Transcript: National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

WILL: Just a moment, now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, here's a blue sky idea. If you've got $100 billion in the bailout fund, why not use that as a down payment?

REICH: Well, try to sell that to Congress. I think that $100 billion, or it actually looks like it's going to be $135 billion, that's going to be eaten up, it's going to be eaten up by municipalities, it's going to be eaten up by Fannie and Freddie, there are many places where that's going to go.

ROBERTS: But the truth is when we look at these enormous deficits with the exception of this aberrant bailout situation. When you look at them, you're talking about health care. It's Medicare, it's Medicaid for the states, and it's health care costs for the businesses.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Which is why the president emphasizes cost control all the time.

ROBERTS: All the time. And there are in both houses of Congress proposals to have commissions, now sometimes these work and sometimes they don't, but to really take a look at Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And being objected to ...

DONALDSON: Speak to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the two Democratic leaders oppose the idea of commissions and the president is not getting behind because he wants to do health care. He is not getting behind this idea.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He is not getting behind the commission right now but let me press that point. Because the administration believes the stars are aligning for health care this summer. They think everything is coming together. What I can't figure out and I ask a lot of people about it, I still don't see the five, six, seven Republican votes minimum needed ...

ROBERTS: One of the things, one of the stars that is aligning is that the Senate has now invested a great deal of time and effort in this question. And as you well know, that takes on a life of its own. They don't want to have done this much work on something and then have it go to waste.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So even if they're opposed, senators like Chuck Grassley and Bob Bennett ...

ROBERTS: And there are ways to get to them. The question of getting from here to there ...

DONALDSON: In reconciliation, of course, you just have to have it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You just have to get to 50 votes. Realistically, that's going to be very hard to do. The administration even though they're allowing says they don't want it to go down to that.

WILL: The big principle obstacle is the president, because there is a bill in the Senate, it's the Wyden-Bennett bill, Wyden, liberal Democrat for Oregon, Bennett, Utah, the reddest state in the union, conservative Republican, they have a proposal that gives the left a mandate. Everyone is required to buy health insurance. It gives the right to fact that they will with their tax credits and tax subsidies and all the rest buy it from private providers. You could get 70 votes for that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it also includes the John McCain proposal to take away some of the tax deduction for employer provided health care.

REICH: Yes. That's the fight.

WILL: But I think if you got it to the floor without the so- called public option, that is the government competing inherently unfairly against these private companies.

REICH: That is -- that is the key to making this work, according to many Democrats. To have a public option.

ROBERTS: One of the things that's happening now is that as a result of even having that on the table, the health insurers are saying, wait, wait, regulate me, regulate me. Please, regulate me. Stop me before I sin again.

DONALDSON: Let's talk about politics. Can the president who has temperized (ph) now a lot of his positions, but can he give up on a public option?

WILL: Sure.

ROBERTS: I think he already has.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to move on to something else. I think Cokie was talking about the insurers. I think this week insurance companies and other health care providers who were very much against the Clinton health care proposal come around and say they're ready to get to the table right now on this.

ROBERTS: As long as there's not the public option. That's what they don't want to have out there.

REICH: Well, the parallels to 1994 are in everybody's mind. A jobless recovery combined with a question of whether you get health care. Remember what happened to Clinton. And also every Republican in town is dreaming of 1994. Could we do it again? Could we destroy health care with a jobless recovery and make the Obama administration look bad.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not if the insurance companies say they want to play, and if they do ...

WILL: I want to move on to one final number, more than 80 percent of Americans are very satisfied with their health care plan.

ROBERTS: They're not satisfied with the cost, however. And the fact that insurers get to make the decision about whether you get treated or not. And doctors have reached the point where they have really had it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That is the debate right there.

REICH: Isn't it amazing? We are now talking about health care when we are no longer talking about the economy. We have already moved on to the next ... STEPHANOPOULOS: They go together. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Edwards was out talking this week about her husband, his campaign, and the affair that could've doomed it had it been doing better.

She went on Oprah this week to talk about it. I think it had a lot of people scratching their heads. But at one point we learned that Elizabeth Edwards found out about it two days after John Edwards announced he was running for president. Then remember three months later there was a recurrence of her cancer. And Oprah asks her, why didn't you get out then?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OPRAH WINFREY, TALK SHOW HOST: I'm surprised because I think that would have been your -- that was a way out. That was a way out.

ELIZABETH EDWARDS, JOHN EDWARDS WIFE: It was.

WINFREY: Considering the fact that you already knew that there had been an affair.

EDWARDS: I knew that there'd been a night. That's all I knew.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now, Cokie, Elizabeth Edwards is an enormously sympathetic and appealing, but I think a lot of people wondering. What is this about?

