party. You're not considering the damage that Ted Cruz has done to the Republican Party.
I would say the White House [stumbled] in the past few weeks by virtue of this failed launch and the misstatements by the president given the fact that they probably should have predicted there would be even a few people who were knocked off their plans.
Brzezinski added that those “who were given great hardship because of the health-care law, and whether it's five people or five million, those are stories that are going to be told, and those are stories the communications department in the administration and the Democratic Party should have predicted.”
“That is just stupidity,” she continued.
“But the thing is right now, I think the potential for the Republicans to still lose out on this is strong because of the damage they've done so far, too,” Brzezinski stated.
“And I think the president has time to fix this,” she continued. “Here's what could fix this: getting people signed up. I don't know how they'd do it, but if they could get those millions of people signed up, it would help a lot.”
As NewsBusters has previously reported, Scarborough is at best an uneasy ally of the Republican Party.
While in early August he accused both NBC and MSNBC of having a liberal bias, by the end of the month he accused conservative radio talk show host and best-selling author Mark Levin of being jealous of the MSNBC co-host's success.
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On the other hand, soon after the Navy Yard shooting in Maryland, Scarborough slammed Obama for making what the MSNBC co-host called “a political speech” and claimed MSNBC and the mainstream media “would be killing” GOP president George W. Bush for insensitivity and poor judgment if he had done the same.
Speaking of the Texas senator, Scarborough seems to have a special grudge against Cruz. At first, he refused to say the Republican's name. Then he didn't stand up for the GOP official when his co-host said that Cruz doesn't love this country.
In mid-October, he said there is “a very real chance” that Cruz would run for president as an independent in 2016 because he'd definitely lose in the Republican primaries.
And it took him some time to use the “L” word -- “lied” -- when discussing Obama's claims that people could keep their doctors and medical plans in ObamaCare.
Scarborough's prediction might be more interesting if the midterm elections weren't a year away, and anything can -- and often does -- happen during a 12-month period.
