it is really this question of kind of creating a narrative of yourself. i think you re right. it s a combination of public perception and all these things and also his own perception of himself. and it s very interesting, too, i think, i was sort of thinking about him and kind of contrasting him with bush, second bush. and the ways in which barack obama s narrative about himself is so much more sort of believable to a certain kind of way. i think sort of george bush kind of wanted us to sort of see him as this deeply sort of authoritative figure. you know, we ll not negotiate with terrorists. we ll not you know all these things. i always felt there is a strange gap. i didn t quite completely believe him. like he was sort of saying these words. i didn t actually believe what he wanted me to think about the character he was creating of himself. and with barack obama, i have kind of completely believed him. i m sure we ll talk about the
us do when we lose somebody in our family. especially if the loss is unexpected. we re shaken out of our routines. we re forced to look inward. all of us, we should do everything we can do to make sure this country lives up to our children s expectations! [ applause ] to me that was a real quintessential barack obama moment for two reasons, one this idea of empathy and moral imagination. the theme of red states and blue states, reaching people across artificial distinction and also people were frustrate the because i didn t talk about gun control. it s not picking a fight. that s not that is not his process. it is getting through. what all of you do in some ways, right, is try to get people out of their own heads and into the heads of other people. right? is that how you see yourselves,
you point this out in your book. there are two t.a.r.p. votes, the first one failed. the second one passed. what happened in between was a lot of progressive democrats who voted against the first time came onboard the second time. part of the reason they came onboard is calls from candidate soon to be president barack obama and promises of it is going to be a bailout for everybody, bailout as a negative term, a rescue for everyone. home owners are going to get dealt into this deal and there was $50 billion appropriated through t.a.r.p. less than 10% of troubled asset relief program funding for housing support programs has been spent. less than 10%. $45.6 billion originally allocated for the program. 4 4 $4.5 billion. there is money sitting in a bank account that is allocated for the purpose of helping homeowners. and remember the mortgage settlement they alotted $25 billion for homeowners? this is more money than that
yeah. right. i want to start off with you about how you thought about writing the character of barack obama. you were doing something similar to what barack obama and his speechwriters this speechwriters have to do. what i got from that column you read from the lewis article, there is an attempt on the party of barack obama and the speechwriters and the people in charge of the way he is presented in the media to create a naturrative and a character. that is not the character that i think barack obama was talking about in that quote. the narrative to me is written by some much larger collective entity that incorporates both, you know, right-wing commentary and left wing commentary and the way he is perceived by ordinary people, the things that other people write about him and say about him and the way in which he is depicted are just as important to creating that character of barack obama as whatever he may say or do about himself. i felt i was entitled to
government s ability with the reserve currency in the world, what is the constraint on our ability to just print money? that i think really gets the heart of the question we re talking about. so i think, you know, this week was the 100th birthday of richard nixon. richard nixon was the president who finally ultimately killed the gold standards. what hasn t died is the gold standard mentality that money is this commodity we can use up if we don t. that is a false constraint. there is a real constraint. let s talk about $10 trillion coin. you just cut her by 90%. let me just so if we put that obviously as stephanie pointed out, we put that in the bank account, there is no hyper inflation. that money isn t going anywhere. where you get a constraint is if the government said let s spend $10 trillion on infrastructure projects. then you have a real problem. you have $10 trillion worth of real resources in the economy. so you re trying to push this money into the real economy. then y