The following is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.
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We arrived at the southwest gate of the white house a little after one o'clock on the afternoon of
September 17th. It was a warm fall day, but the capital felt quiet and half-empty, as it does on
Fridays at the end of summer, with Congress still in recess. Rolling Stone had interviewed
Barack Obama twice before, both times aboard his campaign plane — first in June 2008, a few
days after he won the Democratic nomination, and again that October, a month before his
election. This time executive editor Eric Bates and I sat down with the president in the Oval
Office, flanked by busts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. The conversation
stretched on for nearly an hour and a quarter. The president began by complimenting my multi-
colored striped socks. "If I wasn't president," he laughed, "I could wear socks like that."
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When you came into office, you felt you would be able to work with the other side.
When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work
with you and create bipartisan policy?
Well, I'll tell you that given the state of the economy during my transition, between my election and being sworn in, our working assumption was that everybody was going to want to pull together, because there was a sizable chance that we could have a financial meltdown and the entire country could plunge into a depression. So we had to work very rapidly to try to create a combination of measures that would stop the free-fall and cauterize the job loss.
-GREAT!-
edjane maps :)
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f-ROLLINGSTONE
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/209395
