The consensus is that President Obama is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.

Regardless of what happens with health care reform, Obama has failed to create a rally cry for America. His campaign message of hope and change played well for candidate Obama, but this is the real world now. Now is the time for leadership not campaign speeches.

What Obama failed to realize is that bipartisanship is not going to happen – not today. He foolishly still thinks that if he gives Republicans enough of this or that, they’ll come around. In doing so, he squandered a super-majority in the Senate, weakened health care reform and has made his presidency into a series of false-starts and missed deadlines.

Obama needed to rally his political party around his agenda, but he didn’t. He should have taken a no-holds-bar approach to passing meaningful legislation. He needed to play hard-nose political party politics.

If he had done that, Republicans and Fox News would have labeled him a radical leftist pushing a socialist agenda, but that happened anyway. In the current political atmosphere any Democrat would be labeled a commie. For some reason, we’re back to red-baiting again.

By trying to be the appeaser in chief, Obama has gained nothing. What he’s left with is a watered-down health care bill, an economy that’s still floundering, a radicalized right that’s reaching deafening decibels, two wars and very little political capital left to do anything about any of it.

Here’s what blogger Dana Blankenhorn said about Obama this week.

Barack Obama has no choice. He must play this hand by Nixon’s rules. You can’t impose new rules until you’ve won enough hands that the old rules no longer apply. That means narrow, partisan majorities, and intense organization of his own people against the common enemy that is the modern Republican Party.

Even though he doesn’t believe Republicans have any ill motives, he must in the near term convince the rest of us they do, or we go back to Argentina and America will never come back.

What Blankenhorn means about “Nixon’s rules” is this.

Richard Nixon’s concept of Conflict held that majorities had to protect themselves from various minorities. Only those who were inside the Thesis deserved protection. Outsiders (and this concept eventually extended to all Democrats) were suspect. Their motives were not those of ‘us,’ they were ‘them’ and they had to be defeated for ‘us’ to be safe.

The notion of “the other” was the foundation for Nixon’s “southern strategy.”

And here’s what New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote about Obama today.

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.

Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan — of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a ‘pragmatic agenda.’ But pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and it’s not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.

That he hasn’t done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk “liberal.” That is admirable in intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his vision of America’s future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway. His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo ‘nonideological’ enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted president.

At the end of the day, it may be that his critics were right when they said candidate Obama didn’t have enough experience to be the President of the United States. No matter what you thought of President George W. Bush, he got stuff done. We can’t say that about Obama – at least not yet.

Once again Obama uses his Weekly Address to talk about health care reform. Here’s the video, but there is no transcript available yet.

Watching the conservative echo chamber in action is a frightening experience that most people don’t have to stomach on a daily basis.

The latest misinformation parroted by the rightwing machinery is that President Obama is buying votes on health care with judicial nominations.

As usual, it all starts with just a simple question. This time the ultra-conservative Weekly Standard got the ball rolling.

Read the entire story on Examiner.com

Here’s the complete video of Barack Obama’s inauguration and speech. It seems like such a long time ago. Remember? Hope and change. It was an exciting time, wasn’t it?

Here’s a speech President-elect Obama gave back when he was still riding on the hope train. This was before reality dynamited the change and hope train tracks.

Here’s the complete video of White House press conference on Feb. 26, 2010 with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

Health care reform was the topic of President Obama’s Weekly Address on Feb. 27, 2010. The below transcript was provided by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 28, 2010 at approximately 3:40 p.m. eastern.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
Weekly Address
February 27, 2010

As the Winter Olympics draw to a close this weekend, I just want to take a minute to congratulate all the athletes who competed in these games. And I especially want to say how proud I am of all the American men and women have achieved over the last few weeks.

Whether it was the men’s hockey team’s stunning upset of the Canadians on their way to the gold-medal game, Lindsey Vonn’s heroic gold-medal comeback from a shin injury, or Apolo Ohno becoming the most decorated American winter Olympian of all time, you can’t help but be inspired by the sheer grit and athletic prowess on display in Vancouver.

And it’s not just the medal count that’s inspiring – though we’ve certainly done great on that score. What’s truly inspiring is the character of the men and women who have won those medals. The sacrifices they’ve made. The integrity they’ve shown. The indomitable Olympic spirit that says no matter who you are or where you come from or what difficulties you may face, you can work hard and train hard and still triumph in the end. That is why we watch. That is why we cheer. That is why in the middle of an extremely challenging time for America, we’ve been able to come together as one nation for a few weeks in February and swell with pride at what our citizens have achieved.

Now, when it comes to meeting the larger challenges we face as a nation, I realize that finding this unity is easier said than done – especially in Washington. But if we want to compete on the world stage as well as we’ve competed in the world’s games, we need to find common ground. We need to move past the bickering and the game-playing that holds us back and blocks progress for the American people.

We know it’s possible to do this. And we were reminded of that last week when Democrats and Republicans in the Senate came together to pass a jobs bill that will give small businesses tax credits to hire more workers. We also saw it when Democrats and Republicans in the House came together to pass a bill that will force insurance companies to abide by common-sense rules that prevent price-fixing and other practices that drive up health care costs.

We need that same spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship when it comes to finally passing reform that will bring down the cost of health care and give Americans more control over their insurance. On Thursday, we brought both parties together for a frank and productive discussion about this issue. In that discussion, we heard many areas of agreement. Both sides agreed that the rising cost of health care is a serious problem that plagues families, small businesses, and our federal budget. Many on both sides agreed that we should give small businesses and individuals the ability to participate in a new insurance marketplace – which members of Congress would also use – that would allow them to pool their purchasing power and get a better deal from insurance companies. And I heard some ideas from our Republican friends that I believe are very worthy of consideration.

But still, there were differences. We disagreed over whether insurance companies should be held accountable when they deny people care or arbitrarily raise premiums. I believe they should. We disagreed over giving tax credits to small businesses and individuals that would make health care affordable for those who don’t have it. This would be the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, and I believe we should do it. And while we agreed that Americans with pre-existing conditions should be able to get coverage, we disagreed on how to do that.

Some of these disagreements we may be able to resolve. Some we may not. And no final bill will include everything that everyone wants. That’s what compromise is. I said at the end of Thursday’s summit that I am eager and willing to move forward with members of both parties on health care if the other side is serious about coming together to resolve our differences and get this done. But I also believe that we cannot lose the opportunity to meet this challenge. The tens of millions of men and women who cannot afford their health insurance cannot wait another generation for us to act. Small businesses cannot wait. Americans with pre-existing conditions cannot wait. State and federal budgets cannot sustain these rising costs.

It is time for us to come together. It is time for us to act. It is time for those of us in Washington to live up to our responsibilities to the American people and to future generations. So let’s get this done.

Thanks for listening.

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, spoke at “A Dialogue on Our Nation’s Security” held at NYU on Feb. 13, 2010. This is the complete video. There is no transcript available.

Here’s the transcript and video of President Obama’s Weekly Address. The topics are the economy, the difficulty of bipartisanship in an increasingly partisan Washington and the “pay as you go” rule Obama signed into law last night. The transcript was provided by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 13, 2010 at approximately 10:15 a.m. Eastern.

All across America, people work hard to meet their responsibilities. You do your jobs, take care of your families, pay your bills. Sometimes, particularly in tough times like these, you have to make hard choices about where to spend and where to save. That’s what being responsible means. That’s a bedrock value of our country. And that ought to be a value that our government lives up to as well.

Yet, over the past decade, this hasn’t always not been the case. Ten years ago, we had a big budget surplus with projected surpluses far into the future. Ten years later, those surpluses are gone. In fact, when I first walked through the door, the government’s budget deficit stood at $1.3 trillion, with the budget gap over the next decade projected to be $8 trillion.

Partly, the recession is to blame. With millions of people out of work, and millions of families facing hardship, folks are paying less in taxes while seeking more services, like unemployment benefits. Rising health care costs are also to blame. Each year, more and more tax dollars are devoted to Medicare and Medicaid.

But what also made these large deficits possible was the end of a common sense rule called “pay as you go.” It’s pretty simple. It says to Congress, you have to pay as you go. You can’t spend a dollar unless you cut a dollar elsewhere. This is how a responsible family or business manages a budget. And this is how a responsible government manages a budget, as well.

It was this rule that helped lead to balanced budgets in the 1990s, by making clear that we could not increase entitlement spending or cut taxes simply by borrowing more money. And it was the abandonment of this rule that allowed the previous administration and previous congresses to pass massive tax cuts for the wealthy and create an expensive new drug program without paying for any of it. Now in a perfect world, Congress would not have needed a law to act responsibly, to remember that every dollar spent would come from taxpayers today – or our children tomorrow.

But this isn’t a perfect world. This is Washington. And while in theory there is bipartisan agreement on moving on balanced budgets, in practice, this responsibility for the future is often overwhelmed by the politics of the moment. It falls prey to the pressure of special interests, to the pull of local concerns, and to a reality familiar to every single American – the fact that it is a lot easier to spend a dollar than save one.

That is why this rule is necessary. And that is why I am pleased that Congress fulfilled my request to restore it. Last night, I signed the “pay as you go” rule into law. Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else.

But that’s not all we must do. Even as we make critical investments to create jobs today and lay a foundation for growth tomorrow – by cutting taxes for small businesses, investing in education, promoting clean energy, and modernizing our roads and railways – we have to continue to go through the budget line by line, looking for ways to save. We have to cut where we can, to afford what we need.

This year, I’ve proposed another $20 billion in budget cuts. And I’ve also called for a freeze in government spending for three years. It won’t affect benefits through Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. And it will not affect national security – including benefits for veterans. But it will affect the rest of the budget.

Finally, I’ve proposed a bipartisan Fiscal Commission to provide recommendations for long-term deficit reduction. Because in the end, solving our fiscal challenge – so many years in the making – will take both parties coming together, putting politics aside, and making some hard choices about what we need to spend, and what we don’t. It will not happen any other way. Unfortunately this proposal – which received the support of a bipartisan majority in the Senate – was recently blocked. So, I will be creating this commission by executive order.

After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do. Like families across the country, we have to take responsibility for every dollar we spend. And with the return of “pay as you go,” as well as other steps we’ve begun to take, that is exactly what we are doing.

Thanks.

Here’s the White House press conference with Robert Gibbs and Dr. Christina Romer on Feb. 11, 2010 discussing the 2010 Economic Report of the President. The transcript was provided by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 12, 201 at approximately 4:30 p.m. Eastern.

*Syria: We have not formally nominated an Ambassador.

**Google/Iran: Google has not been in touch with the White House regarding Iran.

1:05 P.M. EST

MR. GIBBS: Good afternoon. I need to get a shot clock up here. (Laughter.)

Q You never — obviously it’s Dr. Romer who made you on time.

MR. GIBBS: Well, you know, I am — the President and Dr. Romer are very good examples, and I thought I’d follow their lead, Chuck.

I want to do two quick announcements, and then I will turn this over to Dr. Romer, the chair of the President’s Council on Economic Advisers to talk about the report — Economic Report to the President.

The first announcement earlier today, President Obama called to congratulate President-elect Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica for her recent electoral win. The President reaffirmed his commitment to working in close relationship with Costa Rice on issues of mutual interest, including clean energy, climate change, and security for the benefit of both countries and for the people of the Americas.

Secondly, on February 18th, the President will meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The meeting will take place in the Map Room here at the White House. The Dalai Lama is an internationally respected religious leader and spokesman for Tibetan rights. And the President looks forward to an engaging and constructive dialogue.

Q Any coverage on that?

Q Coverage?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t have that yet.

Q Why in the Map Room?

MR. GIBBS: That is the best place that the President felt and the team here felt for the meeting to take place.

Q Diplomatic considerations?

MR. GIBBS: Pardon?

Q Diplomatic considerations?

MR. GIBBS: How so?

Q Deciding not to have it in the Oval Office –

MR. GIBBS: No President has met with the Dalai Lama in the Oval Office.

Now I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Christy Romer, who will talk to you a little bit about the economic report that the President will sign in about 20 minutes.

So, Dr. Romer.

DR. ROMER: All right. Well, it is a pleasure to be with you all. You have to know that for a chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, there’s no bigger day than the day that her first Economic Report of the President comes out. So anyway, so that is what brings me here.

I think for anyone who is not a devoted fan of the economic report, I thought it would be helpful to give just a little bit of background. So the Employment Act of 1946 set up the Council of Economic Advisers to bring the best professional advice to the President on economic matters. It also mandated — or said it was the role of the federal government to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power, and that every year the Council of Economic Advisers of the President were to submit a report to Congress saying how we were doing.

And so this year’s economic report is the 64th, I believe, in this line of classics. Each economic report does three things: It talks about the challenges, the economic challenges that we face as a country; it talks about what policies were put into place in the previous year and how they worked, and it lays out the President’s economic agenda going forward.

I think — I like to think that this year’s economic report is particularly important, not because of me but because of the times that we are facing. I think if you think about the economic challenges that we face, there’s probably not for a very long time been as great a set of economic challenges.

And of course, these span all the way from of course the immediate crisis, right? When we came in, if you remember back to a year ago, we were losing close to 800,000 jobs a month. Real GDP was plummeting. Our financial system was certainly very stressed, and there were real questions about what would be happening.

But we also know that there was a reason that the President had run for President on a lot of economic issues even before the economic crisis — things like stagnating incomes for middle-class families, soaring health care costs, the fact that as an economy we were failing to invest adequately in educating our children for the jobs of the future, investing in innovation and other things that would help us to grow faster over time.

All right, so I think that certainly makes this volume particularly important to document the challenges that we face.

The second thing that I think is so important about the volume is to put down in one place all of the economic actions that we’ve taken. And it’s not a surprise by far the longest chapter in the economic report is on the rescue, just simply because this was an economy in a terrible crisis. But it really goes through laying out not just the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but what the Federal Reserve did, all of the policies for financial stability, our housing program.

But then it also goes through the policies put in place in a lot of other areas. I think it’s so easy when we’re all caught up and thinking about what’s going to happen with the health care reform bill that is before the House and the Senate, to remember back that we passed the reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program that brought health insurance coverage to an additional 4 million children.

And we just go through all of those kinds of accomplishments. We’re in the middle of doing financial regulatory reform. Let’s remember we passed the credit card bill last spring to try to deal with some of the consumer issues there.

And so it really is, in one place, getting a sense of the tremendous amount that has been accomplished.

And then of course it lays forward the President’s economic agenda. And here — I think one thing that is I think so important to keep in mind, as an economist, the way we think about economic policy is, you know, what is the problem going on in the private market that creates a role for government. And so talking through what are some of the market failures in innovation; what are some of the market failures present in our health care system that give a role for government; what’s the motivation behind the President’s agenda.

But I think one of the things, again, it’s so helpful to see the agenda as a coherent whole. And I think it does paint a picture of a very well-reasoned, very important agenda for moving this economy forward.

In terms of themes, I think it will sound very familiar to you. It’s one, certainly, that the President has talked about — rescue. There are two chapters, both on what we’ve done in the United States, what’s been done in other countries. There are three chapters in what I like to refer to as the rebalancing. This is what the President often refers to as getting away from bubble and bust and thinking about how are we going to grow more healthfully going forward. And that is things like we’re pretty sure that consumers are probably going to be saving more in the future, and that’s probably a good and healthy thing. But it raises a question of, well, where’s the demand going to come from?

And so the President has talked about the importance of spurring investment, the importance of spurring exports as a way of making sure that there’s demand to keep people employed.

There’s of course the budget deficit. That’s a big part of the rebalancing, that at the same time we’re going to spur investment, we’re going to spur net exports, we do need to put in place a plan for getting our long-run budget deficit under control. And here I think the economic report has a very nice chapter about where our long-run deficit problem came from, about what — the reason that one would be concerned about it, what it does to the economy; the logic for the kind of fiscal anchor that we have talked about, or the fiscal target that’s talked about the budget; and our concrete proposals for dealing with it.

I’d also put in the end of bubble-and-bust financial regulatory reform, and there’s a very nice chapter talking about where financial crises come from, what financial intermediation is and why it’s important, and the logic of the administration’s financial regulatory reform proposal.

And then, finally, there are four chapters on what the President often refers to as rebuilding the economy stronger, that wanting to make sure that when we come out of this crisis, we don’t just go back to where we were but to something better. And that is exactly health care, education, the transition to clean energy, and spurring innovation and trade. All of those are things that we think can make the economy stronger going forward.

The last thing I’ll mention, just in case you’re wondering what’s unique about this, the 64th Economic Report of the President, come back to the idea –

Q It’s yours. (Laughter.)

DR. ROMER: Well, that’s true. But I think much more than that is, it is the times — that I think that it is a time when economic issues are so incredibly pressing. And I think that makes it special.

I also want to — I think methodology is somewhat different. One of the hallmarks, I think of the Obama administration is the reliance on evidence. I often say that you win a policy argument not by shouting the loudest or talking the most but by having the best arguments. And I think that is a tribute to this President and this policy process. And so in this economic report we try to put forward the good arguments for the policies that have been proposed. There’s some original research in here, and there are also, for the first time, references, so you can see the studies that are behind some of the things that we have been thinking about.

And the last thing I’ll say is it’s prettier than ever before. So, first time it’s been printed in color. It’s going to be the first time, staying with our accessibility and transparency, it will be available in electronic form for your Kindle and your Sony Reader and whatever. So everybody on the beach will be reading the Economic Report of the President. (Laughter.)

All right.

Q What beach? The white beach.

DR. ROMER: So, you want to take it from here, Robert?

MR. GIBBS: I’ll direct some traffic for you.

DR. ROMER: Okay.

Q Dr. Romer, one figure that just leaps off the page from this report is that even after job growth returns, you don’t see unemployment coming down to 6 percent until 2015. Isn’t that a pretty bleak assessment of what six years of the Obama presidency is going to deliver?

