Barack Obama's new focus recalls an old Clinton mantra: 'The economy, stupid'
With 100 days left until the general election on Nov. 4, Barack Obama is turning from foreign policy -- his focus for the last week as he visited Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Jordan and several European capitals -- to the state of the U.S. economy.
In an interview with Tom Brokaw on NBC's "Meet the Press" (taped Saturday in London and broadcast Sunday) and again in an interview with Bloomberg News as he flew home to Chicago, the Democrats' nominee-in-waiting said he was meeting on Monday with his top economic advisors
They include former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former Treasury Secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin (one of Hillary Clinton's campaign advisors), Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the "Sage of Omaha," billionaire investor Warren Buffett. (Some -- Rubin and Buffett among them -- will participate by phone in the meeting at Washington's Omni Shoreham Hotel.)
The purpose of the meeting, the Illinois senator told Bloomberg, is to "really work through in detail some of the immediate steps that may need to be taken both between now and the end of the year and after inauguration'' to strengthen the housing and financial markets and to talk more about long-term economic strategies.
"I expect some further fine-tuning of our short-term policies based on what's happened over the last several months," Obama said, "and I want to get their read as well as to where they think the economy is going in the short term and medium term."
On "Meet the Press," Brokaw asked whether $4-a-gallon gasoline might actually be "a good thing, in a way" because it forced the country to confront the energy crisis.
"I do not think that high gas prices are a good thing for American families," Obama replied. "... Ordinary families are under extraordinary stress as a consequence of these high gas prices, so we need to do what we can to bring these prices down.... We should have, over the last 20 years, been planning for this day."
Obama recalled President John F. Kennedy's 1961 address in which he made it a national goal to "put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth" by the end of that decade and called for a similar focus on energy:
"We should be saying. 'In 10 years' time, we're going to be cutting our oil consumption drastically.' " He noted that he wanted to put $150 billion -- $15 billion a year over 10 years -- into research and development of new energy-related technologies.
"What is driving people all across the country right now," he said, "is worries and concerns about inability to pay the gas bill, inability to buy food because prices have gone up so high.... We've got to fundamentally shift how we approach economic policy."
-- Leslie Hoffecker
Photo credit: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images for "Meet the Press"
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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Obama came and left the Middle East the BIGGEST challenge to world stability and he gave no speeches and met with no important people. There are no votes to be collected in Kabul or Baghdad, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Jordan or Palestine---the Middle East. If Obama had any suggestions or different perceptions of the war “different than the current Administration” he could have used it and delivered it to this region. Obama is a fraud.
Posted by: Mike | July 27, 2008 at 10:29 AM
What a laugh. First it was Chris Matthews suggesting that the projected 3 trillion budget surplus that George Bush Jr. turned into a 5 trillion dollar deficit be a talking point.
Matthews only credited Bill Clinton with doing something right AFTER Hillary Clinton had been forced to suspend her campaign by the George Soros led Huffington Post / MSNBC propaganda machine.
Barack is not an innovator, he is a rock star in search of a crowd.
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Posted by: Alessandro Machi | July 27, 2008 at 10:47 AM
Obama is the one!
Posted by: ailo paul | July 27, 2008 at 03:54 PM
I do not think Republicans are going to stand for a threepete of Democrats harping about how bad the economy is. They, this time, are prepared to fix the problem in time for the elections. Bloomburg news did a good job of exposing first that oil prices are set to drop and may stay down for quite some time [Refiner Insiders Buy Most Stock Since 2000 on Oil Bet]. It may be why Oprah saw fit, to take Baroque's show on the international road!
Posted by: Albert Franklin | July 27, 2008 at 03:59 PM
Exactly.
Posted by: Paul Stewart | July 27, 2008 at 06:09 PM
Alessandro Machi is a bonehead, and I will post that every time he? slithers on to the comments page and whore out your asinine websites.
Posted by: Not Alessandro Machi | July 28, 2008 at 03:21 AM