A House ally of President Obama defended his misstatements about being able to keep your health insurance under Obamacare, saying the president may have misspoke but certainly didn’t mean to mislead.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who once famously branded a debt deal Obama made with Republicans a “sugar-coated Satan sandwich,” said on MSNBC last night that it was “phenomenally silly” for the GOP to compare Obamacare’s sad rollout to disasters.
“The great tragedy is that I think many of my colleagues on the other side are actually hoping for rain instead of sunshine. Because they fear the sunshine because it will give people insurance and they think it will be political repercussions that will hurt them instead of saying all of that aside, my number one goal is the American public,” Cleaver said.
On Obama’s broken promise, “at the worst, that the president misspoke and maybe made a mistake in speaking.”
“But it was not to mislead,” Cleaver declared.
“I think the other part of this that is extremely important is that I think in the absence of an agenda, this is the GOP agenda for the next year. And so, in the absence of an agenda, they’re going to concentrate on trying to dismantle something that will help the American public,” he continued.
“Healthcare was one of the chief causes for bankruptcy in this country. And they’re talking about this was something good that the president has destroyed? That’s absolutely ridiculous. We can fix this. As the great theologian said, we’ve seen the enemy and it is us, it is the Congress for failure to fix something that can be repaired rather easily I think.”
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