0 >> urgency to fix the healthcare.gov website is growing. it faces growing criticism from conservative cry babies. obama care's most outside wart and awkward opponent, senator ted cruz, gave a speech to a tea party crowd in his hometown of houston monday night. during the speech, he highlighted the website's rough rollout in a manner most foul. >> you know the nigerian e-mail scammers? they have been a lot less active lately. because they have all been hired to run the obama care website. wow, enough of the nigerian nightmare already. the joke was clearly cruz's attempt to brush off criticism for his own failed effort to defund obama care. the law is getting stronger support from the public, despite technical issues from the website enrollment. a new "washington post" abc news poll shows obama care continues to be divided among party lines. but there is a slight uptick from 42% in september to 49% in october. president obama acknowledged obama care's rollout has been rocky, but defended it. >> there's no sugar-coating it. the website has been too slow. people have been getting stuck during the application process. and i think it's fair to say that nobody is more frustrated by that than i am. >> ted cruz's preel school level cracks didn't stop with the nigerian comment. he tweeted the picture of a welcome home cake he received from his supporters. the green eggs and ham themed cake pays tea party homage to cruz's 21-hour floor speech where he argued americans did not like green eggs and ham and they not like obama care either. dr. seuss wouldn't have dug you, brother cruz, at all. here's what cruz went on to say at his homecoming. >> it was unfortunate. that many senate republicans made the decision not to stand united with the house republicans. but i'll tell you, i'm hopeful with a little bit of time and reflection that senate republicans will decide to come together again. i would love to see republican unity. you see all of us stand together against this train wreck that is obama care. >> ah, tisk tisk, tisk tisk. senator cruz is strongly mistaken if he thinks people will stand with the republican party. americans do not like it when the government shuts itself down. they don't like it when political gridlock costs the country $24 billion. $24 billion. they don't like hundreds of thousands of federal workers losing their wages. new polling numbers show americans are extremely unhappy with the way the federal government works or fails to work. the abc news "washington post" poll shows americans' approval of congress is at a 40-year low. these wounds to congress are self inflicted. it's a result of budget brinksmanship. blame for the shutdown is being focused on the republican party, which is at least -- at its least popular level in data since 1984. on the flip side, president obama's favorability is hardly in stellar shape. but he appears mostly unharmed. is approval is essentially the same now as a month ago before the shutdown. and the furlough notices flew. get your cell phones out. i want to know what you think. tonight's question, should democrats remind americans that every republican is just like ted cruz? text a for yes, b for no to 676 it 22 or go to ed.msnbc.com. i'll bring you the results later in the show. congressman matthew cartwright from pennsylvania joins me now. congressman, do republicans care that their image is in such disastrous shape? >> oh, i think they do. i think they have to cringe when they hear things like what you quoted senator cruz saying at the top of the show. i mean, jokes about nigerian scamme scammers. you know, i wonder how much off-the-cuff that really was, and how calculated it was to appeal to senator cruz's base. many of whom believe that the president is from africa. but, yeah, in answer to your question, i think that republicans really have to be recoiling. the mainstream, you know, i call them country club republicans. the center of the road type republicans. they must be at their wits ends when they try to think about how to deal with senator cruz. but you get this. you know, you see this happening when -- when a law like the affordable care act becomes pretty obvious that it's going to take root, that it's going to work, that it's going to be a part of the american legal structure. it's the further and further right wing fringes that continue to attack it, as the other attacks melt away. >> sure. well, with all due respect to you as a political figure and other politicians, we know that many politicians are poll-driven, number-crunching empirical number verifiers, whether up and down. so why is it the poll numbers that are steadily sinking aren't impressing the republicans with the fact that the american public just doesn't like what they're doing. >> oh, i think a lot of them are paying attention to it. in fact, we saw during the shutdown a lot of the centrist republicans were actually coming out and saying in public that they would be for a clean cr. opening up the government again with no strings attached. but you hear -- you know, the continual rain of quotations from the right-wingers. i have one here, michael eric, that i want to read, speaking of senator cruz. quote, never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery to enslave workers and to prevent any possibility of employers providing work for the people. i mean, that kind of over the top, overblown rhetoric we have seen. but that wasn't from senator cruz. that was from republican congressman john taber in 1935, and he was talking about social security at the time. >> wow. the parallels are pretty frightening there, as dr. king would say. what is it about the whistle politics that you referred to earlier in regard to ted cruz about the nigerians now on the payroll, basically trying to work on the website? why is it that they continue to exploit the impolicit racial passions deeply embedded as opposed to playing to the higher road where we can all come together? >> i don't know that they're doing that, michael eric. but i will say that i suspect it. and whether they're doing it on purpose, it does appeal to the people who think that way. there are, you know, a lot of fairly backward people that are a part of the base of people like senator cruz. and comments like that just are right up their alley. >> yeah. well, we're going to talk about a judge later on, a republican, who you might have heard about. who said, look, enough is enough. you know, are there going to be other republicans joining him who say, look, this is too extreme. i'm here as a republican, i want to stand behind principles that can be morally defensible, but this kind of stuff that they're doing now is playing to a base -- constituency in their party which really goes against the best interests, even of the republican party, much less to say the entire nation. >> well, as i say, i think -- i see it as kind of the last great gas gasp of the right wing against the affordable care act. it's sort of to be expected. the moderates fall away from the attack, you know, after 44 times repealing it. they got tired of that. they were bound to. the rest of us already are. but the right wingers stay at it. and that's what's going on here. >> well, do you think that the moderates are going to be able to gain any ground in terms of trying to regain the authority within their own party? i just don't believe that john boehner cottons too well to the right wing of his party, even though he defers to them with regular intensity. >> i see a great irony here. somebody like senator cruz or folks who are in blood-red districts who can go on with nonsense like this, they're not in trouble. they're not going to be in trouble. the people who are going to be in trouble are the ones who are guilty by association, and we're talking about the moderate republicans who are in closer districts who stand a reasonable chance of losing because of their association with the republican party, and what it got up to with this ridiculous shutdown we just went through. >> right. well, look, finally, tell us behind the scenes what's really going on, what some of these moderate republicans you know who are really, you know, just turned off by what they are, you know, right wing brothers are doing. you're there behind the scenes. tell us, is there really a ground swrel for some kind of simpatico for moderate democrats, moderate republicans, to move this country forward? >> you know, michael eric, i want you to know, i get along with all of my brothers and sister members of congress, and most of them are great company, nice people to be with. it's just that when -- some of the hard line right wingers get up to a microphone you kind of just have to put your hands over your ears when you hear the things they say. but, yes, there are a lot of moderate republicans that i think really want to save their party. it sounds like senator mcconnell is desperately trying to save the party. and i think the speaker of the house is really at his wits end, and has been for some time with how to deal with this situation. >> no doubt. well, all i can say is god bless you up there, my friend. congressman matt cartwright, thank you so much for your time tonight. >> my pleasure. remember to answer tonight's question at the bottom of the screen and share your thoughts on twitter at ed show. and on facebook. i want to know what you think. coming up, a fox conspiracy theory that will take your breath away. plus, a texas judge does the texas two-step away from the republican party. when we made our commitment to the gulf, bp had two big goals: help the gulf recover and learn from what happened so we could be a better, safer energy company. i can tell you - safety is at the heart of everything we do. we've added cutting-edge technology, like a new deepwater well cap and a state-of-the-art monitoring center, where experts watch over all drilling activity twenty-four-seven. and we're sharing what we've learned, so we can all produce energy more safely. our commitment has never been stronger. mmm! this is delicious katie. it's not bad for canned soup, right? 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