Word: difficult
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Klein: I talked to a bunch a folks - friends, my kids - what should I ask the President? It was almost unanimous: the thing that people remarked on is just how crazy things are. How difficult it is. Focused on the health care process - what have you learned from that process, what's your takeaway? How is it going to influence the rest of your presidency? Obama: Look, even if we hadn't tackled health care, this year was going to be a tough year. During the transition period last year, it became apparent very quickly that we were going...
...seen their 401(k)s diminish or their hours reduced understandably are frustrated when they see big banks getting money for a problem that they helped cause. And when you see the unemployment rate spike to 10%, it was inevitable and justifiable that the political climate would become very difficult. So health care was done against the backdrop of what was already going to be a tough political climate...
Having said that, there is no doubt that the process for doing big, important things in this country has become far more difficult because of the way Congress is working right now. I came in expressing a strong spirit of bipartisanship, and what was clear was that even in the midst of crisis, there were those who made decisions based on a quick political calculus rather than on what the country needed. The classic example being me heading over to meet with the House Republican caucus to discuss the stimulus and finding out that [House minority leader John] Boehner...
...impossible to avoid. It's impossible to avoid if you're trying to do big stuff. Now it is even more difficult in a 24-hour news cycle. I have no idea what Lyndon Johnson had to do to get the Civil Rights Act done. Or if I have an idea, it's because I read Robert Caro's biography 40 or 50 years later. So that process is one that people have legitimate concerns about. And one of the things that I think is very important for us to do moving forward on financial reform, on energy legislation...
...some justification - it actually works. Yesterday we had a whole bunch of CEOs and innovators here to talk about modernization of government. The infrastructure bank falls in that broader category of, How do we make these dollars work better? Because we're going to have to make some very difficult spending decisions moving forward...