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I guess PBS decided that "Fix the Debt" campaign's Steve Rattner wasn't getting quite enough air time, what with his near daily appearances on MSNBC's Morning Joe, because Charlie Rose and his producers gave him some unfettered air time Monday evening.

Rose asks why President Obama should care about the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" thinks about his policies, and whether he's willing to go after our social safety nets. I'd love to know the last time Rose asked whether a Republican president should just ignore the base of his party and suggested that what they think doesn't matter all that much. To his credit, Rattner did admit that President Obama has good reason to pay attention to those that just reelected him, and that they should not be ignored.

He also briefly alluded to the conversation he had during the panel segment on This Week, where his fellow guest Steve Brill rightfully pointed out that lowering the Medicare age would actually save money, but rather than getting into the weeds on that discussion, Rattner only admitted that maybe raising the age might not be "such a good idea." Heaven forbid anyone might actually discuss the heart of Brill's arguments, because it runs counter to the Villager narrative that we must raise the Medicare eligibility age in order to control our health care costs.

Instead, the conversation turned to whether President Obama is entitled to change his mind on the issue or not and with Rattner again pushing for "significant changes to entitlements" as long as there "was a reasonable response from the Republicans on revenues." The idea that Republicans are ever going to come around on taxes seems pretty ridiculous, and as Karoli noted here on our health care costs, the problem is not with the cost to administer Medicare or with the consumers out there, it's with the providers Congress refuses to reign in.

Rose and Rattner were also extremely dismissive of Paul Krugman, who has written extensively about the fact that the debt and the deficit are not urgent issues now and not what we should be focusing on, with Rose calling him "a Nobel Prize winner, but also a minority opinion."

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Who needs Fox when you've got CNN treating their audience to god-awful programming like Fareed Zakaria's Memo to the President: Road Map for Second Term? It's been airing on their network over the weekend, and it's nothing more than one more long infomercial for group No Labels, advocating for every item on the right's wishlist, from economics to foreign policy.

What was missing? Even token representation from anyone in the progressive or labor movements. Instead, there was interview after interview with Republicans, neo-liberals, DLC Third Way "centrists" and advice from some of the last people we should be listening to -- because their very bad policies are what got us into the economic mess we're in now.

In a portion of the program which focused on economic policy, the audience was treated to former Reagan and Bush adviser James Baker -- which makes sense, because who better to talk about what President Obama needs to do to fix the economy than a leading member of the same administration that blew a mile-wide hole in the deficit with tax cuts and a couple of wars they left off the books?

For "balance," he follows up with Robert Rubin. The same Robert Rubin who helped Bill Clinton deregulate the derivatives market and then went on to work for Citigroup while the rest of the country was left with the economic time bomb of deregulation and "too big to fail" he helped to put in place.

Zakaria also decided we needed some sage advice from Mitch McConnell's wife Elaine Chao, who served, as Jim Hightower put it, as George Bush's anti-Labor Secretary, and who helped our most "anti-labor president of modern times" to degrade our protections and rights in the workplace and that wages were kept as low as possible. How could we possibly have a discussion on what to do to improve our economy for the American working class without her input?

And for more "balance" yet, we were treated to Peter Orszag, who left the Obama administration to go work for Citigroup just as Rubin did, and who has been out there pushing for "reforms" -- in other words, cuts to our social safety nets and reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

And there's more where that came from with the entire guest list and their conflicts of interest. You can read the entire transcript here and the full transcript for the segment above below the fold.

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Dan Senor, a top adviser to former GOP nominee Mitt Romney, on Sunday lashed out at President Barack Obama for meeting with progressive groups like MoveOn.org after winning the election, but ignored similar meetings with business leaders.

Appearing on a Sunday panel on ABC's This Week, Senor said that the president's first offer to avoid the fiscal cliff by ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the richest Americans, $400 billion in targeted spending cuts to earned benefit programs like Medicare and several stimulus measures was as extreme Republicans demanding Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) controversial budget plan and a 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates.

"I think he has spent more time on the phone this week, from what I understand, with Steve Israel, the chairman of the Democrats' campaign arm, than he did with [House Speaker] John Boehner," Senor complained. "He's spending time with [AFL-CIO president] Richard Trumka and MoveOn.org. You tell me what he's telling those hard-left groups about his position and how he can walk back to something more reasonable."

