Presidential biographer Edmund Morris delivered one of the more, well, colorful lines on this week's Sunday morning shows. 
 
 On CBS's "Face the Nation," host Bob Schieffer, anchoring an authors roundtable discussion with the likes of Bob Woodward and Arianna Huffington, kept engaging the panelists in discussion about how America’s Founding Fathers would have felt about today’s political climate. 
 
 “What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics, Edmund?” 
 
 “You keep asking these presentist questions,” said the Kenyan-born, British-accented historian. “As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in 'My Cousin Vinny,' ‘That’s a b------t question!'” Morris said, relishing the word as network censors bleeped him out. 
 
 “You cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today,” he continued. “I can only say that what he represented in his time is what we hope for in our presidents now, what we look for in our presidents now and what we’re increasingly disappointed by. He understood foreign culture, recognized the dignity of the United States. He was forceful yet dignified. And what I really feel these days is, we’ve become such an insular people.” 
 
 Morris went on to criticize the American people, who he said “are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.” 
 
 Schieffer tried to cut to a commercial break, but Huffington interjected, “And then I can try to defend my fellow Americans after the break,” she said, before the segment ended. 
 
 Morris is the author of a trilogy about Theodore Roosevelt as well as a biography of Ronald Reagan. 
 
 Correction: An earlier version of this item incorrectly quoted Morris (and "My Cousin Vinny"). ||||| Democrats rushed Monday to put out a fire set the day before by surrogates who declined to answer head-on whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago. 
 
 Asked on NBC’s “Today” show whether Americans were better off, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter was definitive. 
 
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 reset Cutter adds to 'better off' debate 
 
 “Absolutely,” said Cutter, listing statistics about rising unemployment and declining wages in the six months before Obama took office. “By any measure, the country has moved forward over the last four years. It might not be as fast as some people would have hoped, [but] the president agrees with that, he knows we need to do more.” 
 
 “The answer is we are better off,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, chairman of the Democratic National Convention, said on CBS’s “This Morning.” “We were losing 800,000 jobs a month, we lost 3.5 million jobs, the mortgage lending crisis was creating a foreclosure problem that we hadn’t seen since probably the Great Depression … We’ve had 29 consecutive months of growth in private-sector jobs… So the answer is yes, we are better off.” 
 
 “Absolutely,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse on CNN’s “Starting Point.” “The truth is, though, is that the American people know, we were literally a plane that was heading, the trajectory was towards the ground when the president took over. He got the stick and pulled us up out of that decline.” 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Full coverage of the Democratic convention) 
 
 These answers differ from Gov. Martin O’Malley’s (D-Md.) response to the same question Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Asked whether Americans were better off, O’Malley replied, “No, but that’s not the question of this election.” 
 
 Even O’Malley changed his response Monday morning, saying on CNN, “We are clearly better off as a country, because we are now creating jobs rather than losing jobs.” 
 
 Also on Sunday, both Senior White House adviser David Plouffe and Obama strategist David Axelrod declined to directly answer whether Americans were better off than they were four years ago. 
 
 Plouffe reverted to talking points about job creation and the failings of the Bush administration, prompting ABC “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos to say, “You still can’t say yes.” 
 
 On “Fox News Sunday,” Axelrod merely said that Americans are now in a “better position” than they would have been in if the Republicans were in office. 
 
 The Romney campaign seized on the comments to make the point that Americans are not doing very well under the president. 
 
 “They made a political calculation that they have to say that things are better today than they were four years ago,” Fehrnstrom said in an interview on Fox News. “They are siding with the 30 percent of Americans who believe we are on the right track. But by siding with them they risk alienating the majority of people in this country that know from their own experience that things are not better.” 
 
 “The middle class has been crushed under President Obama, but he doesn’t seem to get it. Gas prices have doubled, incomes have dropped, poverty is headed toward fifty-year highs, and chronic unemployment is at unprecedented levels. But the Obama campaign now has a clear message for Americans – you’re doing well, you just don’t know it. Americans deserve a president who understands we’re not better off and has a plan to fix it,” added Amanda Henneberg, a Romney spokesperson. 
 
 Correction: an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
– Face the Nation got a little excited today, with host Bob Schieffer provoking presidential biographer Edmund Morris to curse on air and then slam the American people. Asked during a roundtable discussion what Teddy Roosevelt would think of today’s politics, Morris responded, “You keep asking these presentist questions. As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in My Cousin Vinny, ‘That’s a f***ed up question!'” He went on to explain that “you cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today," Politico reports. He then criticized the American people, who “are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent, and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”