Transcript from CNN'S "YOUR MONEY "
Aired March 6,2010
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody has said it. So now's the time to make a decision.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: David, will he get his decision and been it look like what he wants?
DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: We don't know yet. He doesn't know. The betting in Washington is that he will certainly get an affirmative vote out of the Senate. He's probably, but it's a much closer call, going to get a vote in the House.
Nancy Pelosi does not have the votes now and she is not going to have them until everybody understands what's in the new bill. She's been working through a set of amendments that are going have to be costed out by the Congressional Budget office; they are going to be double checked with Senate leaders and with the White House. That's all going to take some time.
Until she does that, these coalitions won't quite come together. Where she is now, by all, most accounts, is, she starts out about even, maybe even a vote down, based on what happened in November in the House. That she is, she probably had some votes in her pocket in November that she could have called upon. So we don't know how many are out there. Maybe eight, nine, ten Democrats who could go from no to yes.
On the other hand, there are also some Democrats who voted yes who may go to no. And they start with the abortion opponents led by Bart Stupak, a Congressman from Michigan. And he says he has about a dozen Democrats who go no. So you can see how close that leaves the counting.
VELSHI: Let me ask you, David.
GERGEN: There are wild cards out there. Sure.
VELSHI: Let me ask you about this. One coalition that seems to be coming together quite clearly is the Tea Party. They have been on conference calls, they have been discussing-- doing something akin to what happened when the initial bailout bill was passed. You remember that in the fall of 2008. Getting people to force their Congressmen to vote no against this. Is there some danger in the next two or three weeks that we see a ground swell conservative movement that pushes some Congressmen from the yes column into the no column and actually derails this?
GERGEN: I think there is Ali and I think that's one of the reasons that the White House wants to move swiftly. The press secretary of the president has been arguing he'd like to see a House vote by March 18th. The president's going off to Indonesia then. I think that's unrealistic to get a House vote that quickly given all the permutations they have to go through.
But the longer it's out there the more the againers, the Tea Party folks and others can mobilize. What we are seeing in the polls Ali is there has been some slight shift of wins in the more favorable wins for the bill, but we also know that the people who are opposed are much more intensely opposed than the people who are for it. And the people opposed are about twice the size of those who are for it.
So it is quite possible that you could see some real push back and clearly what the White House wants to do is to get this done before the Easter recess comes. So they don't want members of Congress going home and just getting inundated by Tea Partiers and others over Easter recess and then balking.
VELSHI: And they got a cross country thing starting on March 27th. So I guess the president wants to get it out of the way before that. David, good to talk to you, as always thank you so much.
GERGEN: Can I just say?
VELSHI: Yes.
GERGEN: Can I just say one other thing, that I do think that ...
VELSHI: Sure.
GERGEN: From all of our points of view on this show, the longer the Congress in Washington is thinking about and trying to legislate on the future of various industries, the more uncertainty I think that also introduces into our economy, and our economic performance.
Right now we have a health care industry, the financial industry and the energy industry, huge parts of the American economy, that are all facing the potential of new laws, new regulations, uncertain about how to invest and I think that's causing some dampening of the capitalistic spirits, if you will.
VELSHI: May not be regulation, it's just that it is uncertain as to what those regulations will be.
GERGEN: Exactly. So uncertainty, as you know, breeds caution. On the part of industry and I think it's in everybody's interest that this get wrapped up by health care.
ROMANS: I think we can all agree on that. Yes.
VELSHI: I think that's very true. David good to see you. Thanks very much, one of those industries that David was talking about, the energy industry. When we come back we're actually going to talk about that, about the nuclear opposite. Why some people say it's the only clean energy solution for the country and why there may be a little less regulation to allow the entrepreneurs into the nuclear game.