An Obama Economy
CBS
Transcript
back again with our panel of distinguished authors this campaign started out being about iraq suddenly it wasn't about iraq anymore it's about the economy i want to talk about iraq in a minute but bob the fact that we face these severe financial problems right now and this what looks like an economic downturn coming is this going to doesn't obama have to set some priorities here there are just simply going to be some things he's not going to be able to do here in the beginning and let yet you have these presents well you talk about an economic downturn i think it's really a crisis and the movement was to save the banks in the financial system now and what obama has said and that i think the chief challenge he's got now is to prevent a further decline and then to deliver something to the middle class he talks about also the people who've lost jobs lost their homes i mean all of this trillions of dollars in you know bailouts and guarantees and so forth i mean here just the other day citigroup got a guarantee of over 300 billion dollars of troubled assets that's half the defense budget of this country so now the people who are on the line who are feeling the pain are going to have to in a you know the coming months feel up this administration is delivering some protections and something for them in terms of jobs and keeping their homes and bob i think that you're you're you might actually be understating the problem because look this is a monumental economic challenge because first of all you have simultaneously a cyclical recession the meltdown of the financial system a drying up of credit happening nobody knows what the right answers are let's let's focus on one thing the bank bailout the you know that has been passed in congress it still hasn't worked you know you still do not have credit flowing easily around the country you still do not have the availability of capital for all the businesses that need it that has to you know we've got to figure out how that's going to work then you have the problem which the government has made all these guarantees from from the city group one to uh deposits that you and i have when do when does it stop making those guarantees or is the government in perpetuity going to guarantee every kind of financial issues it's going to draw the line with the media the media will get no bail out but all this you know it's going to require i just wonder obama is going to have to spend a lot of time figuring this stuff out working on it and trying different things let's remember you know we we thought we were so superior to japan but japan after a couple of years of denying all its problems it tried all this it injected massive amounts of equity into the banking system it spent massively on infrastructure projects and it lowered interest rates to zero none of it worked jane will uh what happens to iraq now i mean that's the one thing we haven't even talked about here except just to mention it is it in fairly good shape now is it will george bush leave iraq a better place than he found him you know i think one of the smart appointments that that obama has made is to keep gates in at the defense department so whatever happens in iraq at least is going to be seen as some kind of continuity with the problems from before and not a radical shift that will be kind of blamed politically on obama but i you know it's it's it's still very shaky obviously and and and um so i think that there's no guarantees there i think you know some of you have been spent more time probably covering iraq in particular than i have you've written a wonderful book on the search we've got 140 000 of our fellow citizens there and their plans and talk of small drawdowns and a long-term plan but those people are essentially acting as a police force in an incredibly violent place and uh you see the violence every day and so when we leave does the violence go up do all the political problems increase obama's basic point about the surge everybody now says he was wrong about the search fine at some level it's true but the basic point was you need political deals on the ground that will stick to make this work because at some point we're going to leave meanwhile let me just ask michael just as a closing we have about 30 seconds left what do you want to hear barack obama say on election day well obviously you have to address all these questions you got gotta deal with iraq you gotta deal with afghanistan you gotta deal with that region the promiscuous the promiscuous forms of terror the salvation terror that we talked about has to be addressed but also domestically our hopefulness and our anticipation that the american future will be brighter and black people have dealt with cash poor credit and debt for a long time to have a brother in the white house right now is a tremendous advantage right now we can make a dollar out of 15 cents all right i want to thank all of you great great discussion you