DR. ROMER: So the first thing to say is to remind you this is exactly the same forecast that you saw a couple weeks ago when we did the budget, right, so it is the administration forecast. And as I think we described at the time, we had — we tried to do an honest, conservative forecast to make sure that we were basing our budget numbers on sort of as close to the consensus and reasonable forecast as we can.

I think it is important to realize that certainly when we did this forecast, we had a placeholder in there for some targeted jobs measures, but certainly when things were still very fluid. And I know for, in particular, the Council of Economic Advisers are very enthusiastic about the small business jobs and wages tax credit, and certainly things that are now moving through both the House and the Senate in that kind of area.

I think that’s the kind of a proposal that might have the chance of moving the dial, of being particularly effective. So I think what’s really going to matter is you’re right that the forecasts are certainly something to be concerned about, and that’s why the President has said job creation, more of these movements are going to be important going forward to make sure we can get that down as quickly as possible.

MR. GIBBS: Mark, let me just add to that, too, as we’ve discussed the chart that I handed out on Friday, the hole that we’re climbing out of — it currently stands at 8.4 million lost jobs deep, right? Again, taking the recession in 1981, 1991, and 2001, they don’t cumulatively equal 8.4 million jobs.

So what people — most people I think recognize as the worst downturn in our economy in most memories — 1981 — combining that with the most previous two doesn’t equal the downturn in the economy that we saw. The job growth alone isn’t all of it. You looked at — we had the — I think the statistic I saw, that I probably got from Dr. Romer, was that you had consecutive quarters of more than 5 percent, more than negative-5 percent economic retraction for the first time since the Great Depression. So I think it’s important to understand the sheer size and the magnitude of what we’re dealing with.

Q What you just said leads naturally into what some of the critics are saying this morning, which is that what you’ve just described as documenting the challenges is really an exercise in blame-shifting. Is it?

MR. GIBBS: No. The fact that we lost 763,000 in January of 2009 isn’t blame-shifting; it’s a fact. The fact that we were, as Dr. Romer said, averaging 700,000 jobs lost a month in that quarter is a fact. The fact — the notion that we are now where we are losing — in November we had positive job growth, but we’re getting much closer to the margin of zero — that’s a fact. This isn’t blame-shifting.

Look, there are millions of people in this country that have lost their job. They’ve lost their job because we had a risky financial system of which the President wants financial regulatory reform to lay down rules of the road so it never happens again. We had a bubble-and-bust economy, again, another chapter that they’ll talk about, where we thought somehow job growth could be predicated on the availability to get an American Express card or a housing loan. Okay? That’s not going to get fixed overnight, and it’s never — under the President’s ideas, not going to happen again. What we have to do is lay a foundation for the fact that, how do we address for the fact — for largely for the last decade, we didn’t create jobs and people saw their wages either flat-line or stagnate.

Those are monumental challenges. Whose fault it is will be decided largely by history. But there are 8.4 million people that don’t care about what history decides. They want a job.

DR. ROMER: I just want to add, exactly what the entire report — it is all facts, right? It is just simply — it’s not trying to shift blame, it’s just trying to say here are the challenges that we face. And it’s fundamentally — it’s what the economic report is supposed to do. It’s saying what’s the motivation for the policies going forward.

MR. GIBBS: Caren.

Q One of the numbers that that is new in the report is the forecast for 95,000 payroll creation, and that’s a pretty tepid growth. And I’m just wondering, are you saying that if you get the jobs bill that you think the jobs growth can be stronger than that, or does it already assume that?

DR. ROMER: All right. So the first thing to say, that 95,000 is very consistent, say, with other forecasts. I think the blue chip just came out yesterday — they asked a special question — they think on average in 2010 it’s going to be 116,000 jobs a month. So we’re very much in the range of other forecasts.

What I was saying is that is I think a reasonable estimate. It’s our best estimate going forward. It did not have in place — it didn’t take into account the specific form of any jobs bill going forward. We know there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what will come out of Congress. At the time we did the forecast there was even a lot of uncertainty about what exactly would be proposed.

So that was certainly the case. The reason we’re proposing things like small business lending, the jobs and wages tax credit, the energy retrofit program, is because we think those will be particularly effective.

And so I think what the President is going to do is to put in place the best that we can, working with Congress, and then see if we can get better performance. That of course would be what all of us are hoping for.

Q Can you also respond to the Republican argument that what is holding back people from hiring is the uncertainty about legislation on health care, cap and trade, and things like that, that’s making businesses more cautious?

DR. ROMER: I think, having talked to a number of business people — especially I really found our jobs summit incredibly useful — what I certainly hear from business people is the main uncertainty that they face is the economy — it’s not legislation, it’s not any of that — it is, is the demand going to be there, is the economy going to grow and be strong?

And, you know, I think that is exactly what the President has focused on. And by doing the kinds of policies that he has proposed and wants to continue, I think that’s going to be the main thing that helps us to resolve that uncertainty. Just the more we can get good growth like we’ve seen in GDP, I think that’s going to help with a lot of the uncertainty.

MR. GIBBS: Chuck.

Q Does your jobs forecast, the 6 percent, does that assume no jobs bill gets passed this year? Does that assume no more government stimulus, new stimulus, or –

DR. ROMER: So the — I mean, certainly this is — the forecast that went into the budget, and certainly it’s designed to be a post-policy forecast –

Q You assume that some jobs stimulus –

DR. ROMER: So we pad in the $100 billion targeted kind of thing, but it didn’t have the format. And I think one of the things that I’ve tried to describe is I think we have some ideas for a particularly good format.

Q Can you talk about housing foreclosures a little bit? There was another number that came out today — and I assume it’s addressed a little bit in there — but are you concerned that this number is going to keep growing since there were so many — you guys put some temporary halts in it and then now over the next few months it’s going to grow? And when does it stop growing, this foreclosure number?

DR. ROMER: So certainly foreclosures are a big issue. Housing in general is a big issue. So it’s discussed in both chapter two on the rescue, but also chapter four kind of going forward what do we think is likely to happen sort of as we go back to full employment.

Obviously housing has been sort of a major part of where this crisis started, with the decline in housing prices and the problems certainly there. That’s why we’ve had a very aggressive housing program, and again that’s described certainly in detail in chapter two.

I think going forward that is certainly — it is one of the headwinds that we’re facing. I mean, part of the reason why even — we are seeing growth but part of the reason coming out of this recession most people are forecasting a number like 3 percent GDP growth in 2010 is we do know that we are still facing headwinds. It has been just a terrible recession and part of that is the financial crisis, part of that is getting lending back, and certainly part of that is going to be these persistent problems in housing. And I think that is going to be something that we’re working against. We do think we have good policies in place, but it is going to be something that we’re going to have to be working to deal with.

MR. GIBBS: Chip.

Q You said overall this is a conservative forecast, and you of course may recall that there was a time when you issued a report I think it was 8 or 8.5 percent unemployment you said would be the max — and it went up of course to 10 percent. Was there an effort here to avoid being overly optimistic so that you didn’t get burned politically down the road? And has anybody in a senior position — the President or anybody else in the White House — ever said to you, hey, err on the side of conservative rather than optimistic so we don’t get burned politically?

DR. ROMER: No, I mean, every time we try to do the best we can. I think that’s — the truth is we don’t have a crystal ball. Every year we try to do an honest, reasonable, conservative forecast to make sure that we are basing our budget assumptions on the best possible forecast that we can. We try to inform our decisions by looking at what other people talk about.

One of the things I do want to mention, though — I think I mentioned it at the budget press conference and Peter Orszag said that’s economist for “I told you so” — because we did take a lot of heat last year for both our GDP forecast and our unemployment forecast. And I will absolutely say the unemployment forecast, like many people, we did not forecast how high the unemployment rate would go.

We were actually remarkably accurate on the GDP forecast. So actual when we have the numbers in, we now know that over 2009 real GDP grew by 0.1 percent, one-tenth of 1 percent. Our prediction had been for three-tenths of 1 percent. So were in fact quite accurate on the GDP forecast.

One of the things that we talk about in the economic report is just how this recession has been unusually hard on the labor force and the degree to which the usual relationship between GDP growth and the unemployment rate has broken down somewhat, and that the unemployment rate has risen much more than one would have predicted based on the behavior of unemployment.

MR. GIBBS: And also, Chip — we had an occasion to talk about this on many outings here — nobody predicted what we saw at the beginning of the first quarter of 2009. Nobody saw 763,000 jobs lost. In fact, we didn’t see 763,000 jobs lost because there was a revision that took us from 740,000 to 763,000.

So these numbers are constantly being revised. But I think the bottom line is when Dr. Romer and Dr. Bernstein came out with that, nobody had a full grasp — us included — on just how deep this was.

Now, that’s not to blame anybody — that’s just to understand that the severity, the slope at which we saw job loss, was unforeseen not just by us but by virtually everybody that enters into the type of forecasting that these guys enter into.

DR. ROMER: Can I just say one thing? You’ll actually see a table in the economic report in chapter two that actually shows you what other people were forecasting at the same time we were doing our forecast, to kind of give you just the facts on the degree to which the world was changing very quickly.

MR. GIBBS: Every day.

DR. ROMER: And so I have one minute before I get to go get this baby signed.

MR. GIBBS: Yes, she’s got to go.

Q Just quickly on income inequality, the report talks about inequality but doesn’t make any specific recommendations on it. How seriously should the administration be treating that right now?

DR. ROMER: I think that is an issue that I know the President feels deeply about. We have a whole chapter on strengthening the American labor force, because that’s where we certainly talk about, certainly in terms of this recession, the degree to which different demographic groups — young people, blacks and African Americans — all that have seen higher unemployment rates relative to the average.

I think very much the message of that chapter, and I know it’s one, again, I’ve heard the President talk about, is how important education is in trying to even the playing field and trying to prepare all of our children for the good jobs in the future. So I think that is certainly a big part of certainly where I see our economic agenda trying to make roads in that area.

MR. GIBBS: We’ve got to let Dr. Romer go for –

DR. ROMER: All right. Thank you so much. Enjoy your reading. (Laughter.)

Q Thank you, Dr. Romer.

Q Robert, can I come back to WellPoint, which the President raised the other day? And also because, you know, Secretary Sebelius wrote that pretty toughly worded letter saying, justify all this stuff. They’ve responded. They’ve said basically it’s because healthier people are opting out, they’re getting cheaper coverage elsewhere, so we’re losing money. Are you satisfied –

MR. GIBBS: Well, I thought they made — because I saw — I think they made a $2.7 billion profit last year. So maybe that’s –

Q It sounds like you’re not satisfied with their explanation.

MR. GIBBS: Maybe that’s economic parlance for just breaking even. But, look, when health care inflation goes up at 4 or 5 percent, when a company makes a $2.7 billion profit and turns around and increases rates in the individual market by nearly 40 percent, I think there’s some explaining and some investigation that needs to be done.

I think it also underscores more than ever why the case that the President made about helping people particularly on the individual market, why that’s so important; that creating a national exchange, a national pool, that can have a greater amount of purchasing power — one of the things that the health care reform bill called for — is obviously needed in this region of the country and, quite frankly, throughout the country.

I will look through and get a more detailed response to the letter. I have not seen the response that they wrote. Just again, understanding that health care inflation is not nearly rising at that level, though their profit looks quite nice. I think more needs to be explained at how that number was derived.

Caren.

Q The White House warned earlier this week about a crackdown in Iran surrounding the anniversary of the revolution and there have been reports of a crackdown. And I’m wondering if you could give your reaction to what’s going on there?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, we continue to monitor events as they happen and try to get the best available information, understanding that a lot of media, Google, and other Internet services have been basically unplugged.

I think the President was very clear in his speech in Oslo that we stand by the universal rights of Iranians to express themselves freely and to do so without intimidation or violence. Iranians have gone out into the streets to do just that in a peaceful way. And we will continue to monitor it and continue to express our condemnation and dismay for any violence that should result as — should happen as a result of the exercising of those universal rights.

Q And you mentioned the Google suspension. Have you heard directly from Google about this?

MR. GIBBS: I should check with NSC on that. I saw some emails around this yesterday. I don’t know if that was based off of news reports or based off of something that NSC had gotten.**

Q Robert, a follow on Iran? The head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, Ali Salehi, has just in the last few minutes cautioned the President against taking what he calls “wrong steps.” He said, “The consequences are beyond the imagination of anybody. Don’t test Iran.” Any reaction to that?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I think Iran has made a series of statements that are far more political than they are — they’re based on politics, not on physics. Okay? The Iranian nuclear program has undertaken — has undergone a series of problems throughout the year. Quite frankly, what Ahmadinejad says — he says many things and many of them turn out to be untrue. We do not believe they have the capability to enrich to the degree to which they now say they are enriching.

I would also say this. If they are serious about the peaceful use of their nuclear program, then what they should have done was taken more seriously the offer on the Tehran research reactor, understanding that the increase in — the increase from 3.5 to nearly 20 percent was what the United States and the IAEA and its partners offered as part of the Tehran research reactor so that medical patients could have access to these medical isotopes. Iran cannot replace and continue to operate the TRR at its current pace.

So then not taking the IAEA up and its partners up on a very commonsense offer leads, quite frankly, the world to believe that Iran has other ideas. That’s why — and I would say this — the reactions — the actions of Iran have led the world to be more unified than at virtually any other point in the past many years. They have brought forward, through their actions, through their statements, our partners in the P5-plus-1 now moving in accord forward to taking those next steps.

Q Is there another deadline, new deadline for them?

MR. GIBBS: Well, you saw yesterday the Treasury institute some sanctions on the IRGC, and obviously the next phase in this — as the President talked a few days ago, this is multifaceted and there will be more phases to this, including the United Nations.

Q Following up on that, the deadline was the end of 2009. Why should the leaders of Iran think that there are any consequences for disobeying what the United States and the IAEA and the P5 want, given that, with the exception of the move by Treasury yesterday, there have yet to be consequences?

MR. GIBBS: No, no — and look, Jake, as you said, the President is working through and with our partners on making that happen. This was not going to happen in Time Square when the ball hit zero. This was always going to take some important time. But understand this, Jake, our allies in this are more united than they’ve ever been to take actions and consequences based on the statements and the actions of the Iranians.

Q Do you have China on board yet for U.N. sanctions, through Security Council?

MR. GIBBS: We believe that the Chinese have and will continue to play a constructive role. They worked with us, again, very constructively on the U.N. resolutions dealing with North Korea, and we believe, and I think they believe it’s not in their interest to have a worldwide arms race; it’s certainly not in their interest economically to have an arms race in the Middle East.

Q So that’s a no?

Q Yes, I mean, that’s not really an answer to whether or not they’re on board.

MR. GIBBS: We are working through with them, with our other partners in the P5-plus-1. This will go through a process at the United Nations –

Q When does that process start?

MR. GIBBS: It already has.

Q Well, when is the public process start of bringing sanctions forward –

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, the process of writing this and devising these, as you know, has already started, Jake.

Q Is the question not whether or not China will support sanctions but what kind? Or are you still working on whether they will support –

MR. GIBBS: I’m not going to get into the back-and-forth of diplomatic negotiations, understanding, again, that it’s in everybody’s interest not to have an international arms race.

Q Robert, this is a difficult time, a tense time already with China, and you have the problem that you’re talking about right now, you need China’s help on Iran and many other issues. Why proceed with the Dalai Lama meeting, which you know will infuriate them?

MR. GIBBS: Well, Jill, we’ve said this all along. First of all, we talked to the Chinese about their currency in Beijing; we talked to the Chinese about the Dalai Lama in Beijing; we talked about Internet access and Internet freedom with the Chinese both in Shanghai during the town hall meeting and in Beijing. We think we have a mature enough relationship with the Chinese that we can agree on issues that are of mutual interest, but we also have a mature enough relationship that we know that two countries on this planet are not always going to agree on everything and we’ll have those disagreements.

Q There are a couple things in the news that I was wondering if you could comment on. One, could you talk about why General Jones is in Pakistan?

MR. GIBBS: No.

Q And the other one is there’s been some reporting about a Haiti recovery commission with Bill Clinton supposedly being asked to head up that effort. Is there –

MR. GIBBS: I will check on that. I don’t have an answer to that.

Chip.

Q Can I follow up with the question I asked Dr. Romer — not looking back so much at the incorrect — understandably incorrect — or understandably perhaps incorrect projections on unemployment, but whether or not anybody in the White House has advised her to be –

MR. GIBBS: No. Of course not.

Q — more conservative rather than –

MR. GIBBS: Of course not.

Q That’s never come up?

MR. GIBBS: Of course not.

Q Okay. To what degree does the administration — not just based on the report — attribute the job growth, the 95,000, to Recovery Act and any other legislation that the President is pushing?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I think that — and I can see if Dr. Romer — I doubt she’s broken it out to that degree. Obviously she has, CBO has, underscored the job growth that we’ve seen under the Recovery Act. I think the Recovery Act also spurred economic growth, which we’ve seen now two consecutive quarters of positive economic growth. We did know this: We were never going to have jobs growth without first having economic growth.

So I think the Recovery Act has created additional jobs and created an environment for economic growth that we believe will ultimately lead businesses to add to their payrolls.

Q Would the White House respond favorably to a request for federal disaster aid for states in the Mid-Atlantic — Maryland, D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t want to prejudge what they might ask for. There’s a process whereby those disaster declarations come from the states, or in the District’s case, the mayor, to FEMA, and all of those are evaluated. Obviously we have seen an extraordinary amount of winter weather here in the Mid-Atlantic — having shoveled my driveway now what seems like 10,000 times, I can testify to that.

I don’t want to prejudge what might be in — what each locality might ask in particular for. The process, though, is that those declarations come from the state and locality, in the case of the District of Columbia, to FEMA and then they are evaluated there.

