Carney Called Out: What if Bush Told ‘Keep Your Plan’ Lie?

WALLACE: "Jay, it's Nicolle and before you were famous for being the White House press secretary, you were famous in the halls of the West Wing as the Washington bureau chief I think for Time. And I can picture you in those days which you would have, you would have walked into the West Wing and probably sat down in Dan Bartlett's office, which was right next to mine. And you would have taken us apart. If George W. Bush had said for five years, 'If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. If you love your doctor, don't worry, you can keep him.' And if that had turned out to be untrue the way those two things turned out to be untrue for your boss, you would have taken us apart. And that magazine article would have dictated the narrative that our White House would have to fight against for weeks. So, how--"
CARNEY: "--Well yeah, I think--"
WALLACE: "--are you dealing with that?"
CARNEY: "--You are giving me a little too much credit. But look, I think, look, we are, we're taking heat because the website hasn't worked and we're taking heat because we gotta get this right. And that's fine--"
WALLACE: "--But what about that statement?--"
CARNEY: "--Reporters ought to do their job--"
WALLACE: "--I mean, listen, the website, fairly, is not your domain. You are not in charge of the IT department of the White House, but you do have a big role to play in the words that the president utters and in making sure that not just the White House press corps, which you used to be an important member of, but the public believes your boss. And you know as well as I do when the public stops believing in your boss, [unintelligible] rendered impotent. So how do you make the public believe your boss when the two things that were said to reassure people, that they could keep their health plans and they could keep their doctors, turn out to be not true?"
CARNEY: "Well, first of all, Nicolle, obviously I take issue with your characterization of what the president said. It is true that the Affordable Care Act as written grandfathers in anybody who had an individual insurance plan on the individual market in place prior to the passage of the law. The problem which has always been a problem is that insurance companies in that wild wild west of the insurance market, the individual market could arbitrarily cancel those plans and change those plans and downgrade those plans at any time. And many of them have, of course--"
WALLACE: "--But Jay--"
CARNEY: "--Over the last several years. So--"
WALLACE: "--It's not like you guys are innocent and unknowing bystanders of what the insurance industry was gonna do.--"
CARNEY: "--Sure.--"
WALLACE: "--You wrote a sweeping health care law. You obviously knew what the insurance company and the insurance industry said it was going to do. The public is right to feel misled by the president."