Obama on NBC's 'Today Show': Transcript (9-23-08)

Read the full transcript.

LAUER: Forty-two days until this nation elects a new president. Today Barack Obama is coming here to the Tampa Bay area for a rally, and to prepare for Friday night’s presidential debate. On Monday, I caught up with Senator Obama in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he was campaigning. And we talked about this massive federal bailout package of $700 billion. And I said, despite the pressure to get this bill passed quickly, what would cause you in the Senate to stand up and vote no?

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OBAMA: Well, there are a couple of core principles that I think have to be in place.

LAUER: Deal breakers.

OBAMA: Deal breakers. I think you have to have a some mechanism of oversight. You can’t get...

LAUER: But both sides agree on that.

OBAMA: Both sides agree on that. But the administration hasn’t been entirely clear on whether they agree with it. But the bottom line is, you can’t give one person authority over $700 billion without any oversight whatsoever. So I think that’s going to be important.

A second thing that is going to be important is to make sure that the criteria by which people -- firms participate, the way it’s set up assures that taxpayers are going to get the upside and not just the downside.

We want to make sure that taxpayers are benefiting. Third principle is it can’t be simply a bailout for investors, CEOs, shareholders. They’ve got to take a hit for the bad decisions that they make.

LAUER: But how much time do you have to vet this? The talk is this has to get done within the next week or two weeks.

OBAMA: Right. Yes.

LAUER: If you’re lucky enough to be elected president and it turns out this plan has flaws, they’re not going to want to hear from you, “We were rushed into this.” They’re going to say, “You voted yes, pal. It’s yours.”

OBAMA: Well, this is why we’ve got to think about this in two phases. We’ve got a short-term crisis that has to be dealt with in a bipartisan fashion, and then we got a long-term structural set of problems that we’ve got to deal with.

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OBAMA: If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums.

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LAUER: You’ve laid out an ambitious plan. You want to improve health care, you want to improve education, the infrastructure...

Obama: Right. LAUER: ... investment in energy. And, oh boy, here comes this $700 billion bill that wasn’t a part of your thinking when you laid out this plan.

OBAMA: Right.

LAUER: If I’m a voter and I’m trying to decide whether I want to vote for you or Senator McCain, don’t I have a right to know right now from you which of those things are going to get hit by the budget axe before I vote for you?

OBAMA: Although we are potentially providing $700 billion in available money to the Treasury, we don’t anticipate that all that money gets spent right away and we don’t anticipate that all that money is lost.

How we’re going to structure that in budget terms, it still has to be decided.

Does that mean that I can do everything that I’ve called for in this campaign...

LAUER: Probably not.

OBAMA: ... right away? Probably not. I think we’re going to have to phase it in. And a lot of it’s going to depend on what our tax revenues look like.

LAUER: As part of this whole economic picture was the AIG situation. On Tuesday night, the Fed decided to bail them out -- huge amount of money.

OBAMA: Right.

LAUER: That morning, prior to the bailout, John McCain said that the federal government should not bail out AIG. You chastised him.

OBAMA: Right.

LAUER: On the campaign trail.

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OBAMA: He said the government should stand aside and allow one of the nation’s largest insurers, AIG, to collapse.

(END VIDEO CLIP) LAUER: So the message to those voters: “ John McCain didn’t grasp the scope of the situation...

OBAMA: Right.

LAUER: ... and get the fallout from the failure of AIG?

OBAMA: I think what has been clear during this entire past 10 days is John McCain has not had clarity and a grasp on the situation.