Obama: Move on Afghan troops won’t be political
Obama blanketed US Sunday talk shows, to push his under-fire healthcare reform plan and cautioned that despite raging debate over a possible request by the military for more troops by Afghanistan, his decision would not be driven by politics.
The president’s media offensive came a day before he is due to head to New York for his debut United Nations General Assembly as president, and the G20 economic crisis summit of developed and developing nations later in the week in Pittsburgh.
As allegations of fraud mount following Afghanistan’s elections in August, complicating Obama’s attempt to maintain public support for the eight-year war, Obama made his most detailed comments yet on the conduct of the polls.
“It did not go as smoothly as I think we would have hoped, and there are some serious issues in terms of how the election was conducted in some parts of the country,” Obama said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The president warned that he would not make any rushed decisions about sending more troops from Afghanistan, as he digests the implications of US war commander Stanley McChrystal’s classified report on US strategy.
“I am now going to take all this information, and we’re going to test whatever resources we have against our strategy, which is if, by sending young men and women into harm’s way, we are defeating al-Qaida,” Obama added on ABC’s This Week.
Obama also gave his most detailed assessment yet of the priceless intelligence brought back by former president Bill Clinton from his mission from Pyongyang in August to win the release of two US journalists.
The president told CNN he had been interested by Clinton’s assessment of North Korean leader Kim that “he’s pretty healthy and in control. And that’s important to know, because we don’t have a lot of interaction with the North Koreans”.
“President Clinton had a chance to see him close up and have conversations with him,” Obama added.
“I won’t go into any more details than that, but there’s no doubt that this is somebody who I think for a while people thought was slipping away. He’s reasserted himself.”
Obama also made an attempt to bolster his push to pass his top priority healthcare initiative, which is facing opposition from Republicans and even reservations among some Democrats in Obama’s own party.
The president dismissed the view in an interview with the ABC show This Week that the public furore over his plan was a symptom of racism in American life.
“Anytime there’s a president who is proposing big changes that seem to [involve] the size of government, that gets everybody’s juices flowing and sometimes you get some pretty noisy debate.
“I think what I’m proposing is a very modest attempt to make sure that hard-working families out there are going to have the security of health insurance that they can count on,” Obama said.
“This isn’t a radical plan. This isn’t grafting a single payer model onto the United States. It’s simply trying to deal with what everybody acknowledges is a big problem.”
On the economy, ahead of the G20 summit, Obama warned that though there are signs growth may soon resume in the United States, there is little sign that the unemployment picture will improve any time soon.
“I want to be clear, that probably the jobs picture is not going to improve considerably and it could even get a little bit worse over the next couple of months,” Obama, who has already predicted the jobless rate will hit 10%, told CNN.
“We’re probably not going to start seeing enough job creation to deal with the, you know, a rising population until some time next year.”
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