ROBERTS: I'm very puzzled. I'm an admirer of Elizabeth Edwards. I've felt all along that people had their nerve to criticize her for staying in the race when she knew that her cancer had recurred, all that. I think that people get to make their own decisions about these things.

This one just puzzles me because of her children. I don't understand how -- how they get through this public exposure without being hurt.

DONALDSON: It's Elizabeth Edwards' revenge. And some people say exactly right. She has it coming to be able to do this. But the time to have done it in some senses was when she was standing up by her husband, knowing about this, whatever part of it she knew about, saying, you'd make a great president and following him along. Why was that? Why did she do that?

Remember George W. Bush had a press secretary, Scott McClellan, who stood in the press room and carried the water right down the line and then wrote a book denouncing everything that he had done, saying he was terrible. There is something smarmy about that.

REICH: Well, I -- you know, I keep asking myself, what is the great public tragedy here? And the answer I come up with is the loss -- despite his, you know, personal indiscretions of a man who was almost the single voice in the campaigns for the poor, an advocate for the poor, somebody who really was concerned about it, I'm sorry that his public persona is over. His public office is over.

WILL: The public -- the tragedy would have been if he had won. I mean, suppose the man had -- and you can reconfigure Iowa in some ways since he takes off and anything can happen. Suppose he got the Democratic nomination...

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, that wasn't going to happen. I've actually talked to a lot of former Edwards staffers about this, and it's amazing to me, I mean, they had their doubts. They believed up until December that this was not true. By December and January, several people in his circle started to think, you know what, this is probably true, this may be...

ROBERTS: You mean, the affair.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The affair. It may be true. And they actually had something of a doomsday strategy. Several of them had gotten together and basically said, if it looks like he is going to win, we're going to sabotage the campaign, we're going to blow it up.

ROBERTS: Oh my goodness.

(CROSSTALK)

ROBERTS: And why do that? Why not just get out of the campaign or why not go public in the first place?

STEPHANOPOULOS: The answer they give is that in December and January, he probably wasn't going to win. Why bring everybody through it? But then if he were, they were saying they're Democrats first and they would have found the way to get the information out so that he was not the nominee.

DONALDSON: But if they let it sabotage the campaign, it looked like it might be successful, for whatever reason, the political reason, it would...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: But their point would be that it wasn't going to be successful.

DONALDSON: Well, then, why not get out early? I agree with Cokie, there is some moral imperative here that bothers me.

ROBERTS: And also, it could have had an impact on the eventual nominee. Now I don't buy into this theory. But there is a theory that if John Edwards had not been in there that it might have been to the benefit of Hillary Clinton. Now, I -- you know, I think -- I think it was Barack Obama's year. But I...

DONALDSON: Yes, but in Iowa, two-thirds of white people voted for someone other than Barack Obama because they split the vote, Edwards and Clinton.

ROBERTS: I mean, so if you say his staffers were going to sabotage him...

STEPHANOPOULOS: They had suspicions, right.

ROBERTS: ... eventually, they -- I mean, they really should have done it up front then. But the arrogance of all of this is just so overwhelming to me. I mean, to get into a presidential campaign while performing in such a manner is just, you know, I deserve it, it's all about me. And it's just, blech.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And did he really think that he could make it all the way through? We're just about out of time here.

Let's take one more look at President Obama last night talking about Hillary in his stand-up act.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: We had been rivals during the campaign. But these days we could not be closer. In fact, the second she got back from Mexico, she pulled me into a hug and gave me a big kiss.

(LAUGHTER)

OBAMA: Told me I had better get down there myself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(LAUGHTER)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now, not all presidents clear the bar in their first outing at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I think Obama probably did last night.

WILL: Absolutely. I mean, he has good writers, he has good deliver, what more do you need?

DONALDSON: What I liked about it was all of the zingers were -- some in the Gridiron tradition, they singed but didn't burn. They weren't mean. What I saw of the public prints master -- mistress of ceremony, I can't say the same thing.

I think Rush Limbaugh should be condemned for whatever meaning he had when he said he wanted the president to fail. And you can jab at him for that, but she apparently crossed the line as far as I'm concerned.

REICH: You know, one of the great strengths of this president, I don't think he has a mean bone in his body. I think he is the center of serenity with regard to the hurricanes that are going around the economy and everything else.

And I think he is a genuinely, genuinely nice person, something this town doesn't quite know what to do with.

(CROSSTALK)

DONALDSON: He had better develop a toughness. You don't have to call it meanness.

ROBERTS: But he hasn't been a funny person. And so this was -- this was a test to see if he could be...

STEPHANOPOULOS: It has now become part of the job. You guys can continue talking about this in the green room.

And for political updates all week long, follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

END