Jeff Greenfield, Voice of Reason

Jeff Greenfield said he didn’t mind that Imus was running a few minutes late this morning. But his immediate observation—that Imus and Charles, dressed in matching beige jackets this morning, resembled an early 1950s singing group—indicated otherwise.

And Greenfield, a senior political correspondent for CBS News, would know; some of the most fun he’s had recently in television, he said, was doing a piece for CBS Sunday Morning on Anthony from the Doo Wop group Little Anthony and The Imperials.

“They let me sing with him for the promo,” Greenfield bragged. That promo, however, never aired. “There’s just so much embarrassment you can take.”

Imus was too distracted this morning to worry about Greenfield’s poor vocals; following his chat with Sean Hannity just one hour ago, Imus was terrified about almost everything.

Luckily, Greenfield was a sea of calm, saying remains to be seen just how widespread this panic is in America. “The intensity of the anger in the Tea Party movement is real, no question about it,” he said. “But when people say, ‘we, the people,’ there’s another mechanism we have to deciding what ‘we, the people’ think, and those are elections.”

He suspects the Democrats will face some trouble come fall, but just how much remains intangible. “This is one of those things where the heat and the light are not necessarily the same,” Greenfield said, adding that Democrats, fresh off their health care victory, are feeling a renewed sense of confidence in their guy Obama.

As one of the more reasonable guests on this program, Imus wondered if Greenfield thinks, as many have alleged, that this health care bill is the first attempt by the government to take over this country’s entire health care apparatus.

“No,” Greenfield said flatly. “There are a lot of issues about this health care plan that raise some real eyebrows, but government takeover isn’t one of them.”

Not only does Obama’s plan closely resemble the one Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts, but it has roots in a Nixon administration that was looking for an alternative to Senator Ted Kennedy’s proposed single-payer plan in the 1970s.

Obama’s plan also “works so hard not to be a government plan,” said Greenfield, that it could wind up producing less coverage and doing little to control costs. It also bears no resemblance to the plans of countries where the government actually does run health care.

Greenfield feels that some of the anti-Obama sentiment in the country has more to do with him coming from a big city, having an “odd name,” and embodying a fiercely liberal agenda than it does with his race.

“It adds to the fear that something’s going on that we don’t understand,” he said, as police sirens screeched in the background, the cops hot on Greenfield’s trail.

“Maybe this is the government trying to suppress a radio show,” he joked. Or maybe they recovered that tape of your sing-along with Little Anthony.

-Julie Kanfer