White House senior adviser David Plouffe showered Mitt Romney with unwanted praise by calling him "the godfather of [President Obama's] health care plan."
He accused the former Massachusetts governor of "running away from the past" and said that having another big fight about health care would not be good for the country.
The Supreme Court is set to review the legality of the President's health care reform law this week; something Plouffe is not worried about. "We're confident in the constitutionality of the health care law," he said.
Also this week, the story of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen year old boy who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch leader in Florida, gained national traction and sparked a discussion about race relations in our country.
In a special roundtable conversation, our group discussed the issue and whether or not the president, as the nation's first African-American president, ought to lead on the issue.
NPR's Michele Norris, creator of The Race Card project, thinks the president has lead on the topic of race. "I think we've probably heard [the president] talk frontally about race more than any other person who has sat in that office," Norris said.
David Brooks thinks the problem lives more on the personal level and how we process people from other groups. invited viewers to a site called Project Implicit to take a test on just that.
"What you'll find, if you're like the vast majority of human beings, is you process people from other groups differently, and you associate them with violence and other things."
On politics, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (who has yet to endorse a candidate) thinks that Romney has the nomination locked up, "unless [he] steps on a landmine."
You can watch the entire program on our website including a one-on-one discussion with Rachel Maddow on her new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power that asks the question: When did America become at peace with a constant state of war?
Read an excerpt of Rachel's book here.
We'll be back next week. If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press.