Q Is the President satisfied with the way Washington and the metro areas have handled the snow removal? And the only reason I bring it up is not for pedestrian concerns, but because the federal government has been closed for four straight days.

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I’m reminded, again, as I shovel my driveway, that there are no statistics on record — or they did not keep — if there were snowfall that exceeded what we’ve had this winter it happened before they kept statistics on snowfall during the winter. So I think everybody understands that what we have seen here is extraordinary.

Look, obviously it has been an overwhelming weather event. I know that OPM and others are working to try to get as much cleared so that the federal government can open again.

Q To follow up on that?

MR. GIBBS: Yes.

Q Is the government considering asking federal workers to make up their snow days?

MR. GIBBS: Let me check with OPM. I need to check with OPM on that.

Q Okay.

Q Why wasn’t the President out there shoveling the walk?

MR. GIBBS: Because he’s the luckiest man on the planet. I told him that on — (laughter) — I told him that this weekend, that, you should never leave, it’s a great deal; you’ve got a huge driveway and it’s — my back is killing me.

Jonathan.

Q As Christine Romer said, the longest chapter in the Economic Report is the chapter — chapter two on the response to the crisis. And the President’s message at the beginning of the report is unusually long. And I’m wondering if you think that this is a more political document than past economic reports, and if you’re using this as a justification for policies rather than just an exposition of the state of the economy.

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I think as you saw Dr. Romer, this is the first time this has been annotated with references as to where facts were derived from. This is a factual report to the President on the state of the economy and where it’s headed.

Jonathan, we didn’t need a report from Dr. Romer to justify taking extraordinary action to save our economy: 763,000 people in January of 2009 lost their job. I don’t think you need more evidence that something had to be done. And I think we know this: that had nothing been done, that hole that I talked to Mark about would be far deeper.

I think what one of the things this report I think helps many of you all understand is, again, the genuine severity of what we were dealing with, and what we still are dealing with. And the recession started, mathematically, in December of 2007. We are still at a period where we still have not seen consistent positive job growth. This was economic devastation, again, unseen since the late 1920s.

Q Senator Bond accused the White House of using John
Brennan for political purposes, saying that he was being — doing the role, your role. This economic report –

MR. GIBBS: Let me just address that. Let’s understand this: John Brennan has been working in counterterrorism for more than 25 years — right? First as a CIA agent hired by President George W. Bush to work at the CIA, and then to stand up the National Counterterrorism Center. Okay? We asked him to stay on. I don’t have the slightest idea what political party John Brennan is a member of. I’ve never had a political conversation with John. I know this: John is there each and every day working in his office to try to do everything he can to keep the American people safe.

And I would suggest, whether it’s to Senator Bond or others on Capitol Hill, that these are decisions best left to people that have an understanding of counterterrorism, experience in counterterrorism and law enforcement, rather than to politicians on Capitol Hill.

Q But his specific accusation was that he was being used in a way that a press secretary is supposed to — I mean, that he was enunciating Obama’s policy.

MR. GIBBS: I think Kit Bond didn’t — I don’t think Kit Bond liked to hear what he already knew, which was he’d been told that Abdulmutallab was in FBI custody after what happened on Christmas Day.

Now, I’ll let you, Jonathan, ask Kit Bond whether he understands the protocols of how the FBI deals with suspects enough to understand that at that point it would have been obvious he would have been read his Miranda rights. I don’t know whether Kit Bond was confused or whether he just doesn’t want to admit the facts.

Q When will the President sign the debt limit bill?

MR. GIBBS: I think there’s some discussion of him doing that at either the end of this week or over the weekend. I would say this: I think that that bill also contains something –

Q PAYGO.

MR. GIBBS: — exactly — that he has spoken for many times, a very simple concept of paying for what you want to do.

Q So he will do it publicly?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t know what the coverage plans are.

Q Just to follow up on Caren’s question regarding Google, is there any concern now that Iran’s actions following Google’s dispute with China could indicate that regimes are now going to be targeting U.S. companies and Internet freedoms in general as a means of tighter control?

MR. GIBBS: Well, I think that’s been happening for quite some time. I don’t think this is — I don’t think access to the Internet and to open communications is something that has just happened recently. I think this has happened for a while. You heard the President in Shanghai speak out about it as it related to China.

I do not have specifics around the degree to which Google brought any of its concerns to us about what was happening in Iran.

Q So not whether — not whether it’s escalating with Iran now?

MR. GIBBS: I will check with NSC and see if they have anything more particular on it.

Q And is the President — he’s meeting with Secretary of State Clinton later today? I guess she’s going to the Middle East this week. Is he going to be setting any goals for her for that trip?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, this is part of their weekly meeting. I assume there will be a number of topics that will be discussed. She and others are traveling in the next few days and few weeks to the Middle East, and we want to continue to make progress and get these two parties back at the table.

Q And one more question. There’s a report out of Damascus that Syria has accepted the President’s candidate for ambassador there, Robert Stephen Ford. Can you confirm that he has nominated Ford or –

MR. GIBBS: I can check. I don’t have anything on that.*

Q Can you get back to all of us on that?

Q The President told Bloomberg BusinessWeek, in the context of the conversation about dealing with the deficit and this commission he’s going to set up, “The whole point is to make sure that all ideas are on the table, so what I want to do is be completely agnostic in terms of solutions.” That was in — the write-up of the interview suggests the context of whether or not he would be willing to raise taxes on those Americans — individuals earning less than $200,000 –

MR. GIBBS: Let me read what he said at the — when he was asked the question the first time. “I don’t want to prejudge the commission because the whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table, and let’s see what folks can come up.”

So what the President was saying, which I think — the President will set up a commission. The President is not a member of that commission. The President is not going to prejudge the outcome of a commission that he’s setting up on an issue as important as getting our deficit and debt under control. That’s up to the commission.

And I would say this, Major. I hope that — we hope that Republicans, many of whom supported this commission before they had to vote on this commission, and then they magically didn’t support this commission, we hope that when the President signs this executive order and announces his picks for this commission, that they will demonstrate their seriousness in dealing with an issue of this magnitude by taking part in that commission.

Q What’s the timeline on that, is it still going to be this week?

MR. GIBBS: The snow got us a little off track, so it’ll be in the next 10 days or so.

Q How is not prejudging compare with what he said during the campaign?

MR. GIBBS: He’s not a member of this commission. I think the President has demonstrated through cutting taxes for middle class families and for holding the line on — the President doesn’t believe our economic growth should be predicated on raising taxes on middle class families. But that being said, the President is just not going to get in the game of prejudging the outcome of a commission that, one, hasn’t been set up and hasn’t met. I think –

Q He remains opposed to any tax increase for those he outlined during the campaign?

MR. GIBBS: He does, and he’s not going to prejudge what the outcome of the commission will be.

Q Doesn’t that make him an atheist instead of an agnostic on that matter? (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: I was going to check on that, but I’m not. (Laughter.)

Q You had a lengthy conversation with Savannah and Todd this morning on Abdulmutallab, and I want to ask you one question about that. If Abdulmutallab or a case very similar to that — I know each case was different; presents different facts and different scenarios — would you handle it the way it was — this case was handled?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I’ll say this. We’re quite comfortable with the way this one was handled. I’m not going to get into hypotheticals, Major, because this case is different than what happened, obviously, on September 11th. This case is different from the details of what happened with Richard Reid. It’s hard to compare apples to oranges, in this case.

Q One thing you implied is that there’s also after action, there’s always a look back — and in the process of looking back –

MR. GIBBS: Absolutely there –

Q — have you found room for improvement or methodologies that might be executed differently?

MR. GIBBS: I know that John Brennan has been tasked in a process to implement changes based on the report that the President originally got on intelligence failures. And the President asked for us to examine all of what was done that day and in the days after to ensure that we were doing this the best way possible. That’s the President’s role. That’s what he asked everyone to do.

Q In a rare alignment, MoveOn.org, Paul Krugman and Bill Kristol all agreed the President was wrong when he said he does not begrudge Wall Street bonuses.

MR. GIBBS: The President didn’t say that, Major.

Q I’m saying what they’re saying he said. He said “success” — “I don’t begrudge success, I don’t begrudge –

MR. GIBBS: Let’s not play hypothetical.

Q All right. He said, “I don’t begrudge their success, I don’t begrudge their wealth.”

MR. GIBBS: No, no, no, no, no. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people’s success or wealth.”

Q Well, read the question, too, because the question was about — the question was about the bonuses.

MR. GIBBS: No, no, I read the questions. You and I talked about this like four times the other –

Q I know, but the question was about –

MR. GIBBS: I understand. I understand the question was about bonuses. The question — and the President on five different occasions — just as I emailed you yesterday, causing you to reexamine what you’d written based off of the interview — that the President was talking in that sentence, as he’s done many times, about — he does not believe the federal government should be setting salaries for business in America. He still believes that.

Q Does he still remain comfortable with the analogy he made with Major League Baseball players many have pointed out — yes, Major League Baseball players make a lot of money — no, many of them will make the World Series, but none of them had anything to do with the financial crisis or bad –

MR. GIBBS: Well, I don’t think the President would argue that not many baseball players had anything to do with the financial crisis. I don’t think that’s — the point he was trying to make was that there are obscene and shocking salaries, and obscene and shocking compensation that don’t match what happens with your performance.

Q Does Blankfein and Dimon count?

MR. GIBBS: Hold on, hold on, let me — can I just — let me finish my answer — that the President has said that there ought to be — these ought to be based on performance, not on risk-taking, okay?

Q And some of these new ones are.

MR. GIBBS: No, that — right, in the sense that yes, they’re in stock rather than in –

Q Long-term health.

MR. GIBBS: There should be a say on pay. Shareholders ought to be able to weigh in on this. And he said that salaries like you were talking about with baseball and these bonuses are extraordinary and shocking.

Q Blankfein and Dimon — are those obscene bonuses, Blankfein’s and Dimon’s?

MR. GIBBS: The President has spoken repeatedly on these bonuses, and finds them, as he did in here, extraordinary and shocking.

Q Has he been asked specifically about Blankfein and Dimon?

MR. GIBBS: And he said extraordinary and shocking, specifically.

Q Are they obscene, are they an offense, are they a violation of our moral principles?

MR. GIBBS: The President doesn’t have any different view on bonuses yesterday than he had 10 days ago or 10 months ago.

Q Are these more palatable because these are different in type from the ones that were not linked to long-term health stock?

MR. GIBBS: Ensuring the bonuses are paid in that way is a movement in the right direction, right? Does that justify the level of these bonuses when, through only — only through the taxpayers’ assistance, would these banks still even exist? Of course not.

Q Thanks, Robert. Senator Corker has said that he wants to help out with the financial regulatory reform bill. Senator Grassley is participating in the jobs bill. How do you account for this apparent bipartisan good will?

MR. GIBBS: Well, the snow may indicate that it’s all frozen over. No, look, I think — look, I think — let’s take these individually. Look, the finance committee has worked — is working in a bipartisan way on a series of measures to create an environment where hiring can take place, as well as to extend things like unemployment compensation and health care for people that have lost their job. Senator Corker has been very active in this process, in the process of financial reform.

I think there are certainly many in this town that want to deal with the problems that people face, whether it’s creating jobs or whether it’s ensuring that we have rules for the road that protect against the type of excessive risk-taking that led to the near collapse of our financial system, and with it our economy.

I hope that many have learned the lesson that you hear and see people talking about all the time, and that is that they want this town to put aside its petty arguments and move forward on what’s important in their lives.

The President used an example the other day with Senator McConnell about appointments — that at this point in President Bush’s tenure, there were six nominees that had been sitting there for a month or more, right? This President, before today’s action in the Senate, had 63; as he said to Senator McConnell, both a quantitative and a qualitative difference.

I think that all of these are examples of things that are examples of things that are important to people’s lives — that they believe Washington should put aside, as I said, the petty games that normally take up the time in this town to get something down.

Q You said that people talk about these things all the time, but the President has been talking about them more and more this year. Are they responding to that kind of political pressure from the President? Do they seem to be responding?

MR. GIBBS: I think they’re responding to both the political pressure of the President. I think they’re also responding to the political pressure from the American people. They have — the President went to Capitol Hill — tried to go to Capitol Hill to talk to House Republicans about the recovery plan. As we’ve talked about in here, they put out a statement opposing that plan before the President even got to Capitol Hill. The President spent a lot of time trying to work with Republicans on health care, only to have very few respond.

The President will continue to try to do this in an effort to demonstrate to the American people that this town is capable of solving the problems that we face.

Helene.

Q Robert, Haiti? One question on Haiti?

MR. GIBBS: Let me go to Helene first.

Q Thanks. I wanted to ask you, just to go back to Iran first for a minute –

MR. GIBBS: Go back to?

Q Iran.

MR. GIBBS: Oh, okay.

Q Given the sort of rhetoric that’s been coming out of the Iranian leadership in the past week in particular, has the President had any sort of rethink about the whole concept of engagement with Iran? I know you said that, you know, you think this outreach –

MR. GIBBS: No, because, Helene, we wouldn’t be here — we would not be here unified in the P5-plus-1 were it not for engagement.

Q I understand that, and I see that argument, but what about –

MR. GIBBS: So putting aside that we’re at a point in which those countries have never been more united and more forward in dealing with the threat from Iran.

Q Well, we don’t know yet from China and what they’re going to do.

MR. GIBBS: Right, but you wanted me to leave aside the united –

Q I want to put aside the united front in the P5-plus-one and ask you to look specifically about the relationship with the Iranian regime as a whole, between the United States and Iran. Do you see any difference there that perhaps has come from an engagement and do you see, is there any rethink about whether or not there was any — has gone anywhere at all?

MR. GIBBS: No, no, again, I think it demonstrated to the world that these were decisions that weren’t going to be made by the United States or by Russia or by China, these were decisions that were going to be made by the Iranians. Now, sometimes it’s been confusing; sometimes they’ve accepted ideas and agreements only to come back a week or so later and not accept them. And whether or not there is one or two voices in Iran speaking for the Iranian regime, or whether there are many conflicting voices, I’ll let others decide.

But because we engaged, it demonstrated to the world that the choices that Iran made were choices that it alone had to vouch for. The Tehran Research Reactor is, again, a good example. They’re going to run out of the type of medical isotopes that they need to treat those in their country that could be helped by this. Right? If your program is one for peaceful needs, why not accept the help of the IAEA in ensuring the health and safety of your people? I think, again, their walking away from that agreement demonstrates for the whole world to see what their intentions really are.

Q Just quick — U.S. wants Iran to stop their nuclear weapons program, but Iranian President is firm on their nuclear program. And they said that sanctions have not worked in the past, so how now sanctions will work? And what do the future –

MR. GIBBS: Well, this is a much longer discussion, Goyal. I think that this is a process that has begun at the United Nations and I don’t want to get too far on that.

You want a Haiti question?

Q Just one thing. From what you’ve observed so far, do you believe that the Haitian government has properly carried out the judicial process concerning those Americans who are being held? And also, under the circumstances –

MR. GIBBS: I want to point you to State, because I have not had a lot of time to look at the Haitian judicial process over the course of many days. But I know they’ve had contact with the Haitian judicial system and with those missionaries, so I would point you over to State on that.

Q Robert, the Vice President last night said that Iraq could end up being one of the President’s great achievements. Given that the Vice President was in favor of a partial partition of the country and the President opposed the surge that helped stabilize it, how is that one of the President’s great achievements?

MR. GIBBS: Well, putting what was broken back together and getting our troops home, which we intend to do in August of this year.

Q But the Status of Forces Agreement to bring troops home was signed before the President took office.

MR. GIBBS: Something that — something that I think the political pressure that the President, as a then-candidate, helped to bring about.

Look, I think that we will long debate Iraq. We will long debate whether at a very important moment in our efforts to root out terrorism particularly in Afghanistan and on that border region with Pakistan, whether we took our eye off the ball. I think historians will debate that long after we’re gone. I think they will come likely to the conclusion that no single event took our eye off of what needed to be done in order to — in order to occupy a country that, until we got there, didn’t have a single member of al Qaeda.

So, look, obviously — look, the Vice President has been deeply involved in fixing the political process there so that elections can be held and so that our troops can come home as scheduled this summer.

Q Robert, if you are the average Iranian and you’re hearing about the possibility of more sanctions, what can you do to reassure him or her that the sanctions will be targeted against organizations associated with the government and not them specifically? And are you worried that these sanctions, if you do pursue them and they’re carried out, will only serve to solidify the hold of the Iranian government over the people?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I think the government’s hold over those people I think — in the streets over the past many months is in many ways called into question. I don’t want to get into the specifics of what is being worked through, except to say that obviously we do not want to see a backsliding in progress and to do things that risk putting the political changes that are clearly happening in that country — to see them fall back.

All of that is being taken into account even as the world demands not just that the Republic acknowledge the universal rights of its citizens but also that it live up to their agreements around their nuclear program.

Bill.

Q Robert, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has called the February 25th Blair House meeting nothing but a PR stunt. My question is do you know for sure, have you been told that the Republican leadership is going to attend? Have they accepted the invitation?

MR. GIBBS: I can check with Legislative Affairs. I don’t know if they have said they would come or not. Bill, it would be an awfully curious thing that the argument that they made up until the point in which the President proposed this was that the President hadn’t sat down — despite the record — sat down with Republicans enough and talked to them about health care — I can’t imagine a conceivable scenario in which, after having that invitation, you would say, well, I know for nine months I said I wanted that, but I can’t possibly fit it into my schedule now. It just seems silly.

Q Are you proceeding then on the assumption there will be a meeting and there will be Republicans at the table?

MR. GIBBS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Again, I think it would be — well, it would demonstrate a lot about the willingness of those to actually solve a problem for the American people.

