Obama: McCain flip-flopped on position he's held for 26 years David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Tuesday September 23, 2008





Print This Email This What "drives people crazy" about politics, says Barack Obama, is that people call for things in an election year that they've opposed their entire career.



Like deregulation.



On ABC's Good Morning America Tuesday, host Matt Lauer declared that he felt Obama was hurting his cause by attacking Sen. John McCain for opposing a bailout of insurance giant AIG when his own running mate also opposed it.



"It's the kind of thing that drives people crazy about politics," Lauer suggested. "It sounds like you were trying to score some political points against John McCain ... when your own running-mate had used very similar words."



Lauer pointed out that although Obama has gone after McCain for his initial suggestion that insurer AIG should be allowed to collapse, Obama's running-mate, Joe Biden, was also saying at the time that the government should not bail out AIG.



"Hold on a second," Obama replied. "I think that what drives people crazy about politics is the fact that somebody like John McCain who for 26 years has been an advocate for deregulation ... starts going out there suggesting that somehow he's a populist who's been railing against Wall Street."



Obama told Lauer that his own position on the bailout bill includes "a couple of core principles that I think have to be in place," because "you have to have some mechanism of oversight. You can't give one person authority over $700 billion without any oversight whatsoever." He also emphasized that "it can't be simply a bailout for investors, CEOs, shareholders. They've got to take a hit for the bad decisions that they made."



"But how much time do you have to vet this?" Lauer asked. "The talk is this has to get done within the next week or two weeks."



"This is why we've got to think about this in two phases," Obama replied. "We've got a short-term crisis that has to be dealt with in a bipartisan fashion, and then we've got a long-term structural set of problems."



When asked if the cost of a bailout might force him to scale back his own agenda if he is elected, Obama acknowledged, "Does that mean that I can do everything that I've called for in this campaign right away? Probably not. We're going to have to phase it in. and a lot of it's going to depend on what our tax revenues look like."



Obama added, "I think what has been clear during this entire past ten days is John McCain has not had clarity and a grasp of the situation."









This video is from NBC's Today Show, broadcast Sept. 23, 2008.







Download video via RawReplay.com



