Obama On 60 Minutes: “Leadership Isn’t Just Legislation”

President Obama taped an interview with Steve Kroft for tonight’s 60 Minutes before departing for India. In it he tells Kroft that one of the reasons the voters have responded they way they they did on Tuesday was because his administration didn’t properly communicate (over about a gazillion interviews) what they were doing and that “leadership isn’t just legislation.”

However! That’s not to say all that legislation wasn’t necessary. Says Obama:

I think that what happened over the course of two years was that we had to take a series of big, emergency steps quickly and most of them in the first six months of my Administration. Each of them had a big price tag. You’ve got intervention in the banks. You’ve got the auto bailout. You’ve got a stimulus package. Each one with a lot of zeroes behind it. And people looked at that and they said, “Boy, this feels as if there’s a huge expansion of government…. What I didn’t effectively, I think, drive home, because we were in such a rush to get this stuff done, is that we were taking these steps not because of some theory that we wanted to expand government. It was because we had an emergency situation and we wanted to make sure the economy didn’t go off a cliff.

Watch a preview of the tonight’s interview below. One suspects this “messaging was the problem” argument is going to run out of legs sooner than later.

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