'Meet the Press' transcript for August 16, 2009

MR. DAVID GREGORY:  This Sunday:  the August heat over health care.

(Videotape)

Unidentified Man:  One day, God’s going to stand before you and he’s going to judge you and the rest of your damn cronies up on the Hill.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  The president tries to regain control of the debate.

(Videotape)

PRES. BARACK OBAMA:  So I need you to keep knocking on doors, talking to your neighbors, spread the facts, fight against the fear.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  This morning, a special hour-long discussion making sense of health care.  What are the issues at the center of the debate?  How would reform affect your health care?  Separating fact from fiction in the fight. And what does it mean politically for President Obama?  With us:  former House majority leader Republican Dick Armey, now the head of FreedomWorks, a major organizer of protesters at town hall meetings; Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a medical doctor and member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; former Senate majority leader Democrat Tom Daschle, an informal adviser to the White House and author of “Critical:  What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis”; and Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Plus, additional perspectives from around the country:  the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Charlie Rangel of New York; Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce; and Democratic Governor Bill Ritter of Colorado.

But first, making sense of healthcare reform, for the entire hour.  And welcome to our panel here.  You know, the president wrote on the op-ed page of The New York Times today that this is the great debate for America right now. And I think what the public also wants is a civil and informative debate, which is what I think we’re going to have this morning.  I want to talk in just a few minutes about three major areas of contention in this healthcare debate.  But first I do want to talk about the anger, the emotion and the fear that is out there.

And, Senator Daschle, let me begin with you.  All of these town halls, have they altered or derailed the chance for reform this year?

FMR. SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD):  David, I think it’s actually been a good thing.  I think that it’s drawn even greater focus on the issue.  You’ve got President Obama out there in places all over the country talking and trying to set the record straight.  Obviously, these are emotional issues.  This is the noise of democracy.  You ask 300 million people what they ought to do about health care and you’re going to get a lot of different ideas, some of them very deeply emotional.  But the bottom line is I think this really does help a lot, goes a long way.

MR. GREGORY: But it helps, it doesn’t hurt. You really believe that it doesn’t hurt?

SEN. DASCHLE:  I—well, obviously there are—the misinformation hurts. Obviously if you, if you provoke fear, that hurts.  But the opportunity that we have to set the record straight, to keep the focus on the issue, to recognize that there are millions of people out there who don’t have health care, to recognize that there are so many people out there that, that are left out, 12 million people have been, have been discriminated against because they have an illness.  We’ve got huge cost problems, huge quality problems.  And this is our opportunity really to lay the record straight, to put the focus where it belongs and to, and to get this job done for the first time in 70 years.

MR. GREGORY:  All right.  But let’s talk about the tone of the debate.  There have been death threats against members of Congress, there are Nazi references to members of Congress and to the president.  Here are some of the images. The president being called a Nazi, his reform effort being called Nazi-like, referring to Nazi Germany, members of Congress being called the same.  And then there was this image this week outside of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town hall event that the president had, this man with a gun strapped to his leg held that sign, “It is time to water the tree of liberty.” It was a reference to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” That has become a motto for violence against the government.  Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had that very quote on his shirt the day of the bombing of the Murrah building when 168 people were killed.

Senator Coburn, you are from Oklahoma.  When this element comes out in larger numbers because of this debate, what, what troubles you about that?

SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK):  Well, I’m, I’m troubled anytime when we, we stop having confidence in, in our government.  But we’ve earned it.  You know, this debate isn’t about health care.  Health care’s the symptom.  The debate is an uncontrolled federal government that’s going to run--50 percent of everything we’re spending this year we’re borrowing from the next generation.  You...

MR. GREGORY:  That’s—but wait, hold on, I want to stop you there.  I’m talking about the tone.  I am talking about violence against the government. That’s what this is synonymous with.

SEN. COBURN:  The, the—but the tone is based on fear of loss of control of their own government.  What, what is the genesis behind people going to such extreme statements?  What is it?  We, we have lost the confidence, to a certain degree, and it’s much worse than when Tom was the, the, the leader of the Senate.  We have, we have raised the question of whether or not we’re legitimately thinking about the American people and their long-term best interests.  And that’s the question.  The, the mail volume of all the senators didn’t go up based on the healthcare debate, the mail volume went up when we started spending away our future indiscriminately.  And that’s not Republican or Democrat, that has been a problem for years.  But it’s exacerbated now that we’re in the kind of financial situation and economic situation.

MR. GREGORY:  Congressman Armey, FreedomWorks, your organization, advocacy organization getting together a lot of folks, coordinating a lot of the efforts to get people out for the protests.  Do you bear some responsibility for the tone of the debate?

FMR. REP. DICK ARMEY (R-TX):  Not, not whatsoever.  Not when you see the kind of extreme thing you just saw, the—you know, I had my differences with President Bush, George W.  Bush, there’s no doubt about it.  They were well aware of that.  But when moveon.org ran those ads that compared President Bush with, with Adolf Hitler, I thought it was despicable.

MS. RACHEL MADDOW:  They never did that.

REP. ARMEY:  They did do it.  I’ll show you the ad.

MS. MADDOW:  They didn’t do that.  They never ran an ad that compared...

REP. ARMEY:  All right.  Anyway.  All right.

MS. MADDOW:  MoveOn never ran an ad that compared Bush to Hitler.

REP. ARMEY:  All right.

MR. GREGORY:  Well, hold on, hold on.  Finish your thought and then...

