Obama Talks Strategy With Dems
PHILLIPS: President Obama rammed home his message of opportunity for all during a pep talk today to House Democrats. Here he is addressing the Dems' yearly retreat.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: The single most important thing we have to do not just as a party, but as a country, is make sure that there is opportunity for every single person that we are focused every day in this town or in Washington on making sure if you are willing to work hard, if you are willing to take responsibility, you can get ahead.</s>PHILLIPS: Gloria Borger is our chief political analyst. She is with us from Washington. What do you think? Will this be the Democrat's number one theme, going into the election in November, an opportunity for all?</s>GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Absolutely. You know, the president used to spend a lot of time talking about income and equality and now that sort of shifted over because he's gotten some criticism for that and to opportunity for all. So he is going to talk about that in terms of raising the minimum wage and affordable care act in providing health coverage for people who could not get it before, in terms of your retirement with special retirement accounts. So he is sort of lumping this all together to give the Democrats he was talking to today kind of a platform to run on in 2014 without having to directly attach themselves to the president. He hasn't been very popular lately, giving them the Democratic agenda without talking about Barack Obama if they don't want to.</s>PHILLIPS: Those Dems also want to know how to defend against the attacks on Obamacare as well, right?</s>BORGER: They absolutely do. What's interesting in talking to senior Democrats is that they intend to take on the attacks funneling. They are going to say Republicans are going to attack Obamacare and say it doesn't work and the risk pool won't work. You heard the president today tout the fact that they have 3.3 million people who enrolled. But what the Democrats are going to say in the campaign is do you want to take away benefits from people? So you tell all the people with pre-existing conditions who now they don't matter and suddenly they will matter again and all those kids who are insured until the age of 26, under their parents policies that oops you suddenly don't have that anymore. So they are taking the gamble. Even though there have been problems with Obamacare and let's not downplay those because they have been huge, now it may be getting back on track. The government will be regarded as more confident that it was and that they can start touting the benefits and hopefully people's insurance premiums will not rise so that people get sticker shock. That's the big question out there. They are going to defend it very strongly.</s>PHILLIPS: Hopefully, hopefully. That's the quote of the day.</s>BORGER: That's the question.</s>PHILLIPS: Gloria Borger, thanks so much. GM is recalling a million cars and it will be hard to notify owners who have been impacted. We'll explain why next.