If He Could Do It All Again... Obama Says He Would Explain Policies Better

If President Obama could go back to 2008 and give himself a bit of advice, what would it be?

That question was posed to Obama by a student at a townhall forum in Jamaica.

“I suppose I could have started dying my hair earlier so then people wouldn’t say, man, he’s getting old,” he quipped.

But Obama went back to his early stimulus programs and bailouts.

“I think that — keep in mind that when I came into office we were going through the worst global financial crisis since the 1930s, and so we had to make a series of decisions very quickly, many of which were unpopular. Overall, I think we got it right. I think we did the right thing. And because, I think, we took these steps, not only were we able to avoid the kind of Great Depression that we saw in the 1930s, not only was America able to bounce back and start growing more rapidly than most of our peers, drive down unemployment faster, create more jobs faster, but that also had an impact on the global economy and it had an impact on the Caribbean economy, that we were able to bounce back quicker than we might have if we hadn’t taken those steps,” he said.

“But it was, I think, costly politically.”

Thus, Obama continued, “what I would have probably advised was that I might have needed to warn the American people and paint a picture for them that was more accurate about the fact that it would take some time to dig ourselves out of a very big hole.”

“Because FDR, when he came into office, the Great Depression had already been going on for two, three years, and so people understood how serious it was,” he said. “With us, we came in just as people were really starting to feel the impacts.”

“And trying to paint a picture that we’ll make it but it’s going to take some time, and here are the steps that we need to take — I think I would have advised myself to do a better job spending more time not just getting the policy right, but also describing it in ways that people understood, that gave them confidence in their own future. I think that would probably be the most important advice that I would have given myself.”