Obama 'sucked less than Romney': Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a DEMOCRAT, uncorks a Nebraska-sized tornado on the president, slamming him for health care lies and saying he's not up to saving Social Security

Kerrey, a two-term Senator in the '80s and '90s, is disappointed in the president for risking the health of the U.S. economy over Obamacare

'He had to know he was misleading the audience,' he said of Obama's infamous 'If you like your health care plan' deception

Explains that an even bigger lie Democrats tell is that 'everybody' can get 'high-quality, affordable health care'

Obama, he says, lacks the courage to bring Democrats and Republicans together to save U.S. entitlement programs from bankruptcy

'If he was up to it, he would have done it,' Kerrey tells MailOnline



Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey thinks President Barack Obama, a fellow Democrat, was re-elected in 2012 because he 'sucked less' than former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The Nebraskan straight-talker told MailOnline in an exclusive interview that Obama isn't up to the job of bringing liberals and conservatives to the table to rescue America's slowly choking entitlement programs.

And Obama, he said Wednesday in his Manhattan office, knew full well he was lying when he promised that the Affordable Care Act would allow Americans to keep insurance plans they liked.

'He had to know he was misleading the audience,' Kerrey said quietly, recalling the newly minted president's countless promises as Congress and the public debated his signature health insurance overhaul.

Not your typical Democrat: Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey opened up with MailOnline about his disappointments with his party and his president

'If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan': Kerrey says many politicians suffer from 'self-delusion' that makes it easier to lie to the public

'On the other hand, he may have said it so many times,' he added, 'that the spell-checker wasn't in the room – the spell-checker, the fact-checker – somebody who says, "Excuse me, Mr. President, but I hope you know this..."'

Obama's infamous four-Pinocchio pledges, Kerrey explained, never stood a chance of being fulfilled because there were 'a million people out there with policies that, for one reason or another, run short of the minimum standard. I mean, they bought something cheaper!'



The White House understood the numbers, Kerrey said, and Republicans did a poor job of explaining the basics of the insurance industry to low-information voters.

Insurers, he said the GOP could have made clear, make money by 'not paying claims,' and by making sure that '80 per cent of the people that are buying insurance don't need it. ... So I need young people to sign up. That's what it's all about.'



The worst lie Democrats told about Obamacare, Kerrey reasoned, 'is not "If you want to keep your health care plan..." – the worst one is, "Everybody deserves high-quality, affordable health care."'

'Excuse me? Uh, I don't know if you've heard about the bell curve?' he snarked.



'If I've got 1,000 doctors, 100 are great, and 100 are not so good.'

He outlined the shape of a bell curve with his hands, and then threw them skyward.

'It's absolutely impossible,' he said.

'And affordable? Forget about it.'

Kerry is best known for calling former Sen. Rick Santorum an '***hole' in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and for calling Bill Clinton an 'unusually good liar'

Kerry has kept his oar in foreign policy, helming the New School for many years in New York City where he rubbed elbows with foreign leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L)

When the Affordable Care Act met its most vigorous Republican opposition in late 2009, the U.S. economy was still floundering and the business community's eyes were focused on GDP growth, not a new set of health-benefit mandates.



'I wouldn't have done health care,' Kerrey said.'I think the big mistake was ... to say, "Whew! We've got the stimulus done, okay, the economy's going to come bouncing back in 12 months – let's do health care,"' he explained.

'Only the economy didn't come bouncing back.'

'We're teetering on the edge of going out of business through most of 2009,' Kerrey recalled. 'And I think you need to just keep driving, driving, driving on the economy, and make it as bipartisan as possible.'

Life-long pol: In 1992 then-Sen. Kerry made an ultimately failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination that eventually went to Bill Clinton

Obama compounded his rhetorical mistakes with political ones, he said, by agreeing to ditch a proposal allowing Americans to buy into the Medicare system the way they would buy a policy from a private insurer.

'"And now you want to do health care," Kerrey imagined Democratic pols telling Obama near the end of his first year in office. 'It's okay, you're going to do health care. I haven't talked you out of it, Mr. President. [But] don't give on the public option.'