I know sometimes polls don’t get a — when there are good numbers in polls they don’t get a lot of attention in this town. But The Washington Post poll from a couple of days ago had a number very similar to that of the poll that they did of voters after the Massachusetts election, and that is that a overwhelming majority wanted to see the effort to reform health care continue. I think that’s important. That’s why the President wants to meet with individuals in both parties to talk through these solutions.

Sam.

Q Just two questions. Basically hours after the President said he was considering using recess appointments Senate Republicans filibustered Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. The first question is, has the President given thought to appointing Mr. Becker through a recess appointment? And secondly, has anyone at the White House been in touch with either Senator Harkin or Senator Udall on their proposals to essentially reform the use of the filibuster in the Senate?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t know about the second question, Sam. I can simply recount the story again that the President at the meeting a couple of days ago — I think it was probably the last 20 or so minutes where the President, during the bipartisan meeting, asked very specifically about the reason and the nature for the hold-up of many qualified appointees that weren’t being held up because of some philosophical or political disagreement. There were, again, 63 that had been sitting for more than a month, when in a comparable period of time in the Bush administration that number was six.

Senator Shelby last week decided to put a hold on everybody because he didn’t get a couple of earmarks. And it’s obvious now that that wasn’t such a good idea, and he pulled back many of those holds.

The President told Senator McConnell quite clearly the situation that we have is, again, as I said, quantitatively and qualitatively different that it was at the beginning of the Bush administration; that it had to change and that if it didn’t change the President would use his power for recess appointments. So that’s where we are now.

Q Any specific discussions about Craig Becker?

MR. GIBBS: There wasn’t a specific discussion about any individuals. Obviously the President discussed those that had been laying over for more than a month.

Thanks, guys.

END
2:10 P.M. EST

Despite the technical glitches, White House staff answers some pretty good questions about everything from No Child Left Behind, Iran sanctions, felon voting rights, Afghanistan, carbon taxing, the bank bailouts and more.

Answering questions: Heather Higginbottom of Domestic Policy Council, Brian Deese, from the National Economic Council and National Security Council Ben Rhodes.

It’s worth watching, so check it out.

Here’s the complete transcript and video of President Obama’s Weekly Address. The transcript was prepared by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 7, 2010 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern.

Weekly Address
February 6, 2010

Even though our economy is growing again, these are still tough times for America. Too many businesses are still shuttered. Too many families can’t make ends meet. And while yesterday, we learned that the unemployment rate has dropped below ten percent for the first time since summer, it is still unacceptably high – and too many Americans still can’t find work.

But what we must remember at a time like this is that we are not helpless in the face of our difficulties. As Americans, we make our own destiny. We forge our own path. And I am confident that if we come together and put aside the politics that keeps holding us back, we can do that again. We can rebuild this economy on a new, stronger foundation that leads to more jobs and greater prosperity.

I believe a key part of that foundation is America’s small businesses – the places where most new jobs begin.

These companies represent the essence of the American spirit – the promise that anyone can succeed in this country if you have a good idea and the determination to see it through. And every once in awhile, these ideas don’t just lead to a new business and new jobs, but a new American product that forever changes the world. After all, Hewlett Packard began in a garage. Google began as a simple research project.

Government can’t create these businesses, but it can give entrepreneurs the support they need to open their doors, expand, or hire more workers. And that’s what we’ve always done in this country. The folks at Southwest Windpower in Flagstaff, Arizona started their company in a small home. Since getting a loan from the Small Business Administration, they’ve sold 160,000 wind turbines to about 90 different countries, and are hiring even more workers today. When Sam Ko walked into one of the SBA’s small business development centers in Illinois, he didn’t have any business experience at all – just a patent for a new metal manufacturing technology. He was given a loan and a business plan, and today his company is still growing, with offices all over the Midwest.

Last year, the steps we took supported over 47,000 loans to small businesses and delivered billions in tax relief to small business owners, which helped companies keep their doors open, make payroll, and hire workers. But we can and must do more. That’s why I’ve proposed a series of steps this week to support small business owners and the jobs they create – to provide more access to credit, more incentives to hire, and more opportunities to grow and sell products all over the world.

Because financing remains difficult for good, credit-worthy small businesses across the country, I’ve proposed that we take $30 billion from the TARP fund originally used for Wall Street and create a new Small Business Lending Fund that will provide capital for community banks on Main Street. These are the small, local banks that will be able to give our small business owners more of the credit they need to stay afloat. We should also continue to waive fees, increase guarantees, and expand the size of SBA-backed loans for small businesses. And yesterday, I proposed making it easier for small business owners to refinance their mortgages during these tough times.

To give these companies greater incentives to grow and create jobs, I’ve proposed a new tax credit for more than one million small businesses that hire new workers or raise wages, as well as the elimination of all capital gains taxes on small business investment.

Finally, we should provide targeted support to the most innovative small businesses – the ones with the greatest potential to export new goods and products all over the world. A lot of these companies – like the wind turbine manufacturer I mentioned – are the foundation on which we can rebuild our economy to compete in the 21st century. They just need a little help securing the financing they need to get off the ground. We have every incentive to help them do that.

Next week, Congress will start debating many of these proposals. And if anyone has additional ideas to support small businesses and create jobs, I’m happy to consider them. My door is always open. But I urge members of both parties: do not oppose good ideas just because it’s good politics to do so. The proposals I’ve outlined are not Democratic or Republican; liberal or conservative. They are pro-business, they are pro-growth, and they are pro-job. Leaders in both parties have supported similar ideas in the past. So let’s come together and pass these measures without delay. Let’s put more Americans back to work, and let’s give our small business owners the support to do what they’ve always done: the freedom to pursue their dreams and build our country’s future. Thanks for listening.

This is the complete transcript and video of the press conference with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Feb. 4, 2010. The transcript was provided by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 5, 2010 at 2:52 p.m. Eastern.

12:47 P.M. EST

Q We want Bill! We want Bill!

Q Bill! Bill!

MR. GIBBS: Hey, I’m all for it, man. (Laughter.) I’ve got a — I’ve got a couple margaritas getting warm right now anyway, so I’m happy to — that’s actually –

Q That’s how you prep?

Q That’s how you do it?

MR. GIBBS: Yes, actually — same as you guys, right?

Q What? (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: That’s just a joke, Mom. We’re not doing that at work. All right, so, take us away. Sorry.

Q There’s been some criticism from Democrats on the Hill, particularly Sherrod Brown, that the President has been even less involved in negotiations on health care since the Massachusetts elections. Is it true? Is that a strategy? Or are you taking that criticism seriously?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, obviously, as the President has said in the State of the Union and you heard the President say yesterday, obviously the problem exists. It continues — the problem that did exist on high costs, small businesses struggling, that was the case before Massachusetts; it was the case after Massachusetts. I still think that a process is working its way through Capitol Hill to figure out the best way forward.

Q But has the President been less involved than he was even last year?

MR. GIBBS: I didn’t believe that the President was less involved last year since we wouldn’t have gotten to where we were if the President hadn’t been involved.

Q What would be making people like Sherrod Brown say this then? There’s got to be some reason.

MR. GIBBS: That’s a better question for him.

Q And is there any details you can share on the meeting this afternoon with Democratic leadership?

MR. GIBBS: I know the meeting was rescheduled, I think until 3:45 p.m. It’s a meeting to go through the legislative agenda for 2010. First and foremost, there will be a discussion on jobs and the economy. Financial regulatory reform will also be a topic. They will talk about energy and health care.

Many of the topics that the President discussed in the State of the Union will be discussed in the meeting. And then, as you all know, next week, next Tuesday, will begin the President’s bipartisan leadership meetings, also something he called for in the State of the Union.

Q The Chinese are dismissing the President’s comments on China about exchange rates and trade yesterday, and I’m wondering, is the administration concerned that by pressuring the Chinese, you’re running the risk of disrupting currency markets, antagonizing a very important creditor and thereby driving up borrowing costs that could hurt the U.S. economy?

MR. GIBBS: No, Matt, because there’s nothing — there’s nothing that — I know there’s been a flurry of stories about our relationship with China, whether it’s issues surrounding our meeting with the Dalai Lama or issues surrounding currency or trade. None of these issues that have been written or discussed about in the last two weeks weren’t discussed face to face between President Obama and President Hu when they met in Beijing. I cannot remember a time in which the President came out of a meeting with President Hu and those topics hadn’t come up.

So as I said here a few days ago, there are — we envision this relationship as one where we can work together on issues of mutual concern. We’ve worked together on stabilizing the world economy. We’ve worked together on issues of proliferation, particularly around North Korea. I think it’s safe to assume that only through the important cooperation that we received with the Chinese that we were able to get some very strict sanctions through the United Nations Security Council on a unanimous vote several months ago, based on the actions the North Koreans had taken late last spring.

There will be issues that we will disagree on, and we will disagree on them both in private and in public.

Q While the Chinese have been fulminating about the President’s plan to meet with the Dalai Lama and also now this pressure about exchange rates, they were saying today that they don’t want to talk about further sanctions on Iran, that that would be counterproductive. Is there any concern that the Chinese are becoming obstructionist in a kind of retaliation on other related — on unrelated issues?

MR. GIBBS: There are issues that are of mutual concern and then there are issues that are of great concern to each of the individual countries. A nuclear Iran is not in the interest of the American government or the Chinese government. An arms race in the Middle East is not a good thing for us or for them. And a worldwide arms race and the destabilizing nature that that could have throughout the world is not a good thing for the American government or for the Chinese government.

I think that the Chinese will continue to work with us on the important next steps that we have to take relating to Iran because it’s not just in our interest or in other’s interest, it’s quite clearly in their interest as well.

Q Robert, a quick follow?

MR. GIBBS: What’s that?

Q A quick follow. Is the Dalai Lama still coming to meet with the President at the White House or not?

MR. GIBBS: I’m sorry?

Q If the Dalai Lama is still coming to meet with the President at the White House?

MR. GIBBS: He will be here later this month, yes. Again, just let me say, again, that we told President Hu in November in Beijing. The President told him that. The President discussed each of these issues — Iranian sanctions, larger proliferation, and currency.

Q Just to follow on the earlier question about the meeting with the Dems, is the message or will the message also be from the President sort of can’t we all get along, in light of the fact that we’re hearing that there’s disagreement and discontent on some of these issues, like health care?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I think they will discuss a strategy moving forward to implement many of the ideas that are of concern to Democrats in the Senate and the House that are also on the policy agenda of the President of the United States. I also think, Dan, there’s great overlap between what those interests are and what the American people want to see their Congress deal with — first and foremost, a robust discussion on how to move forward on jobs and the economy.

Q The President has of late gone into the lion’s den, taken questions from Republicans; he’s taken questions from Democrats. He hasn’t taken questions from the press in a prime-time forum since last summer, I believe in July. Why not?

MR. GIBBS: Look, the President has, as you mentioned, taken questions from members of Congress. He has taken questions at different press avails from a whole host of reporters. We’ve done countless numbers –

Q One or two.

MR. GIBBS: Right, one or two, several times. We have done countless number of interviews — I think more interviews in the first year than any President certainly in recent memory. He enjoys the format, we just haven’t done one in a while.

Q Anything soon?

MR. GIBBS: None that I’m aware of.

Q In the supplemental document “Analytical Perspectives” of the President’s budget, unemployment figures that the administration is projecting are pretty bleak. It’s 10 percent for the rest of this year, 9.2 percent next year, 8.2 percent in 2012. First of all, these are pretty bleak figures. I’m wondering if you have a response to these numbers. And then second of all, is this count factoring in a jobs bill or not?

MR. GIBBS: Let met ask specifically the second part of your question to OMB and CEA. Jake, they are sad and sobering numbers felt each and every day by the American people. We’ll get new jobs numbers tomorrow. There will be a jobs revision, I’m told, tomorrow that’s likely to show additional job loss at the first part of the recession that started in December 2007, making the hole that — the hole of job loss that we’ve dealt with even deeper.

We didn’t — as I’ve said here countless times, we didn’t get here overnight. We won’t get out of that hole overnight. It will take a concerted effort by the President and Congress working together, both parties, to strengthen our foundation and to create jobs moving forward that’s not predicated on risky lending or housing speculation or running up massive debt on credit cards. We’ve got to create jobs in the new industries of clean energy — clean energy manufacturing so that we don’t finish second place to the Chinese or the Indians in creating those new jobs.

Q Also, the numbers don’t show the unemployment rate over the next decade going to even where they were in 2007 when the President announced he was running for this office, at all, ever. They stop at 5.2 percent but they never get down to below 5 percent, which is where they were when the President announced. Why — I mean, this just seems an incredibly bleak outlook on the unemployment problems in this country.

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, Jake, we’ve lost — before the statistic — before any revisions tomorrow, the recession has cost us 7 million jobs. I’ll bring an update, the graph that I’ve brought out here a few times that show the sheer depth of job loss over the many months of the recession.

Look, I think if you go back and look at — there was an article I think around the Christmas holidays that demonstrated that roughly there had been very little to no job growth in the past decade.

So we’ve got to figure out how to create economic growth and ultimately create jobs in an economy that isn’t dependent upon the examples that I used a minute ago — easy credit that allows housing speculation for people that can get but shouldn’t get loans to buy houses.

Q But these numbers are more bleak than other numbers you guys have put out before. I mean, these are much more pessimistic than previous predictions.

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, Jake, understand that when we walked in the beginning of the administration, no one presumed that 741,000 would be the number of jobs lost in January of 2009. And certainly if you average what happened in that first quarter of 2009, an average of about 700,000 jobs — 700,000 jobs a month for each of the three months of that quarter — understanding this, that the — and I don’t have the figures right in front of me, but the economic growth for that first quarter was -6.4 percent. The previous quarter was I believe — and I’m doing this largely off the top of my head — -5.5 percent. We hadn’t had consecutive quarters of such economic retraction since the Great Depression.

So we’ve got a tremendous hole to fill in. And I think that’s why the President spent a majority of his State of the Union speech asking that Congress, each party work together with the other to move forward on creating — helping to create jobs, on assuring that stronger and new foundation. And I think that’s most what the American people want to see out of their government right now.

Q And just a follow-up. I’ve asked you guys a few times what the President was referring to when he spoke to the Republican conference on Friday and he talked about stray cats and dogs getting into the health care reform legislation that would prevent patients from being able to choose their plan, choose their doctor, even though that had been a White House pledge. Have you guys made any progress on finding out what he was talking about?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t know if Bill got that question yesterday. I’ll have to look through it.

Q You didn’t watch Bill, when he did his briefing?

MR. GIBBS: I did watch most of it. I couldn’t — I noticed when you watch it on TV you can’t always hear the questions.

Q How did he do?

MR. GIBBS: Quite well. Quite well. What did you think?

Q I’m neutral on the issue. (Laughter.)

Q That’s not what you told me.

MR. GIBBS: I was going to say, that’s — yes, that’s –

Q I was actually surprised to see you — well, anyway, no — he did a good job, very good job.

Toyota — yesterday Ray LaHood kind of stepped in it when he mistakenly said that people should stop driving them and then backtracked a little while later, caused quite a big hubbub. Has the President been in touch with him? Is the President personally involved in this issue? And is he satisfied with the job Ray LaHood is doing?

MR. GIBBS: Absolutely satisfied with the job Ray LaHood is doing, and I think it’s important, understanding, Chip, after making a misstatement, he do what’s — did what’s not done a lot in this town and said he made a misstatement and then corrected what he had said and was clear that if — and if you go on certain Web sites, if you go on NHTSA’s Web site — nhtsa.gov — or if you go on Toyota’s Web site, you’ll see which cars are impacted and affected by safety concerns. And has been said, if you’re driving one of those cars, you should go see your dealer.

Q Is the President involved in any way, or has this not risen to his level?

MR. GIBBS: No, he’s certainly seen reports and been briefed on what’s going on, simply based on the breadth of what we’re talking about.

Q There have been a number of reports that what’s bad for Toyota is good for GM and Ford. Any thoughts on that?

MR. GIBBS: Well, what’s bad for Toyota is bad for anybody that’s driving a Toyota. And safety and security are the primary concerns of the National — of NHTSA, the Department of Transportation, and the President of the United States.

Q What does all this mean for GM and Ford, which are both still at pretty precarious moments in their history?

MR. GIBBS: Well, Ford I think last quarter reported a profit. I think GM is taking steps to turn around from the bankruptcy that they went through earlier. But –

Q Do you expect them to aggressively try to take advantage of this weakness on Toyota’s part? I mean, it’s a cutthroat world out there in the car business.

MR. GIBBS: That’s a good question for the men and women that run both of those car companies.

Q On the jobs bill, Harry Reid says he wants to bring it up on Monday and he is hoping for Republican support. If they structure this in a certain way they could almost assure themselves of getting some Republican support. Is the President going to insist on that, that there be Republican support?

MR. GIBBS: Well, I think the President could not have been clearer in the State of the Union, in the — in speaking to both Democrats and Republicans, that we have to work together to get our economy moving again. I think there are ideas in helping small business and cutting their taxes, in increasing our investment in infrastructure, several ideas that Republicans have supported at various points in the past and pointed to as ways to help the economy recover and hopefully over the medium to long term create jobs.

So our strong hope, Chip, is that Democrats and Republicans can and will work together to move this important issue forward and get something to his desk quickly.

Q But when he meets with them later today he could say, no ifs, ands or buts, I want this structured in a way that you get Republican support on this thing or I won’t sign it.

MR. GIBBS: Look, Chip, he told that to Democrats and Republicans over the past week, that we should work together. But, Chip, this isn’t just a question for the Democratic leadership or for a Democratic President. We also have to have, as I think you heard the President outline when he spoke with Republicans last Friday in Baltimore — and I think this is true going back to your question — I doubt that everybody has liked every word of every piece of legislation that the President has watched go through Congress and sign. And it’s not likely that he liked every word in every one of those pieces of legislation.

