By Frank James
The Associated Press had an extensive interview with President Barack Obama with the topics covering everything from his imminent trip to Russia and his determination to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon to his take on the economy and his reaction to the death of pop icon Michael Jackson as well as his preference for Michael Jordan over Kobe Bryant.
That's what you call covering the waterfront.
The AP has a series of stories off the interview and has provided YouTube video as well.
Ticking through some of the questions, Obama was asked about Russia and why he was meeting with Vladimir Putin, Russia's prime minister. Of his response, the AP said:
On the eve of a trip to Moscow, President Barack Obama chided Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday for keeping "one foot in the old ways of doing business." By contrast, he said Putin's handpicked successor as president understands that Cold War behavior is outdated.
In a White House interview with The Associated Press, the president said he will meet with both Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev on his trip, in hopes they can "move in concert in
cooperating with us on some critical issues."
On the economy, the AP writes this of Obama's response:
President Barack Obama says he's still "deeply concerned" about the continuing loss of jobs across the country.He said that developing both a short-term and longer-term solution to America's economic woes is "one of the things that I'm most focused on."
Obama also told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday he feels his administration has stabilized the housing and financial markets, while he acknowledged that more work needs to be done in the area of job creation.
The president said he understands that people are "worrying if they're going to be next." He commented just hours after the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent last month.
Obama was asked about the Ricci Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled in a 5-4 decision for white New Haven firefighters who claimed they were the victims of unconstitutional reverse discrimination after the city threw out the results of a promotion exam because no African Americans passed the test.
AP writes of Obama's response to a question on that issue:
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama said Thursday the Supreme Court is "moving the ball" to limit affirmative action, but he stressed that its ruling in favor of white firefighters still allows employers and educators to take race into account in hiring, promotions and admissions.
The president, a former constitutional law professor, avoided criticizing this week's 5-4 ruling even though it reversed a decision his own high court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, had endorsed
as an appeals court judge.
"This was a very narrow case, so it's hard to gauge where they will take it," Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press. The justices sidestepped a broad constitutional ruling on
remedies for racial disparities and instead merely told public and private employers they could not easily discard promotion exams just because the results left no African-Americans likely to be
promoted.
I'll get back to some of the other questions and responses in later posts.
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