Even if the Obamacare law had died in Congress, he insisted, the politics of holding fast to the public option would have favored Democrats since Medicare is among the federal government's most universally popular programs.

'I would have been much better off campaigning saying, "My opponent does not want you to have the right to buy into Medicare,"' Kerrey mused.

In his Washington, D.C. days, the former Nebraska governor often stood out as the rare Democrat who publicly lamented U.S. entitlement programs' seemingly unstoppable march to insolvency.

'We're robbing from the future to pay for the past,' he told MailOnline on Wednesday. 'We just are.'

'And we're shoveling more and more money to people over the age of 65.'

A lack of political will and a healthy dose of electoral fear, he said, has virtually guaranteed a climate inside the U.S. Capitol where no one will take the first step toward cutting benefits or ratcheting up the national retirement age.

'It's the one thing "R"s and "D"s can agree on,' Kerrey explained. 'Don't screw with seniors.'

Kerrey is a decorated Navy SEAL veteran who has grappled with issues of conscience: He once acknowledged that a Vietnam combat mission for which he was awarded the Bronze Star caused the deaths of 13 to 20 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children

The result, he said, is a set of financial chains clamped tightly on future generations.

During an ill-fated 2012 run to recapture his old Senate seat, Kerrey totaled up Uncle Sam's spending on Medicare, Social Security, and the long-term care portion of Medicaid, and divided it by the number of Americans in the work force.

'All workers,' he insisted, 'including government workers! And the source of their contribution is entirely tax money! But take all of it.'

The cost, he determined, 'is $15,000 per year, per worker.'

Once a politician ... Kerrey tried to win back his old Senate seat in 2012, only to be beaten in the primary by Deb Fischer, who ultimately won the general election

Asked how to break the congressional logjam, Kerrey thought for a moment and said, softly, 'It takes a president. It takes a president.'

Is Barack Obama that president? Kerrey stayed silent but shook his head.

'I'm shaking my head "no,"' he acknowledged, finally.

'If he was up to it, he would have done it. He can't run for re-election.'

Another of Obama's failings, according to Kerrey, is an inflated sense of Americans' appetite for programs to correct what the White House calls 'income inequality,' through new taxes and other income-shifting initiatives that transfer wealth from the rich to the poor.

The president's re-election 17 months ago wasn't a mandate to conduct class warfare, he said.

'After the 2012 election, what the president needed was somebody to say, "Mr. President, I'm thrilled you won. You stand for all the things I support. But honestly, you won this election because you sucked less than Romney."'

Americans, Kerrey believes, lost patience equally with the GOP and the White House during the kabuki theater of fiscal cliff, congressional 'super committee,' budget sequester and tense partial government shutdown.

Obama stuck to his guns at the time, holding out for a 'balanced' budget-gap fix that included new taxes on upper-income Americans.

'Everybody since 1913 has had a mandate to raise taxes on the rich,' Kerrey scoffed at his party's leader. 'This isn't something that you've earned, something that's unique.'

Coplorful: As governor of Nebraska, Kerrey dated actress Debra Winger for more than two years, telling reporters that she 'swept me off my foot' (He lost part of one leg in the Vietnam war.)

Obama isn't the first president to make that kind of miscalculation – Kerrey calls it 'self-delusion' – while in office.

He joked that geneticists will one day soon 'find a base pair' of genes that predisposes people to deception.

And he predicted, half-seriously, that 'they'll find another base pair which say that politicians have 25 per cent more capacity for – you call it lying, I call it self-delusion.'

Bill Clinton, Kerrey once famously hinted, may have been that genetic trait's Darwinian ideal.

'He's an unusually good liar. Unusually good,' the Nebraskan said in 1994.

He told MailOnline that he 'actually intended it as a compliment,' although Clinton 'didn't take it that way.'

Obama's lies, he said, stem from the same human flaw.

'That self-delusion moment comes in a single declaratory sentence,' Kerrey said, which is, "If they just get to know me, they'll vote for me."'