On Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show “The Kelly Files” on Tuesday, former Clinton adviser James Carville explained the politics of the Obamacare rollout, which in his view were admittedly troubling for the White House.
Carville was speaking the heels of his former boss President Bill Clinton suggesting that President Barack Obama needed to find a way to honor the promise that if you liked your current health insurance plan, you could keep your health insurance plan.
Carville downplayed the effect of these early rollout problems with the entire law and suggested that some were being drop from their health insurance just because it is the nature of the health insurance business.
CARVILLE: First of all, let’s be honest, we’re talking about a very small part of the law. We’re not talking about the whole law. He completely supports the law. Any law that you make that is of this magnitude — you’re going to have to change parts of it. So we shouldn’t overstate what the president said. This has been brought up before the Congress. Sen. Landrieu said she wanted to do this. Sen. Feinstein said she wanted to do this. President Obama said a week ago that he wanted to do that.
KELLY: No, they’re not on the same page.
CARVILLE: Well, again, listen to what Jay Carney said today. You say they were not on the same page; Jay Carney says they are.
KELLY: Jay Carney said it would be like throwing out the baby with the bath water if they tried to actually reinstate those insurance policies. The administration thus far appears to be talking about some fix, which so far could be a premium subsidy.
CARVILLE: The president told Chuck Todd that he would like to fix it where these people could keep their insurance.
KELLY: Honor the commitment that was made, right. How can they do that? I mean, that’s what — Sen. Landrieu and Bill Clinton are on the same page, trying to keep the insurance. But the problem is, is that possible? They have already been canceled. The insurance companies have already moved on.
CARVILLE: Well, they’ve canceled in the individual market, I think something like that, only 17 percent keep their insurance from year to year, so this was happening. The idea that somehow no one got their insurance canceled before 2010 is just absurd.
KELLY: That’s not the suggestion. Well, a lot of these policies were changed, they were only changing —
CARVILLE: Megyn, you keep making the assertion, people lose health insurance all the time. People particularly lose their health insurance in the individual market.
KELLY: But it was not meant to be this way, James, it wasn’t meant to be this way. We had one of the architects of Obamacare on this show last night. A Democrat, the senior adviser to President Obama on this law who said, we did not mean, we did not mean for the individual insurance market to essentially be canceling, these insurance companies to have to cancel these policies. That is not the way it was supposed to go down.
CARVILLE: Again, it could be any number of reasons, but I think what the president said, and what they’re looking for here is a way to fix this. But again, you have to be — again, President Clinton was pretty clear that he was talking about a very narrow segment of the population.
As for the politics of it all, Kelly pointed to Obama’s waning poll numbers and Carville finally admitted the rollout has bigger problems for the Obama administration and for good reason.
KELLY: Let me ask you this though, because there is a question about whether these polls are in free fall, and whether the president is in free fall and what the Democrats are going to do as a response. The latest poll from Quinnipiac came out today, it shows that President Obama’s approval ratings now at 39 percent. Look at the fall that he had just in the past month. It was 45 on Oct. 1. Is the President trustworthy and is he honest? Look at these numbers. Now, only 44 percent believe he is trustworthy, 52 percent say he is not honest. And that is another precipitous fall from Oct. 1. Is there now — does that now explain why Democrats like Dianne Feinstein, who is not up for re-election, Mary Landrieu, who is and voted for this law, are now starting to come out and say, we want to actually keep the president’s promise.
CARVILLE: You know what, when the poll numbers fall, you run into a political trouble. There is no denying that. And if you asked me that some of the result of his political position weakening, sure it is.
KELLY: Well, it’s more than that. I mean, my question is, really has he sacrificed his credibility in making a promise that did not keep.
CARVILLE: You take some polls that are done at the right time. Look, this feels like August of 2011, when the Republicans were going to win the election, and everything was going to be fine because he couldn’t win. He came back. You can’t take one poll, one set of polls, a period of polls. And if this thing rolls out on Nov. 30, as people hope it does, his poll numbers will probably go up. The truth of the matter is that this rollout has been, not just a disaster, it has been a joke. And people look at it and they say, I don’t think he is doing a very good job. To some extent you can’t blame some people for thinking that.
