Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dick Gephardt was on Meet the Press Sunday, where host Tim Russert asked him if the country could afford both Gephardt’s health care plan as well as human missions to the Moon and Mars. Gephardt’s response was not surprising, for those who followed his previous statements on the issue…
MR. RUSSERT: Can you afford your health-care plan and also support sending a man to the moon or potentially Mars?
REP. GEPHARDT: I think we’ve got a space program. We better figure out the way it is. We haven’t figured out how to pay for the space station and how all that’s going to work. I think we also need to pay attention to what’s going on here in states like Iowa. We got people losing their health care, people losing their jobs. And we’ve got a huge deficit, as you say. I’m really questioning whether or not we need to be talking about a Mars flight when we need to be figuring out how to get everybody covered with health insurance.
MR. RUSSERT: So if President Bush put that in place and you were re-elected, you’d scrap it?
REP. GEPHARDT: I’d rethink the space program because–I’m a big advocate of the space program. I’ve always voted for it. But we are in a situation where we need to pay attention to the middle class of this country and people trying to get in the middle class. They’ve got problems out there and we need to pay attention to those problems.
Gephardt, as regular readers recall, made similar statements a week earlier on CBS’s Face the Nation, but did supply a little additional commentary here.
