Former President Bill Clinton said during a recent televised news interview that he was shocked by the message Republicans were sending in their fight against President Obama’s signature health care reform: We hope it fails.
That means the GOP is “begging for America to fail,” he said, during a “This Week” interview with ABC host George Stephanopoulos.
“I’ve never seen a time — can you remember a time in your lifetime when a major political party was just sitting around, begging for America to fail? … I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’ll be shocked if it fails,” Mr. Clinton said.
And in response to the many recent polls that show more than half of Americans don’t want Obamacare, Mr. Clinton had this to say: They’ll get used to it.
“I just think that when all these dire predictions don’t come out, if they don’t — I believe that pretty soon, within the next several years, this will be like Medicare and Medicaid. And it’ll be a normal part of our life. And people will be glad it’s there,” he said in the ABC News report.
Mr. Clinton also said he wasn’t concerned about the impact of Obamacare’s image on his wife’s potential 2016 run for the White House. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had pushed a similar socialized medicine package while first lady — and was completely shut down by a disapproving public and Congress.
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His response to that suggestion: “I think this bill’s already produced a lot of good results and every — look, they are desperate for this bill to fail, because if it’s not a failure, their whole — everything they’ve been telling us since 1980 that government’s bad, is wrong. They so badly want it to fail.”
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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