Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:04 pm
After having to listen to Candy Crowley and Rick Santorum question President Obama’s competence, Howard Dean went off and called the whole thing right wing talking point nonsense.
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CROWLEY: Senator, I think you have a differing view just because I was watching your reaction as Joe was reporting.
SANTORUM: Yes, this really feeds into the president’s competence. That’s really the question that the people have, is the president competent to do his job? And Obamacare is certainly front and center. What’s going on in the Middle East is another area. There’s a whole group of issues now that people are questioning. And you talk to anybody. I’ve talked — I talked to an insurance — some people in the insurance industry this morning. And they told me that most of the front end may be looking good. People may be able to get on and get responses, but the information coming out the back end to the insurance companies is still garbage. It’s undecipherable. And it’s requiring them to, on a case-by-case basis, actually have someone go — because there’s misinformation, there’s triplicates, there’s husbands labeled as wives. There’s all sorts of problems with the data coming into the insurance companies. So you think you may have signed up, but you may not, because the insurance company may not have the data available to actually put you in the system.
CROWLEY: And Governor, to pick up on sort of the broader point from Senator Santorum. And that is that there has been this unease that has — that started, you know, probably earlier than the launch of the website, but nonetheless has continued.
I want to show you a CNN ORC poll. This is a good track, bad track, how well do you think things are going in the country today question. And right now, 59 percent of the country thinks things are going badly.
Now, that is up from September. It is nine points above April. So there has been this steady deterioration for how people feel about the direction the country’s going. People no longer see President Obama — I think only 40 percent of people see President Obama as able to kind of run the government. Is there that kind of lasting damage? That’s certainly what Senator Santorum is talking about.
DEAN: No, I think there’s no evidence for that at all. Again, I think that’s right-wing talking points against this president. They’ve from day one when he got in there, they tried to undermine him as a human being. And I think that’s, you know, it’s not a tactic that’s good for the country. So my view is —
(CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: Governor, it’s true you had some — it’s true that you had reservations. You didn’t like this when it first rolled out, right?
DEAN: No, this is — look, this is not from my point of view an ideal plan, but this is what passed the Congress and this is the law. And Romney did the same, something very similar in Massachusetts, and it’s worked very well. So who am I to say that the court — the Supreme Court and the Congress of the United States is wrong all the time? I think we ought to make this thing work. It’s the law. It can work. Mitt Romney proved it did work in Massachusetts, where 98.5 percent of all of Massachusetts citizens have health insurance. I fail to see this has anything to do with the president’s competence, other than the procurement process, which has been screwed up for many years, long before this president ever got into office.
So I lose my patience with this nonsense. And I do believe that the facts are going to be determined by what happens on the ground. And I think three months from now, a lot more people will have health insurance, and a lot more people will be happy with all of this.
Former Gov. Dean finally said what Democrats should have been saying for weeks. This is all nonsense. Republicans and their media allies need to be called out on it. Candy Crowley was wrong. We do not need to wait and see if the website works when people are on it. The website has been working for weeks with people on it. Between Sunday and Tuesday of last week, 20,000 people signed up.
Only an idiot who hasn’t been paying attention, or completely insulated inside the Beltway lazy journalist wouldn’t know that. The Republicans have managed to trump up the ACA website issues to the same level as their other bogus scandals.
Howard Dean had enough of this nonsense, and he called it out. Democrats out number Republicans in this country, and they to a person should be doing the exact same thing.
It is time to stand up, fight back, and kill this lie.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