But the key is do we have and share enough in common; are these ideas good ideas to get the economy moving again, to stop playing partisan political games and work on behalf of the American people. Given what the President outlined in cutting taxes for small businesses, in increasing investment in infrastructure — both things that Republicans have talked about — I have no doubt that there will be plenty in each — plenty in any package that can and should garner support from the Democratic side as well as the Republican side.

Chuck.

Q Business leaders today giving the President advice on what should be on job creation. Did he take any?

MR. GIBBS: I have not gotten a readout from — I think the lunch started at noon. You all should have gotten lists of who was there and we’ll — I’ll try to glean some from the President at the conclusion of the lunch.

Q All right, back to health care and your answer on Sherrod Brown — he’s not alone. I mean, there’s a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who regularly say the President — the perception is the President hasn’t pushed hard enough on this bill publicly, whatever it is, leaned his shoulder in more. If that’s not true, why is that perception there?

MR. GIBBS: I would just say, Chuck –

Q — these are not — they’re not bomb-throwers. Sherrod Brown is not a bomb-thrower.

MR. GIBBS: I would just say, Chuck, we’ve gone over the question of the President’s involvement in health care for six months. I think as the President said last Friday, it’s pretty clear he’s not doing this for sheer political gain. I doubt that we would be continuing to do this if it weren’t a key priority of his.

Q But it seems to be that where the message is getting lost there, apparently, he uses the word “hope” to get this done; that there isn’t this idea that he’s there, pulling an LBJ or something like that.

MR. GIBBS: Well, I think there’s –

Q I’m not asking him to lift Bo by the ears. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: I was going to say — (laughter) — there were many possible answers that went through my head with –

Q But that’s what these guys are talking about.

MR. GIBBS: Look, again, LBJ added seniors into those that were assured that they would always have the safety net of quality health care. We’ve not gotten — we’ve added since LBJ different efforts — in the Clinton administration we added additional efforts through kids. That effort was expanded under President Obama at the beginning of our administration. We’ve gotten farther than seven Presidents who’ve worked on this issue intently. We’re close, the President remains very involved and engaged in this, and it’s our strong hope to continue to get this done.

Q One last question. At 5:00 p.m. today you have 59 Democratic senators rather than 60. Does that change your legislative agenda?

MR. GIBBS: Well, I think it changes everybody’s calculus as to taking responsibility for governing this country.

Q But it changes your — changes the Republicans, changes –

MR. GIBBS: I think the President acknowledged as much during the State of the Union. No longer can one party alone, assuming that what is insisted upon is 60 votes in the United States Senate — no longer can one party alone hold its members and make progress on important issues for the American people. That’s why the President has asked again that Democrats and Republicans work together to make that progress.

Yes, ma’am.

Q On the jobs package in the Senate, it doesn’t appear to include, at least initially, a $30 billion lending –

MR. GIBBS: I’m sorry, say this one more time.

Q The jobs package in the Senate doesn’t appear to include initially the $30 billion lending provision through community banks for small businesses. How hard will the White House press on this? It’s obviously the most controversial piece in the package as announced so far.

MR. GIBBS: Well, I don’t think loaning money through community banks to small business is –

Q Well, for the Senate it’s controversial.

MR. GIBBS: — is controversial. I think there are thousands and thousands of small business people around this country, some of whom write the President and say even as the stock market grows, our access to capital to either continue our small business, meet a payroll, or expand our small business, is still hard to come by. The President outlined the specifics of this proposal just this week in New Hampshire and believes that in order to get our country moving again and creating jobs, the best way to do this is, one, through cutting taxes for those that hire additional employees and providing additional access to capital through money that has been given back from bigger banks through TARP, loaned through community banks to small businesses. That’s — this will be a priority –

Q So you’re saying that lending is a vital part of this package for this White House?

MR. GIBBS: Lending is a vital part of this package and it is a extremely vital part of any business being successful. We have discussed –

Q Is there some flexibility on the use of TARP funds?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t want to get into a legislative negotiation from here. I think what’s important for — any small businesses will tell you that access to capital is their lifeblood. We’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing the lending practices of banks, and certainly as it relates to economic growth the President is — believes this has to be a key priority.

Q Okay. One more on the debt commission, Robert. Are you getting any Republican cooperation on that, and when will that commission be named?

MR. GIBBS: The President is working on some of the specifics of the executive order. I believe if the economic team hasn’t already, it was discussed this morning making phone calls to Republican leaders about how this will be structured. It’s our strong hope that Republicans would agree to participate in a commission that many of their members strongly advocate.

Granted, seven of their members had strongly advocated and then unadvocated for the creation of that commission when we were trying to do this legislatively. But I have not noticed in the intervening weeks anything less than pretty vociferous comments about our fiscal situation. I can’t imagine that Republicans would at one minute say this is such an important issue, and then at the next minute say we can’t participate in a commission to help solve what I said a minute ago was an extremely important issue. I think the American people are smart enough to understand that’s Washington game playing; that’s not problem solving.

Q So you’re thinking maybe the next week or so?

MR. GIBBS: I think very shortly.

Q One follow-up on just a related issue, something the President said to Republicans last week. He repeated it when he spoke with Democratic senators, and he also repeated it when he spoke at the town halls in Florida and New Hampshire. He said that there were some members of either the House or the Senate Republican members that voted against the economic Recovery Act and then attended some ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Were there a lot of members? Do you know which members the President was referring to?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t have the stuff with me, but I’ll circulate to everybody as soon as I get out of here.

Q Great, thank you.

MR. GIBBS: Sure, absolutely.

Q On the same lines, Robert, did you look at the Republican comments, statements, news releases that have been made subsequent to the Friday meeting with the House GOP members? Do you see more of, well, to use the President’s formulation, more of a hand of cooperation from them or a fist?

MR. GIBBS: Based on –

Q On their statements, news releases, comments on just the wide scope of issues — jobs and health care and everything else.

MR. GIBBS: Look, I think as the President said on Friday, there will always be differences between the two parties, and that’s an important part of our process. I think that when the rubber has to meet the road, when legislation comes before the Senate, hopefully next week, that begins to cut taxes for small business and increase our investment in infrastructure as a way of moving our economy forward, I think we’ll get a chance to see whether not just the statements of any criticism but the statements of what this President should do are backed up by strong action.

A lot of people said after Massachusetts that the President had to act in a more bipartisan way. I think the President has been pretty clear about wanting to ensure that the two parties work together.

We’ll get a chance to see whether working together is something that people are serious about doing or whether it’s something that a pollster told them to say.

Q Well, beyond, say, the National Prayer Breakfast, have you seen any bipartisanship from the other side at all?

MR. GIBBS: Look, the games of Washington, unlike the Olympic Games, don’t open and close. They happen on a continual basis. I think the American people will be watching what happens first and foremost on the floor of the Senate next week on getting our economy moving again.

Q Thank you for the Olympics plug. (Laughter.)

Q Not C-SPAN.

Q All the channels of NBC. (Laughter.)

Q Just to go back to the jobs revision stuff — just avoid any confusion — have you seen the revisions yet, or are you basing your assumptions on publicly available data?

MR. GIBBS: I read a news report, I think, on CNN.

Q You have not seen the January –

MR. GIBBS: I should preface for my mother again, I do not see this data before you do.

Q And then on this — the report that Google is working with the National Security Agency on plugging any cyber-security holes — any other companies have gone to the NSA on that?

MR. GIBBS: I would — let me specifically point you to NSA on — what’s that?

Q That will do a lot of good. Gee, thanks. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: But I would say this, that as was noted by the President in discussing cyber-security, that we have — we believe that information sharing and cooperation between the government and the private sector is important — ensuring obviously that privacy and civil liberties are protected — and have asked that if companies are dealing with what they perceive to be cyber-security threats, that they go and work with the authorities on that.

Q The Dalai Lama meeting that you said will be here at the White House, will that be in the Oval? Will that be in the Residence?

MR. GIBBS: I do not know where the location of the meeting will be.

Q Will cameras be allowed in, or will the pool be brought in?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t have any coverage information on that right now.

Major.

Q Sixteenth and 17th for that?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t have a date either.

Q You don’t have a date? Okay. And just to go back to what Jake was talking about and this revision, are you talking about historical data that talks about the job losses during the course of this recession or something relative to the January numbers?

MR. GIBBS: The story I read — the story I read — there are typical revisions to data that comes out.

Q Sure.

MR. GIBBS: Take, for instance, I think GDP data is released and then revised at least twice. These are last year –

Q Certain numbers were revised downward twice.

MR. GIBBS: Right, right. Last year there were — there was a several-decade-long revision of jobs figures. The story, again, I read this morning –

Q So that’s what you’re talking about, not something relative to what we’re going to read and see tomorrow?

MR. GIBBS: No, no, no, no. This dates back from governing months from — again, the story said I think April 2008 through March 2009.

Q Earlier you said 2007. Did you mean 2008?

MR. GIBBS: Well, no, no, I said that this governs the total job loss over the period that begins in December 2007 at the beginning of the recession.

Q So the additional job losses — you expect the revision to show began 2007 not 2008.

MR. GIBBS: No, no, no, no. Again, I should just send you the story I read. The revisions –

Q Maybe the NSA can. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: The revisions — they wrote it.

Q They already did.

MR. GIBBS: The recession began officially, as per the board, in December of 2007. The revisions, in the story I read, cover April of 2008 through March of 2009. Those months obviously are encompassed in what we broadly know as the time period during the recession.

Q You don’t have to yell at me now. That’s great. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: Yes, sir.

Q Okay, following up –

MR. GIBBS: I don’t know if that counts as your time or Hans –

Q It counts as his time. I assure you –

Q It’s fine. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: Wow. Now he’s yelling at you, Hans. (Laughter.)

Q The President often talks, and you did a minute ago in talking to Jake, about the boom and bust cycles. Is one of the downsides, is one of the things the American public needs to appreciate, looking at these unemployment numbers that you projected out, is that it’s a slower climb out when you have a scenario that the President wants to have, if he achieves it, of a non-boom-type recovery. Is that something the American people need to either prepare themselves for or be ready to expect, that this unemployment process is going to be a very slow heal.

MR. GIBBS: Major, I think many people that are dealing with the unemployment process have been dealing with it for quite some time. Long-term unemployment is at one of its highest points ever.

Q And let me ask the question, when is the turn, and are you — one of the things you’re trying to say is the turn is going to be slow?

MR. GIBBS: Well, what I’m saying is that this will take time, but most importantly, what the President has talked about, not just throughout the campaign and not just throughout his first year in office, is we have to create a new foundation for job creation for the future; that if what we do is go back to boom and bust economies where we’re –

Q Right, I understand –

MR. GIBBS: Hold on, let me –

Q What I’m asking is –

MR. GIBBS: Can I reclaim some of my time? The boom and bust economies, what you’re going to end up with is — again, going back to what I talked about as what happened in the last decade — you had times of job growth, you had times of job loss, but over the course of the decade you were basically flat. If we’re going to continue to make progress economically, we have to put ourselves on a far different path.

Q Right, but as the numbers indicate, when it was flat, the unemployment rate was lower when the President decided to run for this office than he’s projecting it will be at the end of the actuarial tables of his newest budget. And many Americans would agree it may have been flat, but at least it was a lot lower. And what I’m getting at is, in this process of averting a boom and bust economy, do you have a slower term?

MR. GIBBS: Major, what we’ve gone through is an economic downturn that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Look, the American –

Q I’m not criticizing, I’m just asking you –

MR. GIBBS: No, no, no, I’m saying the American people understand. Many of them have been out of work for a long, long time. They understand that far before any board declared the beginning of a recession that they were working longer, they were working harder, they were increasing their productivity, yet at the same time their wages either were on that flat line or going down. They understood that their costs got more expensive. The cost of energy got more expensive. The cost of health care got more expensive. The cost of college got more expensive.

So, look, there’s no — that was even before the official recession began and certainly before a series of excessive risk-taking by a few nearly dragged the economy back to a period of a great depression.

Q Right. And all I’m asking is, do the American people need to appreciate, as they look at the economic future, as charted by this administration, that it’s going to be slower for unemployment to come down –

MR. GIBBS: Major, I think I started to say, I think the American people understand that because they’ve been dealing with this far longer than the — than this administration occupying this White House.

Q On trade, the President has talked about it more aggressively lately. Gary Locke is giving a speech right now at the National Press Club. In that speech I didn’t find any specific reference to a time for approving the pending South Korean, Colombian, or Panama trade agreements. For those nations who are now perhaps enthusiastic the President is talking about trade, what can you tell them about when the President and this White House is going to push those agreements and get them through Congress?

When I talked to the President about South Korea in Beijing he said, “I want that done in 2010,” either –

MR. GIBBS: Well, there you go. What are you asking me for?

Q Well, but nothing has happened. You can’t find any –

MR. GIBBS: Well, it’s only February, Major.

Q I know. But he said it was going to happen either early or late, which I interpreted meaning early in 2010 or after the midterm elections.

MR. GIBBS: Well –

Q So for those three deals –

MR. GIBBS: Let me say, it would not be good for my job security to go out right now and contradict the three answers you’ve just given me on behalf of your question that the President gave you in November.

Q Even better for Bill’s. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: I would simply say that — look, the President was very clear and specific in the State of the Union –

Q I’m not saying it’s not happening. I’m trying to understand the explanation of him saying he’d prefer to have it happen and nothing being done.

MR. GIBBS: Well, Major, you just noted that a speech has been given where the Secretary — where the Secretary of Commerce — no, hold on — where the Secretary of Commerce is laying out the President’s vision for doubling exports in five years, okay? So though an individual FTA may not be mentioned in that speech, the President obviously envisions the increase of those exports through a whole host of things, including the free trade agreements that he outlined quite specifically in the State of the Union.

He did not outline and I don’t have to outline a specific timeline for that, understanding that the President has laid out a very aggressive goal on increasing exports, partly through the trade agreements that you mentioned.

Q One last — one question on security — one question, it’s important. Senator Bond wrote a letter to the President today about a conversation that we had here in the briefing room yesterday and Bill gave a couple of answers — many answers, really — on there was no political nature to the White House explanation of the dealing with Abdulmutallab. What Bond says in his letter is that the senators on the Intelligence Committee were briefed specifically earlier this week that the disclosure of Abdulmutallab’s cooperation should not be revealed because it was — he says in this letter — “Doing so would threaten ongoing efforts to stop operations the intelligence community thought were possibly happening against the United States.” He writes in this letter, “Distortion of the congressional notification process suggests that other considerations are taking precedence over keeping timely and sensitive information away from our enemies” — I know a charge you would fundamentally reject, but I want to get your response to that.

MR. GIBBS: Well, first and foremost, I don’t want to speak for Senator Bond, who, if the timeline you outlined — a Monday briefing for a Tuesday hearing — why he would in his Tuesday hearing use the statement that the subject refused to cooperate after he was Mirandized.

So I don’t want to speak for the senator who didn’t certainly use any of that information to correct what he said in public in a hearing that happens a day after.

I would say this, having read the letter. During a hearing on Tuesday, information was released that clearly showed that Mr. Abdulmutallab was indeed talking again to interrogators. For those of you that participated in the background briefing, you know that was not something that was timed purposefully.

Q Were they not supposed to reveal it?

MR. GIBBS: It was not timed purposefully. Soon after that — soon after that, media reported — we felt it important to contextualize, because many of you were e-mailing us, what this testimony meant.

I would say, again, having read the letter, no briefing is done here or anywhere in this administration where classified information is used in a place where it shouldn’t be. And I would suggest that somebody that alleges that when they know it doesn’t happen owe people an apology.

Any briefing that’s done here in order to ensure that the information that’s in the public is correct is done in conjunction with many agencies and done so so that information that is classified and shouldn’t be released isn’t released. And in this case obviously it was not.

Q So Bond owes you an apology? Bond owes the President an apology?

MR. GIBBS: No, I don’t think Bond is alleging that the President was in the briefing.

Q On the — on the — two questions.

MR. GIBBS: Hold on, hold on — just hold on, just — this is an important question, Lester.

Q Oh, sure, okay.

MR. GIBBS: The notion that somehow the White House, in conjunction with agencies involved in this interrogation, gave out classified information — yes, I think an apology on that is owed because it’s not true. And I think anybody that was involved in knowing in the Senate Intelligence Committee what was briefed and what was reported would know that that wasn’t violated.

Again, Major, I don’t want to speak for Senator Bond in why, if he was briefed on Monday, why on Tuesday, why does he say that Abdulmutallab — the result of his refusal to cooperate after he was Mirandized? Why does Senator Bond continue to knowingly not have information curb what he’s saying, or is this a bunch of politics?

Q So he owes an apology to whom?

MR. GIBBS: I think he owes an apology to the professionals in the law enforcement community and those that work in this building, not for Democrats and Republicans, but who work each and every day to keep the American people safe and would never, ever, ever knowingly release — or unknowingly release — classified information that could endanger an operation or an interrogation.

Again, I think that the reason that charge is made is only to play politics. I actually don’t believe that that — that he thinks that’s a serious allegation. I think that is — I think if you look at the letter, it’s clearly — this is about politics.

Michael.

Q What message does the President plan to deliver tonight at the two DNC fundraisers?

MR. GIBBS: I think he’ll continue to talk about some of what he’s talking to the leaders today, some of what he’s talking to — he’s talked to Democrats and Republicans about: the need to continue to push forward on an agenda to get our economy moving again, to make our country safer. He will also take some questions at one of these events from folks from Organizing For America.

Q Is he going to suggest a best way forward on his agenda or just talk about the need for it?

MR. GIBBS: Well, the best way forward is to get it through the House and the Senate.

Jeff.

Q Robert, do you know if the President has submitted a statement on behalf of his aunt, who’s in a deportation hearing for the second time today in a Boston courtroom?

