Broadcasting live today from the Health Action 2010 conference put on by Families USA.

Thom Hartmann: And welcome back, Thom Hartmann here with you. And Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is here with me, she’s the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, the chief of the institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland right now. The author of the book, "Failing America’s Faithful". I think the last two times you’ve been on the program, Kathleen, we’ve been talking about that.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Yeah.

Thom Hartmann: But you’re also, you know, a member of one of America’s preeminent political families and certainly an astute political observer, a politician and a former lieutenant governor of Maryland. Your thoughts on last night's State Of The Union address by President Obama?

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: I thought the President did a terrific job, I thought he spoke very, very well. But I think the issue is not how well you speak to the members of Congress but to really how do you get something done. And I think the really, the first order of business is, as he said, to make sure that we get jobs and that we reduce this terribly high unemployment rate. But I’d like to talk just briefly about the importance of also getting the healthcare bill passed. We have a very great opportunity to get it passed. It’s been passed by the Senate, it’s been passed by the House. Never before in American history, it's been tried for over 100 years to get healthcare passed. We’re here with Families USA urging the members of Congress to get healthcare passed. There’s so many stories, Americans going bankrupt because of lack of healthcare. 45,000 people die each year ‘cause they don’t have healthcare coverage.

Thom Hartmann: Right, no we well know the story.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: You know all the facts, the question is, we, go ahead.

Thom Hartmann: I see two scenarios where this can happen. The easiest and frankly less friendly to me, is that the House simply vote for the Senate bill, pass it, send it to the President’s desk, that’s the end of the discussion. I have a feeling if they were inclined to do that it would have happened yesterday so that the President could have bragged about it last night ‘cause he sure wanted to. The other is for the Senate, absent a House vote on the Senate bill, for the Senate to pass via reconciliation so that they can tell Evan Bayh who came out last night and said he would still filibuster any effort to adopt the changes that happen in reconciliation because he thinks that in the future the Republicans will work with us if we don’t play hardball with them now on healthcare. I mean this is how out of touch some of these idiots are, frankly. Pardon my language. But you know, Evan Bayh, the Mary Landrieus of the world, the Ben Nelsons of the world. With reconciliation the President does not need nine Democrats or eight Democrats.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Exactly.

Thom Hartmann: So the solution it seems to me would be for the Senate, right now, to pass through the reconciliation process changes to the bill, their own bill, changes to their own bill, with only 51 votes and then have the House vote on both of those pieces, even though it’s all out of order. Because the only order that matters is the order in which the President signs them, and then put them on the President’s desk. Is there any serious discussion in Washington DC about doing that?

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: I’ve heard that’s exactly what people are doing, thinking of doing. That congressman Pelosi believes that she has the votes to approve the Senate bill and that the Senate will have a reconciliation process where you need only 51 votes. I think that has to be done. I think for any Democrat to go back to the people of the United States and say we spent a year trying to get healthcare passed, and failed, is an enormous embarrassment. It says you can’t even govern when you have majority.

Thom Hartmann: Right. And the Senate could actually vote on the reconciliation of their own bill, which hasn’t even been approved by the House yet, and it doesn’t matter because it’s, because ultimately it will be.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: I haven’t heard that. I do, I believe, but you sound like you know, that you have to actually have the House vote and then you…

Thom Hartmann: You don’t, no, I know it for a fact, I know it for a fact. The Senate can vote on anything and in any order. It doesn’t matter. The order that matters is the order in which the President signs them. He, 30 seconds before he signs the reconciliation bill he’d have to sign the original Senate bill and then he signs the reconciliation bill. But the Senate could have a reconciliation vote on a bill that hasn’t been approved by the House. And that’s how it should be done because that way the House will trust the Senate. And that will bring along the House progressive caucus.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Yes. So that’s what needs to be done. And it needs to be done quickly so that the rest of our conversation is spent on how to have new jobs, green jobs, jobs that will be, that you can manufacture products that can be exported. I liked very much last night when the President said we want to be able to double the number of exports. There are too many Americans who are not at work creating things and you cant just live on finance which is what we’ve been doing for too long.

Thom Hartmann: But part of that problem is that in India the average import tariff for foreign products into India is 40%. India has a law that makes it a felony for a person to own more than two retail stores. There are 12 million mom and pop shops in India. Wal-Mart has one store because by law they can only have one store. China, the average import tariff into China is 22%. Our average import tariff as a result of Reagan, Bush, Bill Clinton, WTO is now 2.1 %. We’re saying to the rest of the world, you can sell here for free but if we try to sell anywhere else, they’re gonna charge us at the border. We’ve got to change our trade policy.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Well yeah, absolutely. But we’ve got to make sure that the others change their trade policy as well. But I like the fact that that’s an area of concern and that he highlighted it because we have lost so many manufacturing jobs.

Thom Hartmann: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, what are your thoughts on the apparent battle within the administration, between the Clinton faction, the Rahm Emanuel kind of DLC new Democrat faction, which President Obama has declared himself a member of, and the progressives in you know, he’s now talking, he’s using Paul Volcker’s language. The progressives. Where do you see that shaking out?

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Well I think that, you know, that’s not necessarily how, I thought that the Clinton administration themselves had many, many factions within them.

Thom Hartmann: They certainly did, yeah.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: But I do think that there’s been a real come to Jesus moment in understanding that you can’t give the bankers all this money, allow them to have these huge bonuses, and then say to Main Street, we’ve done the right thing. And I think that that’s been very, very helpful. We do not need all these really bright people going into finance. We need them to go into manufacturing. So we need to reduce the amount of money that is in the financial sect…

Thom Hartmann: If we just rolled back the Reagan tax cuts so that anybody making over 2.3 million bucks gets hit with a 74% income tax bracket, they’re gonna stop giving out those kind of bonuses.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: And that would be very, very helpful. Because really what you want is you want the brightest, the best and the brightest to go into…

Thom Hartmann: To go into medicine.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Into medicine or into virology, into green technology, not into finance which is just basically playing with money around, it’s not actually creating something.

Thom Hartmann: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Thanks so much. Her book, “Failing America’s Faithful.” Thank you.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Hey Thom, good to be with you.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.