Reporting from Washington - The Obama administration tried today to steady itself and its top domestic priority after last week's stunning Massachusetts Senate upset, as a top White House official vowed to move ahead with comprehensive healthcare legislation because "the underlying elements of it are popular and important."
"The president will not walk away from the American people, will not hand them over to the tender mercies of health insurance companies who take advantage" of them, White House senior advisor David Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week."
His comments came as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called on the White House to scrap the legislation and "start over."
Republicans and Democrats continued to spar over the message and effect of Republican Scott Brown's win last week in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts. The loss has shaken Democrats, who fear voter anger over healthcare and the still-struggling economy in November.
Part of the immediate fallout has been increasing opposition to the renomination of Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. But White House officials, along with Senate Democratic and Republican leaders, said today that they believed he would be confirmed. His current term expires Jan. 31.
Brown built his victory on giving Senate Republicans the one additional vote they needed to filibuster the Democrats' healthcare bill. But Axelrod said the message from voters was more complex than outright rejection of the plan.
He noted that Massachusetts had enacted its own major healthcare overhaul law in 2006, and 68% of voters in last week's special election support it, according to a poll by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University's School of Public Health. Brown voted for that legislation in the state legislature.
"I think people want action on healthcare," Axelrod said, admitting some missteps in the yearlong effort to move legislation through Congress. "The foolish thing to do would be for anybody else who supported this to walk away from it, because what's happened is, this thing's been defined by . . . insurance industry propaganda, the propaganda of the opponents, and an admittedly messy process leading up to it."
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