MR. GIBBS: The President learned of this information, as you probably know, on the campaign trail I think in early November of 2008 when it came out. We said then and we would continue to say that everybody in this country should and must follow the law. We have not been involved at all in that hearing, and we’ll let the law play out as it should. And I would refer you to ICE for any other comments on what happens with the hearing.

Q On that question, though, he did not submit a statement to –

MR. GIBBS: No, no. He has not — this information came to light, again, I believe — I don’t have the exact date — early November of 2008 — he has not spoken with her.

Q Did he help at all with the — with her legal representation or did anyone in his family help with –

MR. GIBBS: He did not.

Q Mrs. Obama or –

MR. GIBBS: He has — he has not, the family has not. This is an issue — this is a legal issue and the President strongly believes that the law must be followed by everyone.

Q Two real quick ones, Robert. Are we going to hear from the President tomorrow about jobs?

MR. GIBBS: Yes. I think I was supposed to announce that we are — around noon tomorrow will travel to a small business in Maryland to talk about some of the issues that we’ve talked about relating to small business — tax cuts, increased lending, getting our economy moving again — and he’ll make remarks there.

Q Robert, a question on jobs –

Q I’m sorry, can I –

MR. GIBBS: I’ll get there, don’t worry. I’m going to go twice as long as Bill. (Laughter.)

Q I want to come back to the Abdulmutallab issue. You spoke of the inadvertent release of the fact that the suspect was now cooperating. Is the President upset that that happened?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t want to characterize information that –

Q Has he had any words with the people who were responsible for it having been disclosed?

MR. GIBBS: Not that I’m aware of, but I can check.

Ann.

Q The Dalai Lama is not a leader of a foreign power. What is the nature of his invitation here? Is he invited in as a personal guest?

MR. GIBBS: I can check with NSC. I don’t — the President meets with folks in the White House all the time that aren’t foreign leaders.

Q — whether it’s an Oval Office visit or whether he stops –

MR. GIBBS: Yes, and I honestly — I don’t have any information on where the meeting will take place.

Mara.

Q I have a question about OFA. One of the striking features of all of the off-year elections we’ve had so far is the absence of the — what you might call the Obama voters or emergent voters, all those people that he brought into the electorate in 2008 and that OFA was going to try to keep energized and active. I’m wondering what his message is going to be to them tonight.

MR. GIBBS: Look, I think he will talk about what we have at stake, what we — the important progress that we have made in the first year and the steps that we must continue to take on a whole host of issues that he campaigned on for more than two years. In terms of specifics for OFA I’d point you over to the DNC.

Lester, let’s take a crack.

Q Thank you so much. In his commendable concern for the unemployed, the President would be gratified if Katie Couric would share 14.5 of her widely reported $15 million salary to rescue those hundreds of CBS employees laid off, so she would still have an income similar to the President’s, wouldn’t he?

MR. GIBBS: Chip –

Q Oooh! (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: Chip is — no. Look, Lester, Lester, I’m — Lester, I’m happy to answer questions on policies that the government –

Q This is unemployment. This is unemployment.

MR. GIBBS: Lester, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to get into the compensation of a network any more than it is for me to get into your compensation.

Q In this time of such financial problems, though, why does the President believe that all taxpayers should have to pay $420 million a year, or more than $8 million a week, to subsidize public broadcasting, whether or not they watch or listen?

MR. GIBBS: Public broadcasting provides a great service to people who, in times of economic downturn, don’t listen to the radio or can’t buy cable TV in order –

Q They all listen to the radio.

MR. GIBBS: I know you think that.

Yes, go ahead.

Q Just a clarification on the Abdulmutallab issue. Did the President know in advance Abdulmutallab would be Mirandized?

MR. GIBBS: I’m sorry?

Q Did the President know in advance that Abdulmutallab would be Mirandized?

MR. GIBBS: I’ll go back and look at the timeline. Those decisions were made, as you know, by the Attorney General, by the FBI, and done so in conjunction and in accordance with agencies throughout the government.

Q I understand he was notified before they indicted him, but before the Mirandizing on Christmas Day was –

MR. GIBBS: The answer that I have is — I don’t have the timeline with me.

April.

Q Robert, on an issue that’s been since –

MR. GIBBS: Don’t worry, we’re far afield on issues today. So fire away, my friend. (Laughter.)

Q On an issue from way back in the Clinton administration, the black farmers, President Obama put in for a settlement of $1.2 billion. We understand today that the White House has been informed that a settlement is very close for the black farmers, and the Justice Department is working it out. Does this end the whole dispute after all these years if this is approved?

MR. GIBBS: April, let me get information on where the settlement is before I talk on it.

Q But wait a minute, I want to ask one thing, though. The President did propose this for the 2010 budget. How important is this for this President to rectify this situation?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, obviously — clearly, April, it’s something that’s important to him. It’s been an issue that, as you mentioned, has been worked on by the federal government now in several different administrations and dating back many years. Obviously ensuring that justice is done is important in this situation.

Bill.

Q Robert, following the loss of three American soldiers in Pakistan, can you tell us how many American troops are on the ground in Pakistan and what their mission is?

MR. GIBBS: Well, obviously there were those that were — had been invited by the Pakistanis that, along with schoolchildren, were cowardly killed by terrorists in Pakistan.

Q Do you know the extent or the number of troops? And I guess if you add the increased drone flights and the American troops on the ground, is there a third war? Are we at war in Pakistan? If not, what do you call it?

MR. GIBBS: We provide assistance to the Pakistanis as they increase their efforts in regions of their country along the Afghanistan border that harbor those that seek to do ill to Pakistanis, Afghans, and Americans.

Sam.

Q Going back to Chuck’s question, you said you were talking about a change in calculus because of the seating of Scott Brown. Can you expand on that? And particularly, can you address two nominees — Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, and Dawn Johnson to OLC — who now seem to lack the 60 votes needed to cut off cloture? How do you see this playing out?

MR. GIBBS: I don’t have specific information on each of those two nominees. I would simply point you to what the President said in the State of the Union about the change in number requiring that Democrats and Republicans work together. I think you’ve got nominees that have passed out of committee that deserve — that deserve support. I think the Senate, if they haven’t already, are going to vote on the head of the GSA, which has been held up since June, since she cleared the committee in June. The head of the GSA — I mean, a completely non-controversial appointment held up for months because of the type of partisan political games that the American people continue to be tired of.

Q Well, do you want to see actual filibusters from the Republican Party, force them to actually talk through these filibusters that they’re launching?

MR. GIBBS: What I’d like to see is that whether you agree or disagree with the nominee, that they receive an up or down vote so that they can begin to do the work of the American people on important jobs that can and should be done and filled quickly.

Q Regarding reports out of Romania today, that elements of an American defense shield might be placed there, what is your reaction to that? And also, there might be the inevitable negative reaction by Russia and other countries in that region regarding the presence of an American defense shield in Romania.

MR. GIBBS: The President outlined in September a new approach on missile defense that provided greater coverage to threats for Europe and for this country. We’re pleased that Romania has agreed to participate in that defense shield that, again, will provide greater security for those that could be threatened there or here. What the President outlined was something that would — that would work better, work faster, and provide greater levels of protection, and that’s what we’ve seen in Romania’s agreement today, and we’re quite thankful.

Thanks, guys.

Q Could you correct your statement about public broadcasting? I’m sure you didn’t mean to say it’s for people who don’t listen to the radio. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: No, no, no, I think I might be taking — I said for people that might not listen to the radio –

Q Public broadcasting is on the radio.

MR. GIBBS: Well, right. I think — right, okay.

Q It’s paid for by the government.

MR. GIBBS: Let me say, if you listen to NPR on the radio, like my mother does, like I do, you could listen to that, you could watch public television –

Q Well, Lester needs a job.

MR. GIBBS: Thanks, guys.

END
1:42 P.M. EST

Here is the complete transcript and video of press conference with White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton on Feb. 3, 2010. Transcript provided by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 4, 2010 at 11:10 a.m. Eastern.

1:23 P.M. EST

MR. BURTON: Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming.

Q It’s not too late — oh, yes, it is. (Laughter.)

MR. BURTON: So I just want to make one quick announcement before we get started –

Q There’s been a coup. (Laughter.)

MR. BURTON: Let’s everybody calm down for a second. (Laughter.)

Q We like the tie.

MR. BURTON: Tomorrow Secretary Locke will be giving a speech on a new major export initiative. The President laid out a goal for increasing exports, doubling exports in five years, and this initiative will lay out the path to get there.

He has spoken to the winners in the Illinois primary. And with that, Julie, I’d be happy to take your questions.

Q Thank you. The President said this morning that he would be open to compromise on health care. What are the areas specifically that he’d be willing to compromise on?

MR. BURTON: Well, as the President has said before, he has very specific principles that he’s laid out. He feels like we’ve gone a very far way in both the House and in the Senate. We’ve made more progress than any administration in history when it comes to health care. But he’s not a legislative technician. He’s not going to get into the nitty-gritty of what the best way forward is at this point. He’s hoping that legislators on Capitol Hill will work to iron out their differences.

Q But even he said that he wasn’t specific enough in the initial negotiations on health care. So will he be getting more specific?

MR. BURTON: Well, the President, as you know, has been very active in these negotiations, in the sense that he’s making sure that folks in the Senate, folks in the House, have a clear sense of where the President wants to go. But in terms of actually writing the legislation and getting down to the line-by-line of what the best way to reach the final agreement is, he doesn’t consider that to be his role.

Q And then on AIG, last year when the bonuses were handed out Secretary Geithner said that he wasn’t aware at that point of the extent of them, but going forward there would be more flexibility in negotiating these bonuses. Was he aware, was the administration aware of these bonuses that were just handed out? And was there any negotiation that went on into the amounts and to the extent of them?

MR. BURTON: Well, news about these bonuses is not new. What is new is that AIG got some of their employees to voluntarily give back $20 million of those bonuses. Obviously the President is frustrated and angry that Wall Street continues to have the sense that excessive compensation should reward some of the excessive risk-taking that we’ve seen over the course of the last couple of years of Wall Street, things that brought us to the brink. That’s why he hasn’t stopped fighting to make sure that we get the reforms in place in order to get these packages under control — things like say-on-pay, ways that we can do this through financial regulatory reform.

He’s also been serious about making sure that we get taxpayer money back, which is why he instituted the bank fee, to make sure that every single dime that went out from taxpayers comes back to the federal government.

Q But is there frustration, though, that no matter what he says and no matter what he seems to do at this point, these bonuses are still getting handed out?

MR. BURTON: Well, like I said before, the news about these isn’t new, but what is new is that some of that money is not going out. But is he frustrated and angry about the fact that the bonus structure remains the same that it has been? Absolutely. So the President is going to work on those items that I mentioned.

Q A couple questions, one economic, the other foreign. Moody’s, the big bond-writing agency, has issued a report saying that growing U.S. deficits threaten the country’s AAA bond rating; that the President’s budget plan is just a small step in the right direction. And is the administration taking that assessment seriously, of that possible downgrade in the country’s bond rating? And what, if anything, would the President do beyond what he’s already announced to try to address that situation?

MR. BURTON: Well, the President didn’t need Moody’s to tell him that we have a long-term fiscal problem in this country. That’s why his budget lays out ways in which we can cut the deficit in the mid to long term, but in the short term take care of some of the problems that we’ve got in this economic crisis, putting Americans back to work, helping banks get more loans out to small businesses so they can create more jobs, and things like that.

So the President is very concerned about the fiscal state of this country and he’s going to continue to work to make sure that we’re taking on the deficit.

Q But Moody’s specifically says that the President’s plan does not do enough at this time to address that problem. Is the President going to basically ignore that?

MR. BURTON: Well, the President doesn’t necessarily disagree that the plan doesn’t do enough. That’s why he thinks that we need a fiscal commission in place to help get bipartisan support for some of the elements that we need to put in place to bring down the deficit in the long term. We’ve gone a long way towards cutting spending, towards being responsible about how we’re spending taxpayers’ dollars, getting rid of duplicative programs or programs that don’t work. But there’s more that we need to do, and hopefully that fiscal commission will help to do just that.

Q On Iran, Iran said today that they had fired a rocket capable of launching a satellite. What is the administration’s level of concern at whether that technology, that capability could be devoted towards military use, even a nuclear missile program?

MR. BURTON: Obviously we’ve seen those reports and we’re still checking them out to make sure that they’re accurate. A launch like that is obviously a provocative act. But the President believes that it’s not too late for Iran to do the right thing, come to the table with the international community, and live up to its international obligations.

Q Iranian President Ahmadinejad said yesterday that Iran was in fact ready to go ahead with a deal that it had reached earlier but yet reneged on to allow its nuclear fuel to be processed abroad. Does the President see that as a serious offer or overture, and would the U.S. take advantage of that in some way? Or do they see it as being a way of diverting attention or diverting efforts towards a new round of sanctions?

MR. BURTON: Well, some of these reports have been pretty fragmentary in the sense that we haven’t seen the whole transcript and everything that he has said. But if those comments indicate some sort of change in position for Iran, then President Ahmadinejad should let the IAEA know.

Ed.

Q Two topics, first on Toyota, I wanted to ask you about the President’s Transportation Secretary today on the Hill saying that people who have Toyotas should just stop driving them. He’s since said that was a misstatement, but I wonder if you can clarify what is the White House telling the millions of Toyota owners out there across the country to do?

MR. BURTON: Well, for starters, as you know, NHTSA, the Department of Transportation, has been very active in making sure that Americans are kept safe on our roads. They’ve been forward-leaning as it relates to Toyota, making sure that they’re living up to safety standards, including encouraging them on the recall. As relates to people who have Toyotas now, you should go to the experts at the Department of Transportation who know a little more about this issue. But all Americans should really — they should get their cars checked out if they think that they might have –

Q Well, why did the Secretary say stop driving Toyotas?

MR. BURTON: — if they think that they might have a car that’s a part of the recall, then they should go get it checked out. And if it is, they should get it fixed. And if it’s not, then they should keep on doing what they’re doing.

Q But on the question of why did the Secretary say stop driving Toyotas? And is there any procedures in place here at the White House now that — the government owns a large share of GM — about having procedures in place for potential conflicts of interest in terms of commenting on other cars and dealing with these safety recalls could be a sticky issue.

MR. BURTON: For starters, the Secretary made clear what he thinks is the right thing to do, which is what I just said. As for being involved in other car companies, this is obviously something the President never wanted to get involved in, but it, of course, would not have any impact on this administration’s commitment to making sure that Americans are kept safe on our roads.

Q Can I ask you about last night’s — the information that came out from the White House about Abdulmutallab and the interrogations he’s had and what cooperation he has with the government? There was a hearing on the Hill today where various Republicans, including Mac Thornberry, were saying that this was just about political cover and that the White House was trying to leak this information selectively in order to protect the President because he has a political problem right now.

MR. BURTON: Well, I would just say that, before, there was criticism from Republicans that what we were doing wasn’t working. Now that people find out that what we’re doing is working, they’re criticizing the fact that we’re saying that what’s working is working.

Look, nothing came out last night that compromises any of the investigations or any of the interrogations that are currently ongoing. We feel like we pursued the correct course in interrogating Abdulmutallab, and through that course we’ve gotten quite a bit of information that’s been helpful both to the United States and some of our foreign partners in keeping the American people safe.

So there’s no regrets on that. But I will say that it’s Washington, and there’s a lot of politics that gets played. I was just watching an interview that was on cable news before I came out here, and you’ve got folks who are –

Q — watching cable news?

MR. BURTON: I never said that I don’t watch cable news. In fact, it’s part of my job, frankly. I watch the broadcasts, too.

But you’ve got people who are criticizing things that we’re doing in this administration, but never criticize things that happen in the administration prior that are exactly the same. And without anything changing in the interim, the only thing that I can surmise is maybe that there are some politics at play.

Q But it doesn’t seem like you’re — you’re not denying that part of the motive here was to push back on the President’s political critics. And I wonder if by revealing that some of Abdulmutallab’s family members are cooperating with the U.S. government, that could now put their lives in danger because al Qaeda and others are going to say these family members are helping the U.S. government.

MR. BURTON: Well, for starters, I will say that the reason that people were told about the success of these interviews didn’t have anything to do with politics in the sense that the determination was made here at the White House that it was important for the American people to know that we’re doing everything possible to keep the American people safe, and that these interrogations are working, that we’re getting evidence that is actionable, and that we feel like we’ve pursued the right course.

No information that was given out over the course of those briefings compromises that in any way, and we don’t feel that we’ve given any information that will harm our ability to get some more.

Q Just may I follow on this quick?

MR. BURTON: We’re just going to keep moving. Chip.

Q I’m a little confused. If the investigation was not compromised in any way by what came out last night, why didn’t it come out a long time ago? Why wait? I mean, presumably the reason for keeping this stuff secret was because it could harm the investigation. Now it comes out, and you say it didn’t harm the investigation.

MR. BURTON: Well, as you know, because it was said last night, ideally this information would not have necessarily come out.

Q Well, why, if it doesn’t harm the investigation?

MR. BURTON: But in order for the American people to know that we are doing everything possible to keep them safe, and in order for our continued success in this effort, we made the determination that it was a good idea to make sure that people knew that our sources — that our methods here were working.

Q Wouldn’t you want to share with the American people the maximum amount of information possible so long as it doesn’t hurt the investigation?

MR. BURTON: Well, obviously this President has put a premium on transparency and making sure that people know what’s happening in this White House, why he’s making the decisions that he’s making. And I would say that what happened last night falls under the rubric of making sure that people know why he’s making decisions that he’s made and the success of those decisions?

Q Why wasn’t it done a week or two or three before that?

MR. BURTON: Well, I think that you could look — you could pick apart any little piece of this process, but if you go back all the way back to December 25th of last year when this all started, we feel like, day by day, moment by moment, we’ve been successful in getting the information that we needed and telling the American people exactly what’s going on.

