Obama on Meet the Press

Tom Brokaw discusses Obama's Middle East and Europe tour on yesterday's Meet the Press. Transcript here.

It amazes me that after his crazy schedule (at least seven countries)...

A week ago on Saturday you were in Kuwait visiting troops. On Sunday you moved to Afghanistan, where you visited troops and met with President Karzai. Monday, the epicenter of the trip, Baghdad, meeting with Prime Minister Maliki and American commanders. Tuesday you were in Amman, Jordan, with the king of that country, King Abdullah. And Wednesday meeting a variety of Israeli leaders and a prominent Palestinian. Thursday you were in Berlin meeting with the German Chancellor Merkel, and you gave a speech to a huge throng at Brandenburg Gate. Friday, in Paris, meeting with President Sarkozy of France. Saturday, in London, meeting with Tony Blair, the former prime minister, then with Gordon Brown, the current prime minister, and with David Cameron as well, who is the opposition leader in this country where there's a fair amount of political turmoil here as well.

that Obama is still able to sit down at the end of it all and respond with poise and clarity to everything Brokaw throws at him.

On some key domestic issues:

The mortgage crisis

MR. BROKAW: Let me ask you a question about housing. A lot of attention this past week to federal aid for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government quasi-agencies that got themselves in real trouble. Banks have gotten in trouble. There's now a housing bill out there to take care of people whose homes are being foreclosed.

MR. BROKAW: This is not as cold-blooded as it sounds, but I hear a lot of people around this country saying, "Look, I did the right thing.... I, I got a prudent mortgage," or I hear a lender saying, you know, "I wouldn't have gotten involved in one of those things." Why should they bail out people, many of whom were simply speculating? Or the lenders who were taking the fees and doing loans that they knew that would not be being paid back and walking away? Why should the hard-working taxpayer in this kind of an economy have to bail those people out?

SEN. OBAMA: They shouldn't, which is why a couple of points that I've made. Any assistance to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac should not be focused on the investors and the shareholders. It should not be focused on management. It should be focused on making sure that we've got liquidity in the housing market. And there are ways of making sure that we are not giving a windfall to investors who were enjoying the upside all these years of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, extremely profitable partly because there was this implied federal guarantee. Well, if they enjoyed all that upside, they should enjoy some downside as well.... So there are, there are a host of complicated issues here. It is true that there may be some folks who didn't make the best decision that will still benefit from the home foreclosure plans that have been put forward. But keep in mind that many of these folks were not so much speculators as they were probably in over their heads. They tried to get more house than they could afford because they were told by these mortgage brokers that they could afford it. We are better off helping them stay in their home if you can fix the mortgage and let them pay it off over time than have them foreclose, in which not only do they lose their home, not only do the lenders lose a lot, but that community suddenly sees its property values going down. And what we need is a floor in the housing market, a, a stop to the decline in housing values, as well as some certainty on the part of lenders in terms of what houses are worth so that we can start restoring confidence in the housing market, but also confidence in the financial markets where credit has been contracting....

The price of gas

MR. BROKAW: As painful as it is, is the idea of $4 gasoline a good thing in a way because it's forced the country to confront finally the idea that we do have an energy crisis, and it's forcing Detroit to retool its line of automobiles, make them more energy efficient.... People are driving less now. In some states, there's an indication that maybe even traffic deaths are down.

SEN. OBAMA: Yeah. Well, I do not think that high gas prices are a good thing for American families. I mean, I've, I've met teachers who have quit their jobs because the school where they were teaching was just too far. It was consuming too much of their income. I've met people who lost their job and couldn't go on a job search because they couldn't fill up the gas tank. Ordinary families are under extraordinary stress as a consequence of these high gas prices, so we need to do what we can to bring those prices down, but...

MR. BROKAW: But there's no easy answer for that on a short term.

SEN. OBAMA: ...but there, but there, but there isn't, and, and that's what I was about to say. The, the fact of the matter is that we should have, over the last 20 years, been planning for this day. I have been an advocate for raising fuel efficiency standards for years, something that John McCain has opposed. Had we taken those steps, we would not be in the same situation that we're in right now, the fact that all the big three U.S. automakers are getting hammered. Had we worked with them to adjust and retool to adapt to this market, we would not be losing as many jobs as we're losing right now. That's, that's all hindsight. Going forward, what we have to do is we do have to continue to push to make cars much more fuel efficient, and I think that the direction of hybrid plug-ins, where we can get a hundred miles per gallon of gas because we've developed battery technology and created a new electricity grid, that can make a huge difference. Industrial use of oil, we can change that. That's why I want to put $150 billion, $15 billion a year, into all these new technologies, research and development. We have to have the same approach that John Kennedy said, "We're going to the moon in 10 years." We should be saying, "In 10 years time, we're going to be cutting our oil consumption drastically." That will bring down, by the way, the price of oil for when we do need to use it.

ALSO ON THE DOMESTIC FRONT, Michelle Obama spoke today about Obama's plans to assist working women.