"He also met with quite a number of business leaders, a lot of CEOs, a lot of Republicans this week," former Obama adviser Steven Rattner noted. "He's trying to do something different than he's done before, which is take his message outside the beltway, outside of Capitol Hill and try and bring it to the people. And I'm totally in favor of that."

"But look, in the negotiations a year and almost a half ago, Speaker Boehner was reported to have offered $800 billion in revenue," Rattner added. "The president has asked for $1.6 trillion of revenue. There's a bid, there's an ask. If the Republicans want to get a deal done, let's sit down and try to find some place in the middle."

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After Romney surrogate Ed Gillespie appeared on Fox News Sunday and desperately attempted to defend Mitt Romney's position on the auto bailout, former Obama car czar followed his appearance and took apart the Romney campaign's arguments that there was any private investment to be found to save the auto industry.

Obama’s Car Czar Bashes Romney’s Auto Rescue Plan:

On Fox News Sunday, former Obama adviser and car czar Steven Rattner disputed Mitt Romney’s claim that Washington followed his advice on how to handle the auto industry rescue through a managed bankruptcy, calling the claim “completely false.”

Rattner’s argument is that Mitt Romney opposed government aid to the flailing companies and that aid was crucial to saving them. Rattner argued that there was no private money available at the time to prop up the companies, necessitating government help.

Transcript via Fox:

WALLACE: All right. I'm being unfair because I didn't realize we only have a minute left. But I do want to ask you. As the former car czar you heard the discussion with Ed Gillespie about the auto bailout. He says -- Romney says that Washington basically followed his advice in a managed bankruptcy, true or false?

RATTNER: Completely false. And what Ed Gillespie said was completely false. The fact is there was no private capital available for these companies. And not only did President Obama recognize that, President Bush recognized that. Remember that the first $17 billion that went in to General Motors and Chrysler was put in by President Bush because he and Hank Paulson, his secretary of the treasury, recognized that there was no private capital. There was no private capital. That's not a hypothetical. That is a fact.

I was there. President Bush was there. It would have been government money or nothing.

And if it would have been nothing, as you said but it worse than what you said, the companies would have run out of money, they would have closed their doors, they would have liquidated, and they would have laid off hundreds of thousands of workers. That is a fact.

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Jason Linkins in his weekly Sunday Talking Heads live blog, did a nice job of summing this portion of Ed Gillespie's appearance on Fox News Sunday up, where Gillespie was trying to explain Mitt Romney's opinion on the bailout of the auto industry:

Wallace moves to Romney's opposition to the auto industry rescue. Again, Wallace has done his homework, pointing out that the current Republican governor of Michigan supported the rescue and has pointed out that Romney's weird explanation for how it came to be that he simultaneously opposed and supported this rescue does not make sense -- Rommey says he wanted a "managed bankruptcy" and has insisted from time to time that what Obama did was not a managed bankruptcy, only to say on alternate weeks that it was a "managed bankruptcy" and that Romney will "take a lot of credit for it."

There's only one salient difference between Romney and Obama's position -- Romney seems to think that private money should have been used and was available to manage the bankruptcy. The White House position was that private money would have OBVIOUSLY been preferable, but there was, as you could imagine, nobody who was particularly hot to pony up the scratch. So the federal government did, after the executives successfully jumped through a bunch of hoops. If we're being honest here, Romney played his hand back when it was still uncertain that the auto rescue would work, his gamble didn't pay off, and now he's having to spit a bunch of circuitous garbage about it to keep from simply admitting he was wrong.

It seems to me that he'd actually be better off if he just conceded the Detroit bailout to Obama, like Michigan's governor has, and just move to another point of critique. But in for a penny, I guess?

Gillespie doesn't have much of an answer, except to say that there was a debate and many people had different point of view. Gillespie says that a managed bankruptcy was Romney's idea. Wallace says, sure, but not with public money. Gillespie says that it's still a managed bankruptcy. Wallace counters, saying that doing it Romney's way would have actually led to a Chapter 7 liquidation. And around and around. "I understand that is an opinion," Gillespie says. He says that Romney's "belief" is that a private bailout would have been better. He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

Gillespie eventually gets around to being slightly more honest -- Romney believes that the bondholders who made terrible investments in these companies should have been bailed out ahead of the middle class people who built the cars. That's really the only worthwhile thing to remember from this discussion.

Transcript via Fox below the fold.

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