His press conferences are dazzling performances, but to get a glimpse of Barack Obama in the round takes the oldest journalistic setting of all, an extended one-on-one interview by David Leonhardt for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
Under questioning to show his state of mind rather than elicit sound bites, we get a picture of how the President sees the economic crisis in the long run beyond the bailouts and fixes.
“The critics have said, you’re doing too much, you can’t do all this at once,” he observes. “Congress can’t digest everything. I just reject that. There’s nothing inherent in our political process that should prevent us from making these difficult decisions now, as opposed to 10 years from now or 20 years from now…
“It is true that as tough an economic time as it is right now, we haven’t had 42 months of 20, 30 percent unemployment. And so the degree of desperation and the shock to the system may not be as great. And that means that there’s going to be more resistance to any of these steps: reforming the financial system or reforming our health care system or doing something about energy…
But part of my job I think is to bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future.”
One of his goals in “the post-bubble economy,” Obama says, is “restoring a balance between making things and providing services, whether it’s marketing or catering to people or servicing folks in some way. Those are all good jobs, and we’re not going to return to an economy in which manufacturing is as large a percentage as it was back in the 1940s”