'Meet the Press' transcript for August 9, 2009

MR. GREGORY:  As you know, Mayor Booker's very politically astute, and on Twitter he recently offered some sage advice.  This is what he wrote:  "My advice for Bloomberg re-election:  Fenty"--talking about the mayor of Washington D.C.--"and I both have liberated scalps.  If Mike shaves his head, young, hip vote is his, victory assured." So, Mayor, you can make news here. Will you shave your head for re-election?

MAYOR BLOOMBERG:  Let me equivocate on that and, and duck the issue.  But I think--my hair is falling out at sufficient rate that I won't have to shave it.  It's going to be gone.

MAYOR BOOKER:  It's for a pre-emptive strike.  It's time for a pre-emptive strike.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG:  I know you're going to say that.

MAYOR BOOKER:  Let me, let me just tell you something.  I've--I have endorsed Mayor Bloomberg.  He's a Republican.  We cast our country too simplistically in left-right debates.  He's been a leader in bringing America together around gun issues that are sensible for all Americans.  He's brought people together around lowering carbon footprints in cities, the left-right coalition.  This is the way we need to move forward.  We have issues in this country that unite people.  I have the right-leaning Manhattan Institute working with me ex-offender re-entry programs because it's a huge drag on our economy to spend billions of dollars warehousing people and miss the opportunities if we can help them to get into work where they'll produce tax receipts and benefits for society as a whole.  I'm proud to sit here with a Republican, because that's the only way our city's going to--our nation's going to move forward is left and right working together.

MR. GREGORY:  Your name has been mentioned, actually, with the potential to get into the race for, for governor of New Jersey.  Governor Corzine has sort of doubled down on that financially.  He's staying in the race.  He's vulnerable, as you well know.  What will this race for governor of New Jersey say about actually the president's performance?

MAYOR BOOKER:  Well, I think the--this is two separate issues.  Governor Jon Corzine has been a governor that has been extraordinarily successful.  Murder in our state has gone down 24 percent.  He's had to cut the state budget $4 billion, but yet he's increasing investments in education in over a billion dollars.  The problem with Jon Corzine right now is most of the state of New Jersey does not realize the tough cards he was dealt and the great decisions he's made under difficult, difficult circumstances.

And as far as Obama, look, we have two races nationally right now, Virginia and New Jersey.  Many people want to use them as a litmus test against the incumbent president.  But understand this.  We're in a down economy, we're facing incredible challenges; every incumbent in America is going to face very difficult times in their re-election.  This has nothing to do with the president.  We are in a national crisis; hopefully we'll be coming together to be dealing with this.

MR. GREGORY:  All right.

MAYOR BOOKER:  And it shouldn't be about, you know, watching the stock market, the daily uptick or downtick of polls.  It should be about solving problems.

MR. GREGORY:  We're going to leave it there.  Mayors, Mayors Booker and Bloomberg, we got to run.  Thank you both for being here today.

Coming next, Congress faces heat this August over health care back home.  Who will win the battle over reform?  Our political roundtable weighs in:  David Brooks, Erin Burnett and Jon Meacham after this brief station break.

(Announcements)

MR. GREGORY:  And we're back.  If you thought the healthcare debate was heated in Washington, outside the Beltway it's gotten down right hostile.

(Videotape)

Unidentified Man #1:  Open up the door.  Open the door.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  From Tampa, Florida, to Austin, Texas...

(Videotape)

Unidentified Man #2:  This man would be given no...(unintelligible).

(End videotape)

GREGORY:  ...to Romulus, Michigan, town hall meetings over health care have turned chaotic; death threats against members of Congress, taunting and shouting, even fistfights.  Democrats claim it's all political theater organized by reform opponents.

(Videotape, Tuesday)

MR. ROBERT GIBBS:  I also have no doubt that there are groups that are--have spread out people across the country to go to these things and to specifically generate videos that can be posted on Internet sites.

(End videotape)

(Videotape, Thursday)

SEN. KENT CONRAD (D-ND):  I mean, is that what we've come to in the United States, that we're going to have people basically functioning as thugs, coming into meetings trying to disrupt them, shouting people down?

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  Republicans in office and on the airwaves insist the anger is real, reflecting real fears about a government takeover of the healthcare system.  But the rhetoric has become extreme.

(Videotape, Thursday)

MR. RUSH LIMBAUGH:  There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolph Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  White House advisers say the tactics will backfire against the GOP.  But can the president retake center stage of this debate?

And we're joined now by Jon Meacham of Newsweek magazine, CNBC's Erin Burnett and David Brooks of The New York Times.  Welcome to all of you.

So, David, that is the question.  What's going on here and how does the president retake center stage?

