What do you do with people in the media that don’t listen when you tell them things?
Howard Dean: The people that voted for Obama and Brown and the voters that stayed home overwhelmingly want a public option.
Chris Matthews: How do you explain that voters preferred Brown who wants to kill healthcare reform over Coakley who consistently supported the public option?
Pay attention, Chris.
Here’s the exchange from Hardball:
Matthews: Would you have 51 after what happened yesterday?
Dean: Yesterday, the problem was people wanted more. We did a poll—Democracy for America—did a poll. Eighteen percent of the people who voted for Scott Brown voted for Obama. Of those 18%, three out of five wanted a public option. They thought they didn’t go far enough. Of the Obama voters that we polled that stayed home, 80% wanted a public option.
Matthews: There’s two facts on the table here. The Democratic candidate was for the public option. She was very aggressive, very progressive. Martha Coakley was much more progressive than the President. She stuck to the line, “I want an individual mandate and I want a public option.* Period. She said it right to the end. Never broke from that. So she took the position you’re advocating now. A lot of people would think. The other guy said, “I’m going to kill it in its bed.” The voters voted for the guy who said I’m going to kill it in its bed. So, they had a choice between a public-option candidate and “kill it”, and they voted to kill it. So how do you explain that?
Dean: These voters were sending a message to Washington. They asked for change and they haven’t gotten change. …
Matthews: Governor, you’re whistling past the graveyard, here.
Dean: I don’t think so.
Matthews: She ran for the public option.
Dean: Our polling shows what it shows ….
Matthews: Scott Brown is walking around signing his name “Scott Brown 41”. “I’ll be the 41 guy who votes for the filibuster.”
Dean: There are a lot of people outside Washington that don’t think that bill ought to pass ’cause it’s too watered down… You know very well what voters do. Voters were sending a message to Washington: “We don’t want business as usual.” That’s what they were sending the message about.
Matthews: How do you know that?
Dean: Because we polled! American Research Institute. … We found out that of the Obama supporters who either stayed home or voted for Scott Brown they overwhelmingly wanted to do more on healthcare not less. …
Matthews: You just said the voters of Massachusetts agreed with you but they voted Republican. That makes no sense.
Dean: Oh, it does make …
Matthews: Are voters crazy?
Dean: There’s only one crazy person around here and I may hold up a mirror and you may see him in a minute!
(No video of this appears to be up yet. If you find a clip of today’s Hardball, please let us know!)
I know this is hard to understand, but the polls say what they say. People obviously believed that if they voted for Coakley, regardless of what she stood for personally (a public option), that it would mean the Senate bill would continue to have the same support and that we would probably get what Democrats have presented so far: an industry-friendly bill that doesn’t put any pressure on the for-profit sector to rein in costs. By denying Coakley the seat, they pretty much guaranteed that this won’t happen. People who want a public option stayed home or voted for Brown. The only way to interpret this is to believe that they wanted to stop the current direction and make Democrats take a different course. When they didn’t see a public option coming up, they checked out and stopped voting for the Democratic candidate.
Voters are right. We’ve seen over and over that Senators who say they want a public option nevertheless are voting with the White House to kill it. Coakley could tell people all she wanted that she wants a public option, but as long as the White House continues to drive the Senate bill forward she won’t be able to get it, either. If Bernie Sanders can’t stop an industry takeover of the healthcare bill, then what hope would Senator Coakley? And, under those conditions, what would be the point of voting for her?
* It may be that her support of the mandate actually killed her. This is not progressive. It’s a Republican idea that is designed to featherbed the insurance industry. It might have been an acceptable addition in order to get people to vote for a public option, but once that was taken out it serves no legitimate purpose and is an incredible invasion of privacy. Voters may have been unwilling to vote for someone that backed this idiot idea. I wouldn’t blame them.