REP. ARMEY:  What, what, what, you’re going to get your chance to talk. Well, I, I, I just looked at the moveon.org ad again this morning, and it, it was a horrible thing.  You know, it’s horrible to see this.  But I have had town hall meetings since 1984.  There are always a lot of colorful people that show up with town hall meetings, a lot of people with a lot of colorful statements.  When FreedomWorks encourages people to go to town hall meetings, we encourage them to go and make their points clearly, assertively and with good manners.  So I’m not—I don’t know who these folks are.  We certainly bear no responsibility for...

MR. GREGORY:  But you say good manners; the, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, wrote an op-ed this week during which she said, “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.  Drowning out the facts”...

REP. ARMEY:  Well...

MR. GREGORY:  ...”drowning out the facts is how we failed at this effort for many decades.” Un-American, Rachel?

REP. ARMEY:  Well...

MS. MADDOW:  I—well, I, I think that anytime you’re trying to stop discussion, I think that’s un-American.  But I, I mean, I take issue with the idea that the government has done anything to earn the kind of threats of violence that we have seen.

SEN. COBURN:  I didn’t say that.

MS. MADDOW:  Well, you—well, David, I...

SEN. COBURN:  What I, what I said is what—it is indicative of the loss of confidence.  And when people are afraid, they do all sorts of things that they normally wouldn’t do.

MR. GREGORY:  All right.

MS. MADDOW:  I don’t think...

SEN. COBURN:  And we have undermined, by our actions—whether it be earmarking and corruption and, and disconnection between integrity and character in what we do and what the people expect, and this—these are just symptoms...

MS. MADDOW:  But whether...

SEN. COBURN:  ...of a lack of confidence in what we’re doing.

MR. GREGORY:  Go ahead, Rachel.

MS. MADDOW:  Whether or not, whether or not the government has acted in a way that you feel is defensible, I don’t think the government has done anything to earn, in your words, the, the, the threat of—that the blood of tyrants must run in the streets, which is what the literal threat was from that man with the gun strapped to, strapped to his leg in New Hampshire.  I also don’t think that, that there is an equivalence between what moveon.org has done and with the comparisons of the president to Hitler that we’ve seen so often in this debate.  I mean, some of the major organizations who are organizing these events, like Americans for Prosperity, a group that has some similarities to FreedomWorks but definitely a different group, they’ve had speakers going around the country not only comparing healthcare reform to Hitler, but comparing them to Pol Pot and Stalin, saying “Put the fear of God into your members of Congress.” I don’t think the government has done anything to earn that.

MR. GREGORY:  Congressman:

REP. ARMEY:  Well, first of all, I don’t know what Americans for Prosperity has done.  But if in fact they deserve to have fire on their bunker, please, put your fire on their bunker.  I don’t want it on my bunker.  The fact of the matter is we had Nancy Pelosi, within the last six months, stand up before a very vocal and ruckus group and say, you know, “I love disrupters.” Here’s the speaker of the House saying, “I love disrupters.” So the fact of the matter is there’s been some provocation by officially elected people, and that is not, that’s not a happy thing.  Moveon.org has been a very aggressive organization. What we believe you should have is people show up, people assertively answer the very difficult questions and for people to be well mannered.

Now, I’d like to go on something that Doc Coburn...

MR. GREGORY:  All right, but that—just, you have to admit, the notion that people are being well mannered is not happening.

REP. ARMEY:  That, that may not—that may be with some people.

MR. GREGORY:  All right.

REP. ARMEY:  I’m appalled by what I see, too, by some people.

MR. GREGORY:  All right.

REP. ARMEY:  But for anybody to say that Dick Armey is...

MR. GREGORY:  So, so you repudiate the Nazi imagery.  The Nazi imagery and all of that, you repudiate that.

REP. ARMEY:  Absolutely, I repudiate it.

MR. GREGORY:  That has no place in the debate.

REP. ARMEY:  I—as I said, I repudiated it when moveon.org did it to George Bush.  Did anybody here at this table repudiate it?

MS. MADDOW:  You remember a...

REP. ARMEY:  We’ve just heard that it was all right when MoveOn did it.

MS. MADDOW:  That’s not true.  They never ran an ad that said it.

REP. ARMEY:  But it is not all right when anybody does it.

MS. MADDOW:  The Tea Party Patriots is an organization that your organization is a member of a coalition with.  It’s called the Tea Party Patriots Health Care Freedom Coalition partner.  That’s what Freedoms Work***(as spoken)***is, that’s what Americans for Prosperity is.  If you go to Tea Party Patriots right now, what they’ve got on their front page of their Web site, the top item, is a video showing the violence at the town hall in Ybor City, in Tampa, Florida, essentially promoting that as if that was a good thing that happened, that showed what the Health Care Freedom Coalition wants to have done in the healthcare debate.  FreedomWorks is part of that coalition.

REP. ARMEY:  Right.

MS. MADDOW:  You can say that you denounce it, but the organization that you head is part of it.

More from NBC News broadcasts   Murray: Filming 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' was 'different'   No ‘favorite things’? Say it isn’t so-prah! Struggling species gets helping hand Astronaut over the moon for daughter’s birth   Panel examines cancer screening confusion Follow on Twitter: Making a Difference

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Sunday's Meet the Press guest list Nov. 22: Senate roundtable, Brinker, Snyderman Nov. 15: Clinton, Duncan, Gingrich, Sharpton Nov. 8: Casey, Barbour, Rendell, roundtable, Brokaw Nov. 1: Tim Geithner, David Plouffe, roundtable Oct. 25: Cornyn, Schumer, Burnett, Sorkin, roundtable Oct. 18: Jarrett, Dodd, Kyl, Shriver, Podesta Oct. 11: Levin, Graham, McCaffrey, Myers, roundtable Oct. 4: Ambassador Susan Rice, roundtable Sept. 27: Bill Clinton, Paterson, Kyl, Webb Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: