Barack Obama Grants MTV First Post-Debate Interview

[bigtree]

Barack Obama Says McCain's Debate Attacks 'Didn't Make Much Sense'
'John McCain has promoted the same policies of George Bush, and people know they're not working,' Obama says in first post-debate interview.

By James Montgomery, with reporting by Sway Calloway

{snip}

The discussion ran the gamut from Biden to Kanye West, but Obama seemed most eager to dissect Friday night's often-testy debate with Republican nominee John McCain, specifically McCain's repeated assertions that his experience makes him the stronger candidate and that Obama "just doesn't understand" the complexities of issues like foreign policy and the economy.

"I don't get taken aback by that kind of stuff. The problem was, every time he said it, when he tried to follow it up with an actual statement about policy or his positions about what it was he presumably understood or did 'get,' it didn't make much sense," Obama told MTV News' Sway Calloway. "If you look at Iraq, for example, the question was asked, 'What lessons have you learned?' and his lesson was 'Well, we should just stay.' Well, that's not a policy. ... The question was 'Should we have gone?'

{snip}

"He says that because he doesn't have a record to defend himself. We've become accustomed in our politics to folks just being able to make stuff up — it's one of the few areas of public life where the standards somehow are lowered in terms of what you say about other people," he continued. "For example, he suggested that I'm talking about raising everybody's taxes, when every analyst has shown I'm actually calling for a tax cut for 95 percent of American families."

"I think the pundits and the press, you guys are looking at tactics. What the American people are looking at is they might lose their job ... they might lose their house," he said. "And I could cite all the polls that showed the overwhelming number of people who watched the debate thought I won ... but even that's not actually relevant. What's relevant is the substance of this thing, which is people out there are hurting, and John McCain has promoted the same policies of George Bush, and people know they're not working. They understand we can't continue four more years of doing the same thing."


Barack Obama Says Economic Crisis Affects Young People Most
'If the economy slows down, they're the ones who are going to have the toughest time finding a job,' senator says.

By James Montgomery

{snip}

We don't know what the bailout is going to look like yet, but I think for young people who are paying attention to the headlines now and wondering what this means ... we've got to do it the right way," he told Sway Calloway during a campaign stop in Greensboro, North Carolina. "If we don't do it, it will have an impact on everybody, especially the next generation, because if the economy slows down, they're the ones who are going to have the toughest time finding a job."

"If the credit markets collapse, what it means is banks aren't lending businesses money. Businesses then can't invest in plants and equipment, and make payroll, so they shut down. And that means the suppliers of those companies, they shut down. Over time, what happens is you get the whole economy coming to a standstill. That's what happened during the Great Depression," he explained. "And at that time, it was just banks that were in charge of capital. Now you've got all different ways that money flows ... but the bottom line is, that if money freezes up, businesses can't do business, and you get an enormous contraction of an economy. And that, ultimately, will affect that 20-year-old, because that 20-year-old is going to be looking for a better job after he gets out of school. ... If our businesses aren't creating jobs, they're not creating tax revenues — now it's harder for government to finance that college education or to build that new university. So it has a ripple effect."

And while he said that action must be taken soon, he also urged caution, saying that the proposed money must not go toward "bailing out CEOs" and that every assurance should be made that those footing the bill — American taxpayers of every age — should be able to get their money back.

"We have to make sure that we structure it in a way where, if taxpayers are putting a lot of money out there, they can get it back. That if they're buying up bad assets, that when those assets raise up and recover, that there might even be a gain to the taxpayer," he said. "But that's not going to happen if we've got the same economic policies that got us into this mess in the first place. We should not have had a system where people were allowed to go crazy, borrowing other people's money, investing it in all kinds of speculation, with questionable assets, knowing that as long as the party is going good, that they would gain all the upside, but when things crashed, suddenly somebody else is going to pick up the tab. Somebody should've been minding the store, putting regulations in place."

read: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1595818/20080927/index.jhtml?rsspartner=rssMozilla

[ensho]

1. kick - glad MTV got the first interview

nt

[Hope And Change]

2. K & R!