I was on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox News today talking health care and the new political reality in DC. When I said that in a recent poll I saw only 45 percent of the country was against the President's health care proposal, about the same number who voted against Barack Obama in 2008, Neil jumped on me saying all the polls he has seen showed overwhelming majority support against.
This is important. For it you listen to the Republican opposition to the plan these days, the argument goes - it is unconstitutional, the Dems rammed an unpopular bill down the throats of the public, it is a big government take over, it is going to blow a hole in the deficiit. The argument about it being unpopular - thus showing the tryannical nature of the Dems, which will cost them dearly in November - seems to be the most common.
The problem is that it is not true. Take a look at a new Gallup poll today. It shows 49% of the country believes that passing the health care bill was a "good thing," and only 40 percent say it was a "bad thing," Whevever the public was on the bill a few months ago, it is now pretty happy it has passed.
And Neil, I did get my figures wrong. I said the country was split on the bill, with about 45% being for, and equal number against - or about the same number as voted for John McCain in 2008. But the most current poll has different numbers, and they are actually better than the ones I had. So no these numbers did not come from Pravda, as you suggested, but Gallup, a polling outfit that has not always been so friendly to the Dems.
On health care, energy, taxes, immigration, deficits and everything else, Obama should get away from the politics of legislating and go back to being president. He should put forward the best proposals to help solve America's problems. He may or may not get much support from Republicans, but he will earn political capital and power, which in the long run is the only way to enact a big, transforming agenda. This approach is exactly what Obama campaigned on. He promised that he would reach out to all sections of the country, listen to the best ideas and appeal to the nation as a whole. "I don't see a blue America and a red America, I see only the United States of America," he said. Obama needs to shift course and govern as the president he promised to become. That's change I could believe in.
You can read the rest of his Washington Post essay here.
And if you happened to have caught my 620AM appearance on Fox News this morning, yes, it did seem a little short. I think once the conservative agreed with me on the GOP's role in running up the deficit they had to pull the plug on the segment.
I don't really know what to say about this disturbing 2001 Beck clip, which Jed L (of jedreport.com) over at DailyKos dug up. You really just have to listen to it yourself.
The ironic part is, after spewing this violent, vitriolic venom, the kind of filth that should have gotten him immediately removed from any form of public communication whatsoever, he complains that everyone on TV is an "extremist" and nobody in the media is rational. Words excape me.
There has been a lot of chatter on the web these last few days about a new round of really crazy rants from Glenn Beck. I tend to skip these stories because I think the guy is a reprehensible loon, a wierd characture of Howard Beale from the movie Network.
So a few minutes ago while cruising around Huff Po I gave in and watched some of his stuff from last week. I could try to describe it but it is just too hard. You need to watch. And get ready for all sorts of Hitler, Hussein references, and of course, the idea that Americorps is Obama's very own 21st century version of the Brownshirts!
Man it is really incredible that News Corporation puts this stuff on the air. It feels a little more like a guy making a show in his basement and putting it out over a community access channel. But here it is, bad spelling and all, on a major American television cable network.
So Bill O'Reilly was kind enough to put me on his show tonight, using a clip from this past weekend's Netroots Nation convention. In the clip I talk about Lou Dobbs, and why he needs to follow Glenn Beck, and move from CNN to Fox.
My guess is that O'Reilly used this clip to send a covert signal to Dobbs that he, for one, wants him over there with him at America's real news network.
For more on the panel that generated this clip check out this post I offered up from this weekend about Dobbs and Beck.
ABOUT a dozen companies have withdrawn their commercials from “Glenn Beck,” the Fox News Channel program, after Glenn Beck, the person, said late last month that President Obama was a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
The companies that have moved their ads elsewhere in recent days included ConAgra, Geico, Procter & Gamble and the insurance company Progressive. In a statement that echoed the comments of other companies, ConAgra said on Thursday that “we are firmly committed to diversity, and we would like to prevent the potential perception that advertising during this program was an endorsement of the viewpoints shared.”
The campaign against Mr. Beck is rooted in an advocacy group’s objection to the commentator’s remarks on July 28. Given the number of advertisers that have pledged to remove their spots, it appears to have been unusually successful.
At Netroots Nation yesterday I was on a panel with James Rucker, head of the advocacy group mentioned above, Color of Change, where we discussed all this. The success of this effort reinforces what I said yesterday - the center-left has the power to get wild, irresponsible demagogues like Beck and Lou Dobbs off mainstream news outlets. It will require intense focus, patience and a broad based campaign. But it is possible. And it is not for their conservatism, or even their opposition to the Democrats. It is that their consistently articulated understanding of race, of immigrants, of people not like them, of who we are as a people is offensive, anachronistic, and has no place in this age of greater racial understanding offered by our new President.
We cannot forget that several years ago a Dobbs and Beck fellow traveler, Rush Limbaugh, was given a shot to go mainstream, joining the booth of the Monday Night Football. Within just a few games he was fired for making racially insensitive remarks. As a veteran of a network news division, I am very much for freedom of speech, and believe that folks like Limbaugh, Dobbs and Beck are entitled to make their case, grow their shows, do their thing. But not on a network owned by Disney, or Time Warner. One of the main reasons I have switched my cable news allegiance from CNN to MSNBC in recent months has been CNN's unwillingness to get rid of Dobbs, who really has no place on CNN, and whose views are wildly out of sync with the CNN brand. I for one will not start watching CNN again until they get Dobbs off their network.
At a forum two weeks I talked about Dobbs and Beck. A conservative news site, CNS, covered it this way. Their video is included below.
Congrats to James Rucker, Media Matters and those who have worked so hard to hold these awful demagogues to account. There is much more we can and need to be doing to be building on their success. More on that soon.
If your television has a dial, turn that dial to Fox News, where Dr. Rob Shapiro, Chair of NDN's Globalization Initiative will be talking about President Obama's brand new budget at 12:10 pm today.
He'll be squaring off with Rep. John Kasich, who ran the House Budget Commitee when he was in congress. It promises to be an epic duel.
UPDATE: Rob showed Rep. Kasich who was boss. We'll have a video up soon!
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