With only one day to go before the midterm elections, the panelists on Monday's edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe program focused on what could happen if the Republicans take the Senate and gain seats in the House of Representatives.
“I think this is going to be the best thing to ever happen to Barack Obama,” regular analyst Donny Deutsch asserted. “It might wake him up and re-energize him during his last two years” in the White House.
Co-host Joe Scarborough agreed, stating:
Barack Obama still believed in 2012 that if he won re-election, Republicans would suddenly say: “Oh, he’s legitimized, we're going to work with him.”
No, it’s going to take, I think, this final step of Republicans takeover for him to go: “OK, do I want to get things done or not?”
Deutsch began the segment by declaring: “The Republicans will win, and there's two kind of little pieces of nuggets underneath that that are good news for Republicans in '16 and beyond.”
An obvious outcome, he stressed, was derived from a recent poll of millennials, people who became young adults about the year 2000.
“I was fascinated” by the results, which showed people of that generation “are leaning Republican, and the Democrats, in a lot of states, are really going backwards on Hispanics,” Deutsch noted.
“They're still obviously winning Hispanics,” he added, “but the Republicans have figured out: 'Hmmm. We are never gonna win another election unless somehow we appeal to that audience.'”
Scarborough responded: “It's hard for a Republican sitting here to say this” because people will claim: “You're only saying that because you're a member of the GOP.”
However, such a result would mean that Republicans would “then have no more excuses,” he noted. “They’re either going to make Capitol Hill work, or they’re going to screw it up. And if they screw it up for two years, they will lose in 2016.”
“The best thing for Republicans and Democrats is the Republicans take over,” Deutsch agreed before the co-host claimed: “I think it's the best thing for the country for its accountability. Do you want to run Washington, or do you want to run your mouth?”
That question caught co-host Mika Brzezinski off-guard as she laughed while trying to introduce the next segment.
Brzezinski also made an interesting contribution to another discussion, when political commentator Bill Krystol said that the election results will definitely be “good.”
“Iowa could go Republican ... will go Republican for both governor and, I think, the Senate,” he predicted. “Kansas will go Democrat, perhaps, probably for governor and perhaps the Senate.”
Chuck Todd, political director for NBC News and new host of Sunday morning's Meet the Press program, heartily declared: “All right! Populism is back!”
Krystol tried to dampen Todd's enthusiasm by stating that Kathleen Sebelius “was governor of Kansas for two terms. It's not like they've never elected a Democratic governor, but it does show, I think very much, the populist strength.”
In addition, he asserted:
There's anti-Obama sentiment; there's anti-incumbent sentiment; there's anti-Washington sentiment; there's anti-Wall Street sentiment; some of which is healthy, incidentally.
The Republicans who are running the more populist campaigns are doing better.
At that point, Brzezinski glared at Krystol before declaring: “You have a smirky twinkle in your eyes. I don't like it.”
The analyst laughed before accepting her remark as “a very high compliment.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, this isn't the first time someone on Morning Joe has been critical of the Democratic occupant of the White House.
On October 15, Deutsch admitted: “Wow! We kind of made a mistake” electing Obama during the 2012 presidential election and demanded a “do-over” because GOP candidate Mitt Romney “was right about Syria; he was right about a lot of things.”
Two weeks later, Scarborough “scalded the president's self-righteous hypocrisy” when Obama angrily denounced the states that were imposing Ebola quarantines of their own instead of waiting for the federal government to handle that task.
“It is absurd that the president would act that self-righteous when his own government, his own administration, is conducting the very policies that he's acting so self-righteous to condemn,” the co-host thundered.
Criticizing Barack Obama is not a regular feature on Morning Joe, but when at least one of the people on that MSNBC program (which regularly gets higher ratings than its Cable News Network counterpart, New Day) calls the president out, that's one tiny step for the “lean forward” channel toward becoming more “fair and balanced.”
