'This Week' Transcript: David Plouffe and Rep. Michele Bachmann

STEPHANOPOULOS: You mentioned the Simpson-Bowles plan. As you know, the president taking some heat for not fully embracing that plan by many of his critics. And the Senate Democrats haven't even come forward with a budget for years.

PLOUFFE: Well, listen, on Simpson-Bowles, you know, there was a lot of elements of that that ended up in the president's deficit reduction plan. So a lot of the ideas in there were a derivative of that.

Now, we did have some issues with that. We thought the Social Security cuts were too deep. It didn't guarantee protection of the middle class in terms of tax increases.

I do get a kick, George, you see these Republicans saying, "If only the president had supported Simpson-Bowles." That had $2 trillion in tax increases, more than the president's revenue. It had more defense cuts than the sequester that they're so upset about.

So it's preposterous to think that somehow there's some storyline out there. These guys -- ask each of them. Do you support $2 trillion in revenue? No. Do you support additional defense cuts?

So -- but what we do need is -- Simpson-Bowles was the spirit of what we need. And they made a great contribution with their proposal, which is, we need a balanced approach that has revenue, particularly from the wealthy through tax reform, more cuts. We've done a lot already. We can do a little bit more in terms of spending. And then, obviously, entitlement reform.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's talk about health care. Unprecedented three days of arguments before the Supreme Court on President Obama's health care law this week. And the public seems to be going into this fight before the Supreme Court very negative on the president's plan. We have our latest ABC poll showing that 52 percent of the American public now opposes the president's law; 25 percent want the Supreme Court to strike down that individual mandate, the requirement to buy health insurance; 42 percent want the Supreme Court to scrap the law altogether.

Two years after its passage, why haven't you been able to bring the public along on health care?

PLOUFFE: Well, first, George, you know, you see a lot of polls on this issue, as do I. Polls also show that people don't want to go re-fight this political battle again. What they want us to do is implement the law smartly, make adjustments (inaudible) like giving states more flexibility to implement this.

But most of the law doesn't take effect until 2014. We've had hundreds of millions of dollars of propaganda spent against it. Now, you are beginning to see parts of the law come into effect. Kids between 21 and 26, over 2 million of them now, have health insurance. They can stay on their parent's plan because of the health care reform law. You've got over 5 million seniors now getting $600 roughly of prescription drug assistance. Women now are treated equally as men in our health care system, free preventative care like mammograms and cancer screenings.

So we just have to tell the story of this. One thing I'm confident of is, by the end of this decade, we're going to be very glad the Republicans termed this Obamacare, because when the reality of health care is in place, it's going to be nothing like the kind of fear-mongering that was done.

Join the Discussion
blog comments powered by Disqus
You Might Also Like...