The White House faces questions today, on the anniversary of President Barack Obama’s inauguration, about the Senate election in Massachusetts that cost the president’s party its short-lived super-majority control of the Senate.
“There’s an unbecoming habit in this town of trying to defray a responsibility, point in other directions,” the White House’s David Axelrod said today, with a ribbing for Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, joining him on MSNBC’s new The Daily Rundown.
“So let me say it was Robert’s fault and I’m bitter about it.”
Joking aside, Axelrod said: “You know, I’ll let others assess responsibility. I think the main thing that we saw in Massachusetts was the same sense of concern on the part of middle class folks about the economic situation, about their wages being stagnant, about jobs being lost, about their economic security that’s been in jeopardy.
“And this is something that predated the big recession that we’re going through,” the president’s chief political advisor said. “And that’s something that we have to pay a great deal of attention to. It is the focus of this president’s attention at all times. And we have to convey that.”
How can the White House interpret the Massachusetts defeat as anything other than a “total rejection” of the president’s health-care reform, he was asked – in light of Brown campaigning as the 41st vote against the bill.
“I think that there were a lot of elements to the message yesterday. Health care was part of it,” Axelrod said. “I would note that Sen. Brown didn’t run one ad on health care in the entire campaign. I’m sure you know that.
“And he supported a health care reform similar to the one that the president was and is committed to in Massachusetts, and said during the campaign that he wouldn’t repeal it,” he said.
“I mean, there are messages here,” he said. “We hear those messages, but there is a tendency in this town — not that you guys would do it — but to overblow things, even beyond their importance. And I don’t think it’s about that one particular issue. I think there’s a general sense of discontent about the economy and there’s a general sense of discontent about this town. That’s why we were elected. We are committed to doing something about it.”
The president’s men were asked about the president’s first year, and why more hasn’t been accomplished.
“For a lot of reasons,” Gibbs said. “The first of which is change takes a long time to happen, certainly in this town. And it takes even longer for the American people to feel that. The president didn’t have a first-year agenda, he has a first-term agenda. So while today marks the end of the first year and the beginning of the second, it’s not even really a hallmark holiday.
“I would say this too, building off of what David said, there are things that the president has accomplished, whether it’s a credit card bill of rights, whether it’s a recovery plan that’s led to the first quarter of economic growth in more than a year, that same sort of anger and frustration that the President saw when he traveled in Iowa, and throughout this country for more than two years is still very pervasive today,” Gibb said.
“I think that’s what we saw most of all coming out of Massachusetts, is there’s a tremendous amount of anger and frustration about where people are economically and whether this town is fighting for their economic well-being or fighting for the special interests well-being,” Gibbs said.
“I think that’s what’s ultimately going to define more about the coming political battles and the upcoming election.
“Health care is an aspect of it, but this is far broader than that. There’s an anger and a real frustration. People’s jobs are being shipped overseas. As David said, they’re working harder, they’re working longer, they’re more productive, yet their wages are going down. That leads to the type of isolation and economic frustration that we felt for quite some time.”
by Mark Silva
Read the original article from Tribune News Services.