Q On the AIG bonuses, is the President completely helpless to do anything about this?

MR. BURTON: No, I wouldn’t say he is helpless. What he’s done is — well, for starters, on the AIG bonuses specifically, there has been success in getting some of those employees to voluntarily not take some of those bonuses to the tune of $20 million, which is no small feat. Secondly, I would say that he thinks that going forward we need to do more things to get these bonuses under control. That’s why he is for and promoting say-on-pay legislation. That’s why he is for getting some of this through financial reform. So, no, I would not say that he is helpless. I would say that he’s doing everything that he can in order to get this under control.

Q But in the past when this has happened, he has come out and voiced his outrage. He is not doing it now. Is he just saying, well, I can’t do anything about it; I’m not going to go out and voice the outrage I’ve voiced before? It’s a marked difference that he is not out there –

MR. BURTON: Well, Chip, I think you should keep in mind that your network and other folks in here have all reported on these bonuses before. For the President to go out and holler at the top of his lungs just because there is old information that is being reported again — and, in fact, the only new information that’s being reported is actually good news, I don’t think it necessarily makes sense for the President every single time to go out and say, here’s what I’m thinking. The President is focused on creating jobs in this country; he is focused on getting our economy back on track. Speaking to every question every single day doesn’t necessarily put our country on the path to where we need to be in the long term.

Q Well, it’s front-page news today. Why not be out there?

MR. BURTON: You may have noticed from this White House that we don’t necessarily just jump on every single thing that runs on the front page of newspapers.

Jake.

Q Any significance to your being here? Should we read anything into this?

MR. BURTON: You shouldn’t read a thing into it other than Gibbs had a couple of things to do.

Q What — had what?

Q Gibbs had what?

MR. BURTON: Gibbs had a couple things to do.

Q It’s not an audition?

Q Will you get a bonus? (Laughter.)

MR. BURTON: No. Unfortunately, as you may know that there’s a salary freeze in place here.

Q Were Admiral Blair and FBI Director Mueller not supposed to say in the hearing yesterday that Abdulmutallab was still talking? Was that inadvertent, sharing that information?

MR. BURTON: You would have to ask them about what was inadvertent and not inadvertent. We feel like we’ve done a good job at sharing with the American people what we’re doing to keep them safe and we’re going to continue to do that.

Q But my impression is that the reason that the briefing happened last night was because this information was starting to get out there, so the administration wanted to share the story to correct the record, but also because the information had already been disclosed that he was cooperating again. And my impression is that Blair and Mueller were the ones who let that information be known, unless I’m — unless there’s some other story –

MR. BURTON: Well, as I said, there’s a lot of information that’s getting out there from all corners. There was an importance in contextualizing some of that information that was out there from the White House. But I don’t agree with your characterization of their testimony. But we do feel like we did a good job of letting folks know exactly what we’re up to.

Q I don’t think I characterized anything, I just asked if they’d –

MR. BURTON: It seemed like characterization.

Q Is that right? Well, the other question I have has to do with a statement President Obama made last week when he was speaking at the Republican retreat, the House Republican Conference. He said — he was referring to the stray cats and dogs in the health care legislation. And he said as examples — he said, “We said from the start it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people, you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it; that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in the decision-making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.” And he said that you guys were in the process of eliminating those provisions. What are those provisions?

MR. BURTON: Not sure. I’ll have to get back to you.

Chuck.

Q A couple questions. First, when you say he called the winners of the Illinois primary, you mean I assume the Senate race, he isn’t — not the governor’s race or anything?

MR. BURTON: He called Giannoulis and Quinn.

Q He called — not Mark Kirk? Should we assume he called Mark Kirk?

MR. BURTON: No, he did not call Mark Kirk. I think there is other calls on the schedule, but he was not called.

Q Going back to some of the facts that came out in last night’s briefing, what do you say to the criticism that says, okay, you guys started to get information from him after January 17th, sometime last week, but there obviously was a four-week gap where you got no information from him, and so the argument is you didn’t use every tool in the arsenal that you had to get information? And I guess there still hasn’t been a clear sort of response from you guys as to why you didn’t use every tool you could have used even in that, say, 24-hour period before he was Mirandized.

MR. BURTON: I’m not sure what you mean by not using every tool.

Q Getting other interrogators into the room that weren’t the FBI, inviting other members of the intelligence community.

MR. BURTON: Well, I would say that the President put his trust very much in the professionals who have been tracking them and fighting al Qaeda for the last 10 years. And it was their determination that this course of action would be the best one to extract the most amount of information. And what we’ve seen there over the course of these past weeks is that that determination was correct and that we have gotten quite a bit of usable information that has helped across the intelligence community to keep the American people safe.

So I think it’s easy to sort of armchair-quarterback this thing and say you could have done this, you could have done that, why didn’t you do this. What we know is that because of what we did, we were successful. And so the President is pleased with the results.

Q But the criticism — forget the politics of this a minute — one of the criticisms is, okay, but there was a four-week gap. And, obviously, time is of the essence on all of these — on all of this information. So how do you know you wouldn’t have gotten this information sooner had you brought in another interrogator?

MR. BURTON: Well, how do you know anything could have happened in the past differently? But what we do know –

Q But you didn’t try — you didn’t use that — other interrogators. We know –

MR. BURTON: What we do know is that the way that we did this, step by step, methodically working to get every piece of information that we possibly could, that we were able to do it.

Now, there is criticism out there from folks on Capitol Hill and not on Capitol Hill who say that we could have done this differently. The President’s view is that given the choice between politicians in Washington and the men and women who have been fighting this battle for the last 10 years against al Qaeda, he is going to talk to those folks who have been fighting al Qaeda. And I think that the results speak for themselves.

Q Is there any indication, though, that — are you saying this is always going to be the — be the way that you handle this, or could there be a next time where maybe before you Mirandize you would bring in other members of the intelligence community?

MR. BURTON: Let’s just talk about this issue of Mirandizing for a second, because a lot of you probably saw the e-mail that Robert Gibbs sent out. And in it, it explains the FBI’s current policy as it relates to Miranda. And in its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, it says clearly: “Within the United States, Miranda warnings are required to be given prior to custodial interviews.” Now, this is the standard by which the FBI has given — has Mirandized suspects over the course of the last years.

Q Wait, but even the FBI had made the determination not to Mirandize him immediately because there was — determined that there might be an immediate threat.

MR. BURTON: Right. In consultation with the folks who were right there on the ground with the U.S. Attorneys in Detroit, with folks here in Washington D.C., they conducted this in the way that they thought was best in order to Mirandize them. So they did ultimately Mirandize him. And the notion that going forward we’ve made a wide variety of changes on how we would conduct this investigation or how we’d conduct this interrogation, I, A, think that’s premature. I mean, this President does think that after any event, we should go back and see if there’s ways that you can do things better or differently. But I think we’re a little premature at this point. But I would just say that it has been successful. The way that we conducted this investigation, the information that we’ve been able to get has been a great help.

Q Can you quickly tell us why Tim Shriver is meeting with Rahm Emanuel?

MR. BURTON: I believe it’s to talk about issues of mutual concern and a little bit about the incident that happened in August that was reported previously.

Q And what is — what can you tell us that the Chief of Staff is going to say to Mr. Shriver?

MR. BURTON: I don’t know. He is — as you know, he has apologized. And we’re all just moving forward.

Sir.

Q Bill, tell me how things are going with respect to Iran and pursuing these sanctions against them?

MR. BURTON: Well, I would just say that Iran needs to live up to its obligations to the international community. But as a result of some of our policies, we have seen successes. We’ve seen that the international community is more united than it ever has been before in this region, Iran is more isolated from the international community than it has been before, and the nation of Iran is divided internally about what the best way forward is. So our view is that the door is still open. There is an offer on the table, and there’s still time for Iran to do the right thing. But, obviously, they have not just yet. But if they don’t, we’ll apply all pressure that we can to make sure that they do.

Q How much more time, though? You said December 31st was the time. And also, how much leverage do you really have over China, given the tensions that have erupted in the last week or two?

MR. BURTON: Well, on time frame — I don’t have a new time frame for you necessarily, but I will say that obviously this is an issue that’s deeply important to the President, and we do think that we’ve had an impact on.

As it relates to China, the President’s view is that our relationship with them is mature enough that on issues where we disagree, we can disagree but work together to come to agreement. And we can also work with them on issues of mutual concern, like nuclear non-proliferation, the global economy, climate change and things like that.

Q I’m talking about sanctions on Iran –

MR. BURTON: Well, that’s probably a better question for China.

Elizabeth.

Q This event today, the Q&A with Senate Democrats, Bill, what does the White House see — is this akin to what happened in Baltimore with the GOP last week? And also, what’s the ultimate usefulness of these Senate Democrats who are running for reelection questioning the President?

MR. BURTON: Well, the President’s view is that we ought to be as transparent as we can, and this meeting with Senate Democrats was an opportunity to, in open fashion, talk to them about some of the challenges that we have, some of the things that we need to work together to get done, and take their questions on a variety of issues. I don’t know if it was Senator Reid or another senator picked who asked the questions, but it was a pretty productive exchange. And I think that everybody felt like folks got a lot out of it.

Q Did this combined with Baltimore represent sort of a new approach by the White House to get his message out?

MR. BURTON: We’re certainly more — these meetings are certainly more on camera than they used to be. So, in that sense, it is new.

Q Can I follow up on that?

MR. BURTON: Sure, Dan.

Q Thanks. As you might know, there’s a coalition of right and left bloggers, politicos, including –

MR. BURTON: Cable pundits? (Laughter.)

Q — people who watch cable TV and people who don’t, including people who used to work in the administration and people who worked on the Obama campaign, who are asking both the President and the congressional Republican leaders in the House and Senate to hold these question sessions, to commit to holding them on a regular basis. Would the White House do that?

MR. BURTON: Well, David Axelrod has talked about this a little, and what he had to say was that part of the reason that Friday was so successful with the GOP conference is that it was for the spontaneity that occurred there. And it’s going to be hard to sort of recreate that spontaneity that happened.

Now, the President thinks that there is space for more open dialogue, more — and he’s going to look for more opportunities to do things on camera and have open discussions on important issues. But in terms of a regularly scheduled event, I don’t have anything for you on that.

Mark.

Q Bill, when the President at the town meeting yesterday said he hopes that he can get health care enacted this year, is this year his new and latest deadline? Is there anything before that that he wants to set, or is he going to give this Congress the whole year to get it done?

MR. BURTON: I think the urgency of getting health care done because of the impact that the costs have on our federal deficit, that it has on small and large businesses, that it has on individuals, didn’t go away, and the President wants to get it done as soon as possible. We don’t have a specific deadline for what the next phase in this is, though.

Q Are you able to say in what way he expects it might be enacted, with a House vote or reconciliation or something of that nature?

MR. BURTON: No, he has not said.

Roger.

Q Bill, back to Ray LaHood this morning, did the administration ask Mr. LaHood to tone down the original statement?

MR. BURTON: Not that I know of. I think that he said something that he felt could be misconstrued, and so he cleared it up in that press conference that you saw.

Q The White House has confidence in Mr. LaHood?

MR. BURTON: You bet.

Q All right. On another question, you mentioned Locke is doing a speech on tomorrow on the trade accords. Does the administration plan to renegotiate those trade accords before sending them to the Hill?

MR. BURTON: You’ll have to wait for the speech to see what the trade policy that he’s talking all about is. This might surprise you, but I don’t have any news for you on renegotiating trade agreements today.

Q The administration has had some trouble with the Colombia accord before.

MR. BURTON: Well, people come to this from different places. I think folks agree that exports help the economy, they help create American jobs. And the President is committed to doubling exports over the course of the next five years. But nobody’s going to agree on a specific trade accord just as it sits, so the President is going to continue to work with folks to make sure that we get to a good agreement that works for American workers and works for getting trade going in an aggressive way.

Q On Pakistan, there were three U.S. troops killed this morning. Is there any comment on that? Do you guys have any more details on that?

MR. BURTON: Well, obviously our hearts go out to those families of the troops who were killed there today. I also saw that some of the girls who were at the school where they were, were killed as well, which shows the heinousness of the type of criminal that would inflict that sort of pain and suffering on folks there.

The President of the United States condemns these attacks. They only act to underscore the threat that these extremists in Pakistan are to both Pakistan and to the United States. And we’re committed to rooting them out.

Q One other question. The biofuels thing this afternoon, there’s a report coming out saying that the U.S. is failing to meet the biofuels target set in the ‘07 energy legislation. Why is that?

MR. BURTON: I don’t have anything for you on that. There’s a call at 4:00 p.m. You should hop on where we’ll get into some granularity of biofuel policy.

Major.

Q Yes — do you want to leave?

MR. BURTON: No, I’m not leaving. I’m going to stick around.

Q How would you evaluate the criticism from some that, on Abdulmutallab, yes, there is more information now, but it might be in the context of plea negotiations, and it might have been extracted before the United States, from a judicial position — had offered things on the table legally to get him to talk more?

MR. BURTON: I think that’s actually addressed in Gibbs’
e-mail that that’s not on the table.

Q None of that is –

MR. BURTON: Right.

Q That there is no conversation whatsoever occurring within the context of a plea deal?

MR. BURTON: I mean, I’m not going to say what conversations are occurring or not occurring, but if you look at the e-mail that Gibbs sent you just a couple hours ago, it said that there’s no plea agreement on the table.

Q And therefore, all these conversations could have happened earlier, but they’re just happening now in a different context? I mean, what’s causing him to talk now in ways that he didn’t before?

MR. BURTON: Well, I mean, we went through some of the — we went through some of the ways that he agreed to cooperate in terms of getting his family involved, which was helpful, and he’s just decided that the best course of action is to cooperate and provide this information that he’s decided to provide.

Q On his own? Okay.

MR. BURTON: But this is from Gibbs’ e-mail: “Abdulmutallab has not been offered anything. The Department of Justice takes his cooperation into consideration, but he’s been offered nothing.”

Q Not formally or informally.

Q Can I just hop in for one quick question?

MR. BURTON: Sure.

Q I’m sorry, Major, but whether it’s Brennan’s letter to the Hill, Holder’s letter to McConnell today, the briefing yesterday, there’s been a much more aggressive case being made by the White House and the administration on how you guys are waging the war on terror and fighting for national security. What changed in the last couple days to prompt this reaction?

MR. BURTON: I don’t know if I necessarily agree that it’s a much more aggressive case being made. The President has made speeches about Afghanistan; Holder has been out there; Brennan has been out there. I think that we’ve seen a pretty coordinated effort to make sure that the American people know what’s happening inside the administration and how hard the President is working to keep them safe.

Q I mean, but do you feel that there was something that was not getting out that needed to get out more forcefully, recently, maybe since Massachusetts, or to the broader criticism you’ve been receiving, or over the Abdulmutallab case itself? Because Jake is right — if you look at these — at the body of communication, it’s not only different in volume but it’s different in content and tone than what we’ve seen over the past month or so.

MR. BURTON: Well, obviously this is a change in debate. Obviously this is a change in debate, and this administration is doing everything it can to both make sure the American people know exactly what’s happening inside the administration and also to answer questions that people might have or challenges that might come about the way that we’re doing things. But I don’t know that I necessarily agree that we’re out there more, or more aggressively, because if you consider the fact that ever since this incident on Christmas Day, we have been very aggressive in taking this on.

Q So you guys, were you seething? Did you say, day after day we’re getting hit by unfair criticism; we got to answer it?

MR. BURTON: Well, obviously nobody likes to take on criticism, but it’s Washington. And when you get a bunch of politicians talking about issues, and you get a bunch of folks who flip-flop from one part of an issue to another part of an issue, but there’s no reason for them to have done it except that there happens to be a Democratic President as opposed to a Republican President in place, the President’s view is that national security ought to be more important than an individual’s job security, if they’re a politician.

And so, no, I wouldn’t necessarily characterize how we feel the way that you have. But we have a job to do, to make sure the American people know everything that we’re doing to keep them safe, and we’re going to continue to do that.

Q Would you say the questions that were raised that you’ve begun to answer with more information, that you’ve said here at this briefing, were raised simply for political reasons or because people were legitimately, though politicians, were curious?

MR. BURTON: Well, I don’t know that I’m in a position to render a verdict on the motives necessarily, but the questions were raised and we answered them.

Q Can you — just a couple things. The Super Bowl party, do you have a –

MR. BURTON: Nope.

Q Okay. (Laughter.) Well, there is one, yes. But you’ve got no details.

MR. BURTON: Yes.

Q The Tuesday meeting with the –

MR. BURTON: Bipartisan bicameral leadership.

Q Yes. That’s the monthly –

MR. BURTON: Yes.

Q No particular agenda, just –

MR. BURTON: Well, I’m sure the agenda will be taking on some of the urgent challenges we face: jobs, the economy, what we can do on health care. So I think that some of those things will certainly be on the agenda.

Q One last thing. Tim Shriver is here, but other groups are here. It seems that there’s something else that needs to be communicated than just directly to Tim Shriver about what Rahm said and what was quoted in the papers last week.

MR. BURTON: What’s the question?

Q What else needs to be — why bring in this larger group? Is there something the administration is trying to get across to this larger group of interested parties on this issue as a result of what was published about what Rahm said last August?

MR. BURTON: This is something that happened in August. It’s something that Rahm has apologized for. Issues of derogatory comments that make fun of one group or pit one against the other don’t do anything to further our political discourse, and for that Rahm apologized and we’re looking to move forward here.

Q Did the President ask him to apologize?

MR. BURTON: I don’t know what conversations Rahm had with the President about that.

Fletcher.

