During Thursday afternoon's edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports, the MSNBC host joined NBC News chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd and USA Today reporter Susan Page in stating that the troubled implementation of the Affordable Care Act has diminished the political status of Barack Obama and resulted in negative poll results from people all across the country.
The discussion was part of a “year-in-review” segment, when Mitchell claimed that the “unhelpful” insurance industry has generated “a big piece” of the ObamaCare program's troubles because, as Page noted, some of the negative developments that are taking place “are not related” to the Affordable Care Act. Todd agreed, noting that the program is “clearly being used by the health-care industry to hide bad – to hide unpopular moves.”
Susan Page
ObamaCare is set to hit all of us this October, and Susan Page of USA Today is already blaming the Republicans in the likely case the law turns out to be an abject failure. Appearing on MSNBC’s Weekends with Alex Witt on Saturday, Page made a confession that has been hard for the liberal media to make: “[W]e are entering this really critical period when we’re going to find out if [ObamaCare] works the way it's supposed to work or not.”
A previous Democratic Congress passed the Affordable Care Act so we could find out what was in it, as Nancy Pelosi infamously quipped. But we won’t truly know how it works – or if it works – until it is implemented. It was courageous of Page to admit that ObamaCare is still a question mark. But she may sense that the health care law will fail to work as it was intended, because she quickly blamed Republicans for the potential failure of the law:
While MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell admitted that the planned NBC biopic of Hillary Clinton was a "bad idea," on her Thursday 1 p.m. ET hour show she and her guests scolded Republicans for refusing to allow the biased network to moderate GOP primary debates: "That's where you get debates where the audience is cheering because they were all hand picked by local or state parties, that's where you get candidates like Mitt Romney talking about self-deportation to try to play to the crowd." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Mitchell made that observation while discussing the topic with former Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, not exactly someone with the best interests of the GOP at heart. Gibbs ranted: "If you're only going to do debates in front of diehard Republicans that 100% agree with you, you're going to end up pushing yourself farther and farther and farther to the right....you're not going to win any national elections."
The liberal media’s attempt to paint Republicans as a party in crisis continues, this time with fresh ammunition from the Republican National Committee’s “Growth & Opportunity Project.” The recently-released report provides a critical review of what went wrong in the 2012 election cycle and how the party can improve its effort to win future elections.
On Monday’s PBS NewsHour, the taxpayer-subsidized PBS network brought on Susan Page from USA Today and Stuart Rothenberg of The Rothenberg Political Report to rip into the Republican Party. Or, as anchor Gwen Ifill put it, the guests were there “to talk about how deep the party's fissures go.”
On Friday's Bill Press radio show, several "objective" journalists agreed with Press that Hurricane Sandy is a big boost for Obama's election hopes. " Looking at Bloomberg’s endorsement and other factors would you have to say that if there were a political winner out of Sandy, it’s President Obama. " This was early Friday morning, before the negative press coverage really began to kick in.
Joining Press in his sanguine assessment were his guests Margaret Talev of Reuters and Susan Page of USA Today. He told Talev:
You would think after all the negative press MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell got for trashing Ann Romney's multiple sclerosis therapy of riding horses, media members would have wised up.
Apparently not, for on CNN's State of the Union Sunday, USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page referred to Mrs. Romney's remedy as a "very expensive horse riding dressage habit" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
One of the key parts of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling regarding the President's healthcare bill was that the fine for not complying with the individual mandate must be considered a tax in order for it to be constitutional.
On CNN's State of the Union Sunday, host Candy Crowley didn't think this was a very important distinction (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
The cover story of Tuesday's USA Today blared "Resurgent Republicans close gap in key states." Susan Page reported a new USA Today/Gallup poll of 12 battleground states found "the number of voters who identify themselves as Democratic or Democratic-leaning in these key states has eroded, down 4 percentage points, while the ranks of Republicans have climbed by five points." GOP voters were also found to be more attentive to the campaign, more enthusiastic about the election, and more convinced the outcome matters. ABC, CBS, NBC coverage? None.
Gallup also found "Americans' concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession." Network coverage? None. On Wednesday morning's Early Show CBS reporter Jan Crawford found only the Gallup result that would discourage Republicans:
A headline in USA Today on Monday worried, "Elections are likely to trim number of women in Congress." It wasn't until the 15th paragraph of Susan Page's story that the numerous female Republican candidates running in the midterm elections were mentioned.
Instead, the Washington Bureau Chief explained, "The prospects for female congressional candidates have been hurt by a combination of a tough political landscape for Democrats — women in Congress are disproportionately Democratic— and the nation's economic troubles. Hard times historically have made voters more risk-averse and less willing to consider voting for female candidates." [Emphasis added.]
In an accompanying graph, Senator Barbara Boxer in California was listed as an example of a female who could be defeated. The only problem? Boxer's opponent is Republican Carly Fiorina, a woman. [H/T Hot Air.]
Yesterday the Gallup organization released a poll showing that Americans trust Republicans over Democrats on most major issues heading into the general election season. Today the same polling outfit released a poll that found a large number of Americans blame George W. Bush for the faltering economy.
Guess which one Gallup partner USA Today hyped?
Here's how USA Today staffer Susan Page began her September 2 online story (filed at noon today):
Nearly two years after Barack Obama was elected president, Americans still are inclined to blame his predecessor for the nation's current economic problems.
In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, more than a third of those surveyed said George W. Bush deserved a great deal of the blame for economic woes and a third said he should get a moderate amount of it. Not quite another third called that unfair, saying Bush warranted not much or none of the responsibility.
According to USA Today's Susan Page, Lincoln Chafee, a Republican who left the party and voted for Barack Obama in 2008, is simply a "moderate."
A cover story for Tuesday's print edition of the paper featured the misleading sub-headline: "Centrists Fuel Big Crop of Contenders This Year." Nowhere in the 1800 word piece did Page describe Chafee as a liberal.
Instead, the politician, now running for governor of Rhode Island as an independent, is part of a "rebellion in the middle." Page sympathetically described the then-Senator's exit from the Republican Party after losing a 2006 reelection bid: "Chafee felt rejected by the GOP, which no longer seemed willing to include moderate Republicans like himself."
In tune with the reverberations of the network morning shows' echo chamber, correspondents like CNN's Dana Bash and anchors like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday praised Kagan for her ability to inject humor into otherwise "hollow and vapid" hearings and charm hostile Republican senators into docility.
"But just on a color note, what struck me, Candy, has been the way Elena Kagan has tried to use a sense of humor to really disarm the senators, particularly Republicans," noted Bash.
Maddow's guest, Dahlia Lithwick of the liberal Slate magazine, gushed over Kagan's "gut-wrenching" sense of humor, her masterful ability to balance "seriousness and levity and humor," and her "disarming and charming and kind of likeable" personality.
"A likeable liberal. Dear me, I know," quipped Maddow.