Wednesday at town hall event held at the City Club of Cleveland, when asked what he would have done differently, President Barack Obama said he regretted he did not “more aggressively” warn the American public how long it was going to take for them to recover from President George W. Bush’s failures.
Obama said, “I would have told myself to anticipate because the recession was so bad and so tough for so many people, that I was going to have to be more aggressive in explaining to the public how long it was going to take for the recovery to take place.”
He continued, “Although this is the challenge we had when we first came in, when FDR came in during the Great Depression, it had been so bad for two three years that everybody understood — OK we are kinda bottomed out — so he could come and propose — OK here is what we are going to do — and there was huge support because there had already been a track record of failure by the previous administration. When we came in, things were crashing but it hadn’t yet shown up in the statistics. It would take another eight, nine months, a year, before things bottomed out.”
He concluded, “I think people were nervous, and they were scared the stock market was plummeting, but people didn’t know the depths of how many jobs we were losing per month and so forth. I think that I might have done a better job at preparing people so they sort of knew what was coming.”
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