MR. DAVID BROOKS:  I hadn't seen the Rush Limbaugh thing.  That is insane. What he's saying is insane.  But I guess I would say the, the first thing is it has been a conventional wisdom among the smartest people in Washington that this is such a tough issue you got to do it on a bipartisan basis.  And the Obama administration, for better or worse, decided not to do that.  There was a thing called the Wyden-Bennett bill that really could have launched a bipartisan, so leaders of both parties could have gone out to these town meetings.  They didn't do it, they chose more or less a Democratic plan and now all hell is breaking loose.  And we are now--and it's not just the crazies, among whom we just saw some.  But if you take overall poll ratings for health care, they are--people are--the American public is now as skeptical as they were when Clinton care collapsed.  So there--it's not just the crazies, there's a real public concern about real issues, aside from the stuff that Rush Limbaugh says.

MR. GREGORY:  Well, you talk about that in terms of approval rating.  Look at this from the Quinnipiac poll this week when it had to do with the president's handling of health care.  Here are the numbers.  Approval's at 39 percent, disapproval's at 52 percent, Erin.  And that's the big question.  I mean, the big battle lines about whether this is manufactured grassroots organizing opposition against health care; the truth is there are people who are angry, there are people who are opposed, whether they're being whipped up in some circumstances or not.

MS. ERIN BURNETT:  You know, I think that's absolutely true.  And you've seen those numbers drop dramatically in terms of approval just over--if you look at the numbers at the end of July even over the past couple of weeks, how dramatically they've dropped.  Americans don't want health care that isn't bipartisan.  And I think people are really starting to focus in on the health care plan is focused on extending coverage to all.  The cost-cutting that might be required as part of real healthcare reform doesn't really appear to be a significant part of this bill.  And that's getting through.  Most people, when it comes down to it, sort of like the health care that they have, and then they get afraid that that's going to change.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MS. BURNETT:  So that's partially, I think, what you're seeing.

MR. GREGORY:  But, Jon, also, the question of where is the president's leadership right now?  Because is--there's the criticism that he's overlearned the lesson that Bill Clinton learned, which is you can't dictate to Congress, let them do it.  But what is he really for?  And in the absence of that, people are sort of whacking everything.

MR. JON MEACHAM:  Yeah, I think that's exactly right.  My sense is that if you ask a lot of even very well-informed people what's in this plan, I'm not sure a lot of people could really explain it.  And I think that it's an unusual failure on the president's part to execute a kind of public education. I don't think he's made the case for this.  And now to go to the insane point from our conservative colleague, now you have the extremists taking over and it turns into a very predictable, very un-Obama-like fight of the extremes, where you're going to have the folks coming in saying socialism, socialism, socialism.  You're going to have the left saying that they're all crazy.  And by the time it's over, what's really going to happen?  And I think that's--this is, this is the opportunity.  The president has an opportunity here to step in and say, "Look, we've all--it's hot, it's August.  Let me explain what this plan really is." And I just have--I personally have not understood that.

MR. BROOKS:  He had...

MR. GREGORY:  David, Sarah, Sarah Palin on Facebook, to the point of the opposition, this is what she writes:  "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's `death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide...whether they are worthy of health care.  Such a system is downright evil." There is the rhetoric; there's also the question of what's true and what's false in what people are arguing about this notion of a death panel.

MR. BROOKS:  Yeah.  Again, that's crazy.  If--the, the, the crazies are attacking the plan because it'll cut off granny, and that--that's simply not true.  That simply is not going to happen.  The real reason for public skepticism is that Obama very eloquently and very truthfully said, "We've got to bring down healthcare costs." Everybody's healthcare costs are rising. It's eaten into your wages, it's eaten into the budget, it's eaten into everything.  And the problem with the House plan is that instead of bending the cost curve down, it would increase the cost curve so inflation would be 8 percent a year when it's all implemented, and that's just disaster.  So what the Obama administration has got to do, and I agree with Jon about this, is make this Obama-like; which is to say, "We're going to produce a plan." And from I hear, by the end of this month they will have a plan.  And they are going to say, "This is what we stand for." And you can't sell anything without a plan.  But it's got to be a plan that actually cuts costs so you can have a rational discussion instead of the scare stories about cutting off grandma.

MR. GREGORY:  And my, my reporting tells me, out of the White House, they are going to focus on this message of consumer protection from the insurance companies, and they say they've got polling which indicates once Americans hear that message, support goes up.

MR. MEACHAM:  Oh, yeah.  I mean, who--people love their doctors and hate their insurers I think is a fairly basic way of looking at it, and I think they just need to talk about that more.  You know, Obama has said that the thing that has, has interested him most as president is that he thinks that the country is interested in complexity and will listen to explanations.  I just don't think there's been that effort on health care, for understandable reasons.  There's a hell of a lot going on, as you just heard from the mayors.

MR. GREGORY:  Well, we're going to talk about...

MS. BURNETT:  But I'm thinking--yeah, sorry.

MR. GREGORY:  I'm sorry, I want to talk about the, the economy, to, to that point, Erin, and bring you in on this.  Here was the good news this week. This was the, the job loss chart, and here's what it shows.  It shows that job losses slowed to the lowest level since August of 2008.  You see that orange bar is the number of job losses, over 200,000, but it's a lot better than it's been.  There is a flip side, though.  There is some bad news.  Another chart that we can show you, it shows you people who have been out of work for six months or longer is actually at the highest point that it's been in some time, topping out in July.  What do we make of this?

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