I was on Meet the Press this morning and was astonished that my fellow panelist Rachel Maddow couldn’t say whether or not she supports the Obama Medicare cuts. You can read about and see part of the exchange here. You’ll notice me — I’m the one asking her insistently to answer the question. She even tried to say that she’s not running for anything so she couldn’t answer, even though she has an hour-long nightly TV program devoted to telling us what she thinks. On Twitter, some Maddow partisans are — of course — accusing me of sexism. Please. Rachel always comes to play and she’d be just as tough on someone dancing away from a very basic question. My guess is that she didn’t want to answer because she realized she would then be admitting that she supports more Medicare cuts on current seniors than does Mitt Romney — you know, the guy who supposedly just blew up his campaign over Medicare. Rachel tried to suggest that, in attacking the Obama Medicare cuts, Republicans are criticizing what they themselves want to do. But as Yuval points out here, the Obama Medicare cuts are the typical crude approach that never works. Republicans want to get savings in the program through competition. If we had had more time to get into it, I would have asked Rachel if she supports limiting the growth of Medicare to slightly above GDP growth plus inflation — the goal for savings of both President Obama and of the allegedly Medicare-hating Paul Ryan.