Obama: '60 Minutes' November 7, 2010

Steve Kroft interviews Obama AGAIN on 60 Minutes.

Even though he's out of the country, we get no relief from Obama.

This interview is keeping him front and center at home while he trots around abroad.

President Barack Obama tells "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft the defeat of his party in the midterm elections was probably because the people thought his emergency stimulus and bailout spending was "a huge expansion of government."

He says he didn't effectively communicate that he believed the spending was crucial to save the economy and not an intentional government expansion.

The sit-down with Kroft, the president's first one-on-one interview since the Democrats lost their large House majority, will be broadcast on "60 Minutes" this Sunday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Video.



Transcript

Steve Kroft: Is this a defeat, a reflection on your leadership?

President 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."

Kroft: Well, it was a huge expansion of government.

Obama: 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.

More video.



Transcript

Kroft: There is this feeling, particularly among people who are among your most ardent supporters, who feel a little disappointed that they think that you’ve lost your mojo. That you've lost your ability, that touch you had during the campaign, to inspire and lead. Everybody in Washington writes about a sort of aloofness that you have. And I'm sure that drives you crazy. How do you respond to that? How do you -- the arguments, people have made the argument you've lost control of the narrative, you've let other people define you, and you haven't sold your successes well enough.

Obama: I think it's a fair argument. You know, I think that over the course of two years we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that leadership isn't just legislation. That it's a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand. And I think that we haven't always been successful at that.

And I take personal responsibility for that. And it's something that I've got to examine carefully as I go forward.

Enough already.

I'll be watching the Packers and the Cowboys on Sunday night.
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UPDATE:

Here's the full transcript of the interview.

Obama Interview Transcript, Part 1

Obama Interview Transcript, Part 2

Here's video of the entire interview.