Q Thanks, Bill. Tuesday’s meeting seems to harken back to some of the President’s early outreach efforts in the early days of this administration. And after those, as we know, Democrats went it alone on stimulus and health care. What gives him any optimism that things will be different now? Does he get any indication from Republicans that they want to play?

MR. BURTON: Well, if you listen to what Republicans have been saying, they say that they want to work with the President on the economy and on health care. They’re obviously still attacking in ways that they’ve attacked in the past, but if you look at some of the elections that have happened over the course of the last year, what the American people have said is they want folks in Washington to work together. The President firmly believes that the way that we can get to the best solutions and the best ideas is by working with Democrats and Republicans to get it done.

So it may be difficult to get that done in Washington in this context. It may not happen overnight. But the President is committed to working with Democrats and Republicans. But as he said in the State of the Union, if Republicans won’t come along, he’s got a duty to govern. So he’s going to do everything that he can in order to take on the things that the American people sent him here to take on.

Q Has he seen any action on the Republican side to give him any sense of optimism here, or is it just what he said?

MR. BURTON: We’re just — you got to chip away at bipartisanship one little bit at a time.

Q Okay, and one other thing, on your other point. Is there some concern in the administration that somehow this idea that you’re not doing everything possible to keep the American people safe is something that’s taking hold in the population? Is that a concern?

MR. BURTON: Well, the President wants to make sure that people know what the administration is doing, and he’s making an effort to do that.

But if you — I hesitate to do this, but the only data that we have that shows how the American people are viewing these issues is public opinion polling, and public opinion polling shows, in poll after poll after poll, that the American people think that we are — that the President is doing a good job to keep them safe; that he is effectively conducting this fight against extremists. And all we can do is everything we can to make sure that they know exactly what’s going on.

Q So like the point-by-point pushback on Collins and things like that, that’s just — that doesn’t — that’s not rooted in some concern?

MR. BURTON: I mean, the only data that we have are polls that say that the American people are supporting the way that we’re conducting this. It would sort of get at the premise of your question.

Ann.

Q Does the President think that Toyota should be hit with civil penalties for a slow reaction?

MR. BURTON: I think this is — the issue of what ought to happen to Toyota is something that’s — that is being discussed over at NHTSA and the Department of Transportation. I’d refer you there.

Q Would it ever reach the President’s level, something like that, considering the safety implications for drivers?

MR. BURTON: Well, at this point, this is — for starters, the President thinks it is critically important that the American people on our roads and highways are safe. And he thinks that the Department of Transportation and NHTSA have done a good job at pushing Toyota to make sure that people are informed about what’s going on, to make sure that those vehicles were recalled. And going forward, the place to get answers on what comes next are the Department of Transportation and NHTSA?

Mara.

Q All right, I just have questions about the Senate Democrats meeting. You said that last Friday was successful because it was so spontaneous.

MR. BURTON: In part.

Q Pardon?

MR. BURTON: In part.

Q In part because it was so spontaneous. How spontaneous do you think today was? (Laughter.)

MR. BURTON: Well, in fairness, we did tell them we were coming.

Q I’m talking about the session itself, not the fact you showed up.

MR. BURTON: I think that the — if you looked at the questions, they weren’t softballs. They were tough questions that the President took on, and they had a good exchange.

Q Okay, okay. My other question — I mean, today was a real kind of — you know, he really appealed to them to practice conviction politics instead of survival politics or calculation politics, and talked about the importance of leading and pushing forward and getting health care done. Yet you seem to be kind of almost reverting to default mode by saying he’s not going to get into the nitty-gritty or talk about the best way forward. What I’m wondering is, does he consider the completion — and of course the Senate Democrats are one of the main reasons health care didn’t get done, because they didn’t finish it in a year — but does the President consider the completion of the health care legislation to be a measurement of whether Democrats can lead or not?

MR. BURTON: Well, I think that the President sees health care as something that we desperately need to take on for a variety of reasons that don’t have anything to do with politics, and that includes the cost to the American family, the cost to American businesses, and what it’s doing to our federal deficit. So pundits can make the determination of the sort that you’re asking.

But if you look over the course of the last year, the President is proud of the accomplishments that he was able to make with this Congress, from everything from passing a Recovery Act that helped to create about 2 million jobs; passing Lilly Ledbetter to make sure that folks get — that women get equal pay for equal work; signing SCHIP into law — on and on and on. The President, I think, is pretty pleased with the amount of progress that we’ve been able to make, but he’s not satisfied that we’ve done enough.

Q But when you were asked about when he wants — you said he wants it done as soon as possible, he kind of said that all last year and it didn’t get done. And one of the criticisms that’s been raised is maybe he didn’t crack the whip early enough or didn’t really kind of heave it over the finish line himself earlier. I’m wondering if he’s planning to do anything different this year.

MR. BURTON: I wish I had some news for you on this. The President has made clear what his principles are. He’s obviously talked to Senate Democrats today. He talked to House Republicans last week. He’s going to talk to the leadership in both parties next week. And he’s going to keep working to make progress on it. It’s too important not to.

Q Can I just ask on Iran? You skipped over me.

MR. BURTON: I shouldn’t have. Go ahead.

Q All right. On Hamas, they had some very virulent anti-Israeli cartoons. In fact the Daily Show did a good job of publicizing them yesterday. Has anybody in this administration aware of these “cartoons” and do you — to affect policy in anyway?

MR. BURTON: I haven’t seen the cartoons and I missed the episode of the Jon Stewart Show, so I’ll refer you to our folks in the NSC. I’m sure Hammer might have something for you.

Q Well, I have one on Iran, too. Some of the people being executed in Iran are as young as 18 years old. Does that harden the administration’s attitude to hasten the sanctions towards Iran?

MR. BURTON: Look, the President condemns those executions. He thinks that it marks a new low in their — in where they are on human rights. He thinks that if they want to not be isolated from the international community, if they want to not keep isolating themselves even more from the Iranian people, they need to respect universal human rights.

Christine.

Q Bill, did the President call Pat Quinn to congratulate him on the win?

MR. BURTON: Yes.

Q Did he also talk to Dan Hines?

MR. BURTON: I’m not sure.

Q Is he among the Democratic leaders who would like to see Dan Hines concede the race and avoid a –

MR. BURTON: I haven’t talked to him about it.

Q Does he have a feeling — is he concerned at all about whether a protracted recount could –

MR. BURTON: Not that I know about, but I haven’t talked to him about it.

Caren.

Q Thanks, Bill. This morning the President expressed frustration over the fact that some of his nominees have been subject to a hold for an unrelated piece of business. But as you know, this was a tactic he used to use in the Senate. For example, he had a blanket hold on all EPA nominees because he was upset that the agency hadn’t put out I think it was a lead paint ruling. So how do you square that just, you know, his record using somebody else’s tactics with what he said this morning?

MR. BURTON: The President thinks that we are in serious times. And in order to take on the challenges that we’ve got, he needs a full team. It’s all hands on deck right now. And some of the things that have been held up — like let’s take some nominees, for example, and there was an unemployment insurance last month. It’s something that was held up for a long time that was wildly popular; it ended up getting passed 88-10 or so. There’s no point in holding things up that people support just to make a point that isn’t helping the American people. So we’re trying to make as much progress as we can here, and to do that we’re going to need a full team.

Q So as far as why it’s different now as opposed to then is just because the situation is a lot more serious with the economy and –

MR. BURTON: What I’m saying is that people are holding up nominees who are actually really popular and that the United States Senate would support given the opportunity. And we need a full team in order to take on the things that we’ve got going here.

Sam.

Q Yes, I’d like to take one crack at the health care angle. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has essentially said that she could the votes to pass a bill provided that she had the guarantees that the Senate would act either first or during to amend its legislation. What is the White House doing to convey that message to Senate Democrats who, as the President rightly noted, need to act if health care is to pass?

MR. BURTON: Well, I think that Speaker Pelosi has made her views clear, and I think that she’s probably communicating her own message to Senate Democrats.

Q So you’re not helping her out communicating that message?

MR. BURTON: Well, I think that if Speaker Pelosi wants to talk to Senate Democrats, she knows where to find them, and I assume that she is indeed talking to them.

The President, as I’ve said, has made his principles clear here on health care and thinks that we need to finish the work so that we can get health reform signed into law.

Stephen.

Q Iraq is going to allow 500 people (inaudible) Baathist party in the elections in March. What role did the White House play in the last few days — I know you’ve been working on this for a while — to bring this about? And do you see now that there’s a chance for credible elections in March?

MR. BURTON: I’m going to have to get back to you on that.

Thank you. All right, guys. Thanks.

END
2:05 P.M. EST

See how President Obama spent a recent day in Lorain County, Ohio…from the point of view of his Advance team. His staff work diligently to keep the day moving, from a surprise lunch at a local diner to a tour of a football helmet assembly plant.

Here’s the entire video of the press conference on Feb. 1, 2010 with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Topics were the budget, deficits, recession, unemployment, China, etc.

On his show yesterday, Glenn Beck ran through a series of photographs from the Chairman Mao regime and read from Mao’s “red book.” Beck said that several people working in the White House are Maoists because of a speech White House Communications Director Anita Dunn gave in June when she said Chairman Mao was one of her favorite philosophers.

“We’ve found all kinds of crazy people that work at the White House,” Beck said. “I think we found two or three that worship Chairman Mao.”

He didn’t say who the other alleged Maoists are, but Beck’s certain that Dunn is one of them. However, according to Dunn, her reference to Mao was an attempt at irony.

Here’s what she said to a high school graduation class at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, MD:

A lot of you have a great deal of ability. A lot of you work hard. Put them together and that answers the why not question. There is usually not a good reason. And then the 3rd lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers. Mao Tse-tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is you’re going to make choices, you’re going to challenge, you’re going to say why not. You’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here’s the deal, these are your choices, they’re no one else’s.

In 1947, when Mao Tse-tung was being challenged within his own party, on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side and people said how can you win, how can you do this, how can you do this against all the odds against you, and Mao Tse-tung said “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.”

Think about that for a second, you don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices in the past. OK. It is about your choices in your path, you fight your own war. You lay out your own path. You figure out what is right for you. You don’t let external definition how good you are internally. You fight your own war. You let them fight their’s. Everybody has their own path.

And then Mother Theresa who upon receiving a letter from a fairly affluent young person you asked her whether she could come over and help with that orphanage in Calcutta responded very simply, “Go find your own Calcutta.” Go find your own Calcutta. Fight your own path. Go find the thing that is unique to you. The challenge is actually your’s – not somebody else’s challenge.

Clearly Dunn used Mao and Mother Theresa to make her point that these young high school graduates should not be discouraged by what others are saying, but to pave their own path regardless of the difficulties they may face. Beck is purposely being intellectually dishonest by pretending Dunn is a Maoist. Referring to Mao in a speech does not mean that Dunn is a Maoist – she also mentioned Mother Theresa. Does that means she worships at the altar of Mother Theresa too?

In his show, he ran through a series of photos of the Mao regime trying to make his point that the Obama administration wants to implement a Maoist communist plot to overthrow the US republic.

“I thought, you know, if you want to see the future, let’s look at the past. Who are these people idolizing? And I came up with a few pictures. Words? Come on. I just decided to look at some of the pictures first,” Beck said.

The photos were of Mao firing a gun, Mao celebrating Stalin’s 70th birthday, Mao replacing workers’ names with numbers and a Mao torture technique. Beck ended this segment by showing a photo of a party at the White House and saying, “This is just a picture of a party at the White House the other night.”

Beck then read from Mao’s “red book,” which says, “Oppose extravagant eating and drinking and pay attention to thrift in the economy.”

So wait, the Obama administration is filled with Maoist – who are opposed to extravagant eating and drinking – and yet, there’s a photo of an extravagant party at the White House?

Here’s the video segment from Beck’s show Oct. 21, 2009

Fox News and the Obama administration don’t get along. White House officials have accused the cable news network of being an extension of the Republican Party. Fox News commentators fire back that Obama is a communist seeking to destroy the country by turning the US into a Chairman Mao style fascist state.

Let’s set aside the fact that 99 percent of all cable news, no matter which network you watch, is worthless. It’s a mix of “balloon boy” stories and opinion journalism masquerading as news. The stories that are covered are often, wrong, incomplete or in the case of “balloon boy” irrelevant.

But what about Fox News? Should the White House be telling journalists to stop paying attention to the network with the highest ratings?

One White House official told Politico that the ACORN story only became big news because Fox News covered it “breathlessly for weeks on end.”

According to the Politico story the White House official cautioned journalists about following Fox’s lead.

“Let’s make sure that we keep perspective on what are the most important stories, and what’s being driven by a network that has a perspective. Being able to make that point has been important.”

Some journalists and media critics have said that a direct attack on a specific news organization can have a chilling effect. That is, of course, if journalists take their marching orders from the White House. Otherwise, it seems unlikely to have any such impact.

But nonetheless some veteran reporters are concerned.

“I can never remember a White House urging news organizations to boycott other news organizations. That strikes me as unprecedented,” Thomas DeFrank told Politico. DeFrank has covered eight presidents and is currently the bureau chief at the New York Daily News.

However, it’s worth noting the dramatic shift in journalism over the last five years. The old notion of objectivity has been tossed overboard for the more Hunter S. Thompson gonzo-style reporting. Whether that’s good or bad – it’s here to stay. And as anyone who’s watched Fox’s news coverage, they’re all for it.

And let’s not forget that the battle between the Fox News and the White House is more about politics than the sanctity of journalism. The White House rightly sees Fox News as the enemy. When you look at their coverage during the Bush administration, there’s was nary a word about a White House that kept a tight lid on its message. And anytime a news organization ran a scathing story about the Bush administration, it was labeled a radical left-wing propaganda machine by Fox News commentators.

But now, Glenn Beck – the biggest loudmouth on Fox News – can’t stop talking about Obama’s Mao-ist agenda to silence journalists. He’s outraged that the president would try to “control the media.” Evidently this is the first time Beck has paid attention to presidential politics. There’s never been a president who didn’t try to control the media – it’s all part of the game.

The reason the White House is taking shots at Fox News is to garner some love from their base. Liberals are dismayed by Obama’s lack of progress on nearly every issue he campaigned on: Gitmo, the Iraq War, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, health care reform, the economy, the environment, transparency and the list goes on. This attack on Fox News is an attempt to show progressives that the Obama administration has the stones to stand up and fight. The question is whether this is a fight worth fighting.

–
Source: Politico “White House: Media shouldn’t follow Fox” by Josh Gerstein and Mike Allen Oct. 20, 2009

For some reason the White House has picked a fight with Fox News. On Sunday, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said that the cable news network was not in fact a news organization but rather an extension of the Republican Party.

“The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” Dunn told CNN’s Howard Kurtz. “Take their talking points and put them on the air. Take their opposition research and put them on the air, and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Fox News commentators jumped at the chance to strike back at the White House.

Glenn Beck blew Dunn’s remarks way out of proportion. On his show, he took out a tourist map of Manhattan, drew a circle around Fox News headquarters, he then played army with military toys, putting a fence around the Fox building and encircling it with tanks and missiles.

“We’ve got the missiles pointed right a Fox,” Beck screamed into the camera. “And let’s make sure that everybody understands this is the enemy America. Everything that’s going wrong with the country – happening right here.”

Dunn didn’t say that Fox News is responsible for everything that’s going wrong with the country. What she said was that Fox News is a “wing of the Republican Party.” In true Beck fashion, he’s creating the illusion that the White House is actively seeking to destroy Fox News – to get them off the air. Dunn didn’t say anything about stopping Fox News from broadcasting.

“Free speech under attack. Sure. In the coming days,” Beck assured his audience. “I’m going to show you how this administration is consolidating power, and that you’re right to speak out, and your right to hear simply opposing voices – people who are asking legitimate questions – all under assault.”

Bill O’Reilly chimed in during his Talking Points Memo segment. He said the White House is attacking Fox News because they’re the only cable news network willing to ask tough questions. O’Reilly said that Fox News is “fair and balanced” and he challenged anyone to prove him wrong.

The other news networks, such as CNN and NBC, O’Reilly said “clearly favored” Obama over McCain during the election and NBC continues to give the president good coverage. O’Reilly demanded evidence that the network’s hard news is anything but honest, objective and fair and balanced.

Well, it just so happens, that last month, Fox News producer Heidi Noonan was caught on tape rallying the crowd while reporter Griff Jenkins delivered some of that “fair and balanced” hard news coverage O’Reilly was bloviating about.

Oh and the 9/12 rally was sponsored and promoted by Fox News and Glenn Beck in particular. The network’s commentators over-reported the turnout, and even ran a newspaper ad chastising the other news networks for not covering the event, even though they actually did.

In case you missed it … You paid to have people tortured and possibly murdered. Your tax dollars went to train CIA employees on how to torture people. And according to recently declassified documents, it appears some prisoners died in the process. What’s more disturbing is that since President Obama has not clearly reinstated a prohibition on torture, you can only assume it’s still happening today.

If I were a member of the elite White House press corpse (yeah I know how to spell corps) I’d ask Obama why he doesn’t unequivocally state that his administration will not torture people. Sure, former President Bush said point blank: “We do not torture.” That didn’t mean much, but we have to assume that if Obama is specifically not prohibiting torture, he’s doing so to avoid lying, and thus by getting him to state he won’t torture, that could mean something. I know, it’s stupid wishful thinking.

The issue for Obama is that while he may not be using CIA employees to torture and murder people, he continues to pursue the Bush policy of rendition. Rendition is the process of sending prisoners to countries that aren’t bound by international treaties like the Geneva Convention that bans torture. What’s great about rendition is that the Egyptians or Syrians are doing all the torturing and stuff like that, so we don’t have to. Outsourcing.

Obama claims that he’s monitoring the treatment of these prisoners to make sure they aren’t tortured, but if they aren’t being tortured, why bother sending them there at all?

But like I said, I’m not a member of the elite White House press corpse.