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| Barack Obama Says Economic Crisis Affects Young People Most Posted: 27 Sep 2008 07:58 AM PDT 'If the economy slows down, they're the ones who are going to have the toughest time finding a job,' senator says.
Barack Obama and John McCain discussed plenty during Friday night's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi, and while political pundits and both candidates' respective camps spent much of Saturday attempting to decide just who won the thing, there was one area in which neither candidate distinguished himself: relating issues to young voters. So when MTV News sat down with Obama for his first interview following the debate, we attempted to change that, asking him how one of the biggest issues of the day — Congress' proposed $700 billion bailout aimed at stabilizing the U.S. economy — affects the average young person, who may not have the most robust financial portfolio but certainly has plenty to lose in the crisis.
"Well, 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." Obama said that an economic collapse would have implications far beyond the job market — basically every aspect of daily life would be impacted in some way. "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." MORE FROM THIS INTERVIEW
Get informed! Head to Choose or Lose for nonstop coverage of the 2008 presidential election, including everything from the latest news on the candidates to on-the-ground multimedia reports from our 51 citizen journalists, MTV and MySpace's Presidential Dialogues, and much more. Plus, check out Think's voter-registration page to find out how you can hit the polls in November. Related Videos | |
| Barack Obama Says McCain's Debate Attacks 'Didn't Make Much Sense' Posted: 27 Sep 2008 04:39 AM PDT 'John McCain has promoted the same policies of George Bush, and people know they're not working,' Obama says in first post-debate interview.
Less than 15 hours after he made his closing remarks in the first presidential debate, Democrat Barack Obama gave his first post-debate interview when he and running mate Joe Biden sat down with MTV News following a campaign stop in Greensboro, North Carolina. 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?' "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." He also took issue with a just-released McCain campaign commercial, which made pointed reference to the number of times Obama agreed with the Arizona senator's comments during the debate: "I don't assume the American public are passive consumers, watching these things going, 'Oh, John McCain runs an ad, so I guess it must be true.' If that were the case, we'd already be losing." Obama also addressed a recent New York Times story that pointed out "dubious claims" in some of his own campaign ads.
"The truth is, we put out tons of ads, and there have been two or three times where we've slipped beneath my standards, where it was kind of a stretch. And when that happens, I tell my team, 'Pull it down,' " he said. "In this kind of thing — where it's a fierce competition — it's not going to be perfect. [But] I think generally people will take a look at how we've run this campaign, and people will say, 'This is someone who has been positive, who's been factual and who's been trying to promote the core ideal that we need to change our economic policies so that we have prosperity not just at the top, but in the middle of America.' " And to that point, Obama said he wasn't outwardly concerned with who actually won last night's debate (though, when pressed, he admitted that he has data that says he did), but rather that the issues wouldn't get lost in the post-debate cloud, saying that, oftentimes, the media get too focused on who won instead of what's really important to the American people: "What did each candidate say?" "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." MORE FROM THIS INTERVIEW
Get informed! Head to Choose or Lose for nonstop coverage of the 2008 presidential election, including everything from the latest news on the candidates to on-the-ground multimedia reports from our 51 citizen journalists, MTV and MySpace's Presidential Dialogues, and much more. Plus, check out Think's voter-registration page to find out how you can hit the polls in November. Related Videos |
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