Re: Why is Sarah Palin in...

Did Obama Throw Biden Under the Bus?

President Obama's explanation during his press conference Monday of a
comment made last week by Vice President Joe Biden appears to raise
that question.

FOXNews.com

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Yin and yang... or, oil and water?

President Obama's explanation during his press conference Monday night
of a comment made last week by Vice President Joe Biden appears to
raise that question.

FOX News' White House correspondent Major Garrett asked the president
to explain a Biden comment made last Friday, during which he said,
"there's still a 30 percent chance we're going to get it wrong."

Read the exchange:

OBAMA: All right. Major Garrett, where's Major?

GARRETT: Mr. President, at a speech Friday that many of us covered,
Vice President Biden said the following thing about a conversation the
two of you had in the Oval Office about a subject he didn't disclose.

"If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, if we
stand up there and we really make the tough decisions, there's still a
30 percent chance we're going to get it wrong."

Since the vice president brought it up, can you tell the American
people, sir, what you were talking about? And if not, can you at
least reassure them it wasn't the stimulus bill or the bank rescue
plan and if, in general, you agree with that ratio of success, 30
percent failure, 70 percent success?

OBAMA: You know, I don't remember exactly what Joe was referring
to...

(LAUGHTER) ...not surprisingly.

But let me try this out. (MORE LAUGHTER)

I think what Joe may have been suggesting -- although I wouldn't put
numerical -- I wouldn't ascribe any numerical percentage to any of
this -- is that, given the magnitude of the challenges that we have,
any single thing that we do is going to be part of the solution, not
all of the solution.

And as I said in my introductory remarks, not everything we do is
going to work out exactly as we intended it to work out. You know,
this is an unprecedented problem.

And, you know, when you talk to economists, there's some general sense
of how we're going to move forward. There's some strong consensus
about the need for a recovery package of a certain magnitude. There's
a strong consensus that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket,
all tax cuts or all investment, but that there should be a range of
approaches.

But even if we do everything right on that, we've still got to deal
with what we just talked about, the financial system, and making sure
that banks are lending again. We're still going to have to deal with
housing. We're still going to have to make sure that we've got a
regulatory structure, a regulatory architecture for the financial
system that prevents crises like this from occurring again.
Now, those are big, complicated tasks. So I don't know whether Joe
was referring to that, but I used that as a launching point to make a
general point about these issues.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

OBAMA: I have no idea. I really don't.



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