President Obama Breaking Transparency Promise?
COOPER: In "Raw Politics" tonight: health care and transparency. From the get-go, President Obama promised the health care debate would take place in the open, including the negotiations that are central to writing a bill. He even spelled out how the transparency would happen, not once, but at least five times. And feel free to count along with me.</s>SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It will be televised on C-SPAN. I can't guarantee you it will be exciting. Broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN, so that the American people can see what the choices are. And we are going to do it all on C-SPAN. It is all going to be televised. All this will be done on C-SPAN, in front of the public. We will have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN.</s>COOPER: Well, that's just five times. As promises go, it's pretty explicit. So, why, then, as Democrats prepare for the last key phase of health care negotiations, where they merge the House and the Senate bills, are Democrats ignoring C-SPAN's actual request to cover the negotiations live? C-SPAN sent a letter to Democratic leaders last week -- as of tonight, no response yet from lawmakers or from President Obama. Joe Johns joins me with the "Raw Politics." Joe, I mean it does seem odd. The president talked a lot about transparency, clearly said he wanted to see this on</s>C-SPAN. JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Well, it is simple. This has obviously been very hard so far, and it will be a lot easier than having a big televised event. The White House is just sort of making the case that this issue has already been vetted, vetted for two years. They also realize that, if they did have televised hearings, it would just give the opposition another platform, Anderson.</s>COOPER: But, again, it's just a case of, you say one thing when you are running for office -- and this happens on both sides of the political aisle -- and then something else very different when you are actually leader. From the Republican perspective, you know, there were some backroom deals. Republicans say the Democrats were essentially buying votes, at Senator -- you look at Senator Ben Nelson, whose state of Nebraska ended up with a deal where they -- they don't have to pick up the tab for expanding Medicaid. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a supporter of the public option, his state ends up with a $10 billion grant for community health centers. So, do Republicans have a point here?</s>JOHNS: Well, yes. It's also a question of political realities. It is pretty clear the bill is not going to get significant Republican support. And what the Republicans are pretty much going to miss out on now is the opportunity to score some points and grandstand for the base. And they are still also getting to the point where they can claim the president is breaking that campaign promise. But, to be fair, the president made that promise before the Republicans said they would filibuster the health care bill. So, either way, this gives an opportunity for them to accuse those Democrats one more time of the secret deal-making you were talking about on health care -- win-win for them, pretty much.</s>COOPER: Yes. Nancy Pelosi was asked about this by a reporter, about not having these negotiations on C-SPAN. Here's what she said.</s>REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Well...</s>PELOSI: ... there are a number of things he swore on the campaign trail.</s>COOPER: Yes. I mean, ouch. Why -- why would the speaker sort of whack the president like that?</s>JOHNS: Well, definitely. It sounded like the speaker was having a little fun at the president's expense. And, you know, in a way, she is right. When you make promises about transparency, like Mr. Obama did on the campaign trail, you have got to expect that they could come back and bite you. The administration has admitted, sure, there have been miscalculations all the way through this health care debate, starting with their failure to sort of figure out how militant the opposition would be. A Democratic analyst told me, the White House never really expected to get the kind of public pushback that they have gotten so far.</s>COOPER: So, does the president have lasting damage for being, you know, for transparency before he was against it?</s>JOHNS: Well, sort of short-term/long-term. Short-term, probably not. Fights over congressional procedure generally go absolutely nowhere. And the president and his party are likely going to get what they want when they pass their bill. Long-term damage, though, could be a different story. Clearly, it looks, it appears like the president has gone back on his word. So, if this is about political capital, he spent a lot on this one. The question really is whether he spent more than he's got.</s>COOPER: All right, Joe Johns, appreciate it. Thanks very much. Let's turn again to CNN senior political analyst David Gergen for tonight's insider briefing. David, we should point out, worked for the Clinton administration during its struggle to pass health care reform in the '90s. He's also worked for Republican administrations in the White House. I talked to him earlier.</s>COOPER: David, you went through this with the White House, with the Clinton White House. They were also accused of being -- of not being transparent, of being overly partisan. I mean, what do you think the fallout is going to be for the Obama administration and the Democrats in general this time around?</s>GERGEN: Well, so far, Anderson, they have had a remarkable lack of success in bringing the public along on this health care bill. And it seems to me that is their biggest problem right now. They have got the Democrats pretty much. And I think they are going to be able to resolve a lot of these differences behind closed doors. This whole effort to say, put it on C-SPAN, I sort of don't think is going to go -- make that much difference to the public. What the public is really concerned about is, is this plan going to work? How much money is it going to cost me? How much -- is the government really going to be able to run this right? Am I going to lose my health care? -- the more substantive issues. And, on those issues now, there has been no movement in the polls that I have seen in the president's direction, which means we could have, for the first time in our lifetimes, major social legislation passed in the teeth of public opposition.</s>COOPER: What did they do wrong? I mean, they supposedly had learned the mistakes that had been made under the Clinton administration of trying to do health care. You have President Obama elected saying -- a lot of people saying they want health care reform. They now are on the brink of having some kind of health care reform, and, yet, as you say, this is in the face of public opposition.</s>GERGEN: Anderson, I -- I think that, in -- they may have overlearned the lessons of the Clinton administration by essentially assigning almost all the responsibility for writing the bill, the health care bill, to Congress. It inevitably got drawn into the vortex of what's -- especially in the House, is a lot of partisanship. And, very importantly, the summer was a turning point for this. When those tea parties got started up, and the people started throwing bricks at the health care plan, the White House wasn't quite prepared for that. And they had -- the month of August was a lost month for them. And by the time the president came back, went to the Congress to give that speech, he was able to, I think, staunch the flow of bleeding, but he wasn't able to turn opinion around in his favor. And I -- I think the White House itself now realizes that one of the things they have got to get straightened out here in the future is, -- they -- they're -- they're -- they can be really, really good when they are all together in the White House. But, when they scatter for holidays, as they did in August, and as they did again with the -- with the December bombing by the bomber in Detroit, they tend to be a little slower off the mark, and they can lose some of the momentum.</s>COOPER: Maybe no holidays next year.</s>GERGEN: No.</s>COOPER: We will see. David, thanks -- David Gergen.</s>GERGEN: Thank you.</s>COOPER: Well, still ahead tonight: a 360 dispatch from what appears to be the new front in the war on terror. We will take you inside Yemen for a firsthand look at where and why al Qaeda is thriving, real reporting you will only see on CNN. And a daring escape caught on camera: An inmate breaks free from a chain, runs off -- how it ended coming up.