SCHIEFFER: And good morning again.
Senior White House adviser David Axelrod is in Syracuse this morning. Republican Senator Olympia Snowe is here in the studio.
The demonstrators who poured on to the streets of Washington yesterday capped off an angry summer that saw the president’s popularity go down as tempers went up, even on the floor of Congress where a backbencher congressman called the president a liar as the president was calling for unity.
I want to go first to David Axelrod this morning.
Mr. Axelrod, what do you make of this demonstration yesterday on the streets of Washington?
Do you think it’s indicative of the nation’s mood? And what message do you have this morning for those people who were on the streets here yesterday?
AXELROD:
Well, first of all, Bob, I don’t think it’s indicative of the nation’s mood. In fact, I don’t believe that some of the angriest, most strident voices we saw during the summer were representative of the thousands of town hall meetings that went on around the country that came off peacefully, that were constructive, people voicing their points of view.
But this is -- you know, one of the great things about our country is people can express themselves even if they’re not representative of the majority. Your own poll, which was taken after the president’s speech, suggests that they don’t represent a mainstream view of this health care plan.And so, you know, I don’t think we ought to be distracted by that. My message to them is, they’re wrong. The president made it very, very clear that he wants to build on the system that we have.
He wants to fix what’s wrong with it so insurance company bureaucrats can’t rule arbitrarily over the lives of their customers in ways that are very significant. So that people don’t go broke because of out-of-pocket costs from the insurance companies.
And we want to make sure that people who can’t afford health care today because they don’t get it from their employer, can get health care, and at a price they can afford. Right now they have to pay three times as much as anyone else.
So that’s what this is about. We ought to focus on what it’s about and not on distortions of it.
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SCHIEFFER: That entire interview is going to be seen tonight on “60 MINUTES.”
And let’s go back to what the president said the other night to the Congress, Mr. Axelrod. David Brooks, a columnist from The New York Times, said that basically the president had praised the so- called public option -- that is this government insurance plan that many people want -- then effectively buried it.
Why doesn’t the president just say, we don’t have the votes to pass this, we have the votes perhaps to pass a lot of other things, and just put that aside and say he’s not going to push it? He said, you know, he didn’t think it was crucial to the plan but he still liked it.
AXELROD:
Well, he -- let me say again that he believes that it will add an element of competition where there is none in some places in this country where there’s a monopolistic situation with insurance companies.
And we believe competition and choice will help bring prices down and improve care and give a better deal to consumers. So he continues to believe it’s a good idea. He continues to advocate it. And I’m not willing to accept that it’s not going to be in the final package. But what he also said and what we’ve all said is that this is not the whole of health insurance reform. And we should not let the whole debate devolve into this one question, circulate around this one question, and lose the best opportunity we’ve had in generations to do something very significant about a problem that just -- that is just getting worse.
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