RUSH EXCERPT:
HOLT: "You had a tough time. You had a tough time getting what you wanted through. And you got a lot of it through. But was there a point — can you remember a moment in which it just struck you that this isn’t gonna be easy? They’re going to fight me at every turn?"
OBAMA: "Oh, that happened early. We — we were in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. And in the midst of that, we put forward a stimulus package, the recovery act, that ended up, most economists will acknowledge, working exactly the way we wanted it to. But I remember heading up to meet with the Republican caucus to show them our plan and to solicit input and ideas from them. And as I was driving up, my aide reads a statement from John Boehner saying, “We — we’re — we’re gonna oppose the president on this.” We hadn’t even had the conversation yet.I was on my way to the meeting."
HOLT: "How did you react to that? How did you react?"
OBAMA: "Well, I — I — what it indicated was something that we kept on seeing throughout my presidency, and that was a tactical decision on the part of Republicans to say no because their view was that if they said yes, and there was any sort of bipartisan cooperation, that would benefit me politically. And if there wasn’t, that would hurt me politically particularly at a time when the economy was doing poorly. They figured we could do pretty good with midterms if it seems as if Washington’s dysfunctional at a time when everybody’s hurting."