Obama urges fast action on stimulus package
He wants Congress to approve the trillion-dollar plan before Feb. 16. Obama also says some of his campaign promises will have to wait.
Reporting from Washington — President-elect Barack Obama today urged Congress to move quickly on a stimulus package to calm what he called the worst recession since the Great Depression.
"We can't afford three, four, five, six more months where we're losing half a million jobs per month. And the estimates are that if we don't do anything, we could see 4 million jobs lost this year," Obama said during an appearance on ABC's "This Week."
The president-elect is looking for Congress to pass, by Presidents Day weekend, what could wind up being a $1-trillion package of direct spending and tax cuts. If it doesn't, he said, "then Congress is going to hear from me."
During the interview, which was taped Saturday, Obama acknowledged that not everything he promised to do during the campaign would be able to happen quickly, given the country's economic quagmire.
"Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient," he said. "Not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped."
In particular, he said, he was unlikely to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in the first 100 days of his presidency.
"It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize -- and we are going to get it done -- but part of the challenge . . . is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom may be very dangerous, who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication," Obama said.
Although some evidence against terrorism suspects may be tainted by the tactics used to obtain it, Obama said, that doesn't change the fact that there are "people who are intent on blowing us up."
The president-elect described homeland security as his top priority, adding that terror attacks like the ones in Mumbai could happen here.
"We are going to have to stay vigilant, and that's something that doesn't change from administration to administration," he said.
"The dangers are always there. I think you have to anticipate, having seen the mayhem in Mumbai, there will be possible copycats," Obama said.
On the economy, Obama also said that though he's focused "on a pretty heavy lift" in getting Congress to pass his economic stimulus package, he also planned to look at how the nation paid for government and how to make the system more efficient. That will include a structural deficit with entitlement programs that eat up the federal budget.
