Obama: "All the choices we've made have been the right ones"

Ah, the days of old, when a more humble Obama rated his performance as a "B+."

Now?

A+, baby. Do they give A++'s, or is that just something from A Christmas Story?

He does at first avoid grading himself...

Tapper: You have gotten a lot passed though, much of your agenda has been passed -- the stimulus, health care, Wall Street reform -- so we're sitting in a state right now where a majority of the voters disapprove of your handling of the economy and we're going to Virginia later, where a majority of the voters do not thing you deserve to be re-elected. We're sitting in a school, what grade would you give yourself?

Obama: Well, you know I'm not going to give myself a grade.

Tapper: Not even a midterm?

Obama: Other than "incomplete" because the work that we started is not yet done, but the fact is that the American people are rightly frustrated over what they see as a system in which responsibility is not always rewarded, where people who have done the right thing all their lives still seem to be struggling, that sense that the American dream is slipping away. I think that is something that helped get me elected but it hasn't been entirely solved yet, and in some ways it's gotten tougher for folks because of the financial crisis.

And I think most people understand that we didn't get into this problem overnight and we're not going to solve it overnight, but I think that after two-and-a-half, three years of elevated unemployment, home values declining substantially, people feeling as if everything they've worked for is still leaving them vulnerable and not having the security they've counted on, it's not surprising that people are feeling frustrated and as president of the United States, even though they don't think I caused the problem, they're still going to feel a justifiable impatience in terms of why aren't we able to get this in a better place.

What I say to the American people is that we are moving in the right direction, it is going to take time to heal all the problems that exist out there, the health care bill that we passed is absolutely the right thing to do but it's going to take awhile before it's even fully implemented, much less taken full effect, and you start seeing health care inflation stabilize.

...he later notes he got a perfect score.

I guarantee it's going to be a close election because the economy is not where it wants to be and even though I believe all the choices we've made have been the right ones, we're still going through difficult circumstances.

In Obama's mind, he has made all the right choices. He has done what liberal/socialist economic theory says he should have done.

The fact that this has only led to further pain isn't an indictment of the theory, but rather of reality, which is misbehaving. The theory holds.

posted by Ace at 02:16 PM

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