[0:01]What is the one thing you would go back and change during your presidency and how would you change it? Other than dying my hair?
[0:21]Um, I have to tell you, every day, you know, I make some mistake. Um, fortunately, most of them aren't that big. Um, sometimes you just make use your best judgment because you're working with probabilities. You don't know the perfect answer. If something's easy, it does not reach my desk. By definition, somebody else has solved it. If something's easy to solve, I don't even see it. Somebody else has solved it a long time ago. So, most of the time I'm dealing with probabilities. If I'm making a decision about are we going to take a strike uh against Bin Laden. I don't even know if Bin Laden's there. And I've got young men and women, uh young men who are at risk when I send them there, I'm operating on probabilities. When we decided to bail out the auto industry, you're talking about polls earlier. That polled at about 10% even in Michigan. Because people were, you know, so mad about the bank bailouts, they thought, no more bailouts. And we weren't positive the thing was going to work, but we knew that if we didn't do it, you'd lose a million jobs all across the Midwest, including here in Indiana. So we made that bet, and it worked. Um, if if I were to talk about domestic policy, I think, the thing I would have probably done differently is, uh, I would have tried to describe earlier to the American people how serious the the recession was going to be, which is which would have hopefully allowed us to have an even bigger response than we did. Um, our the recovery act, our response to the recession was actually bigger than the New Deal. It it we that's how a lot of teachers kept their jobs. That's how a lot of construction workers stayed on the job and projects kept on going. That's how a lot of states met their budget. That's why we didn't end up having 30% unemployment. But, um, I I I've in in the balance of trying to reassure people, uh, I maybe didn't indicate to them that, look, this is probably going to be a two, three, four year process of us digging out of this hole so that we could have staged some of that recovery money over a longer period of time and possibly uh accelerated the recovery.
