It's like coming to my town and publicizing what my wacky neighbor says. If the national media is going to spend so much time telling us what Sarah Palin thinks, what Beck thinks and what lunatics think, then they should be fair and balanced and give equal time to smart people. Instead, they give the impression that America is a nation of fools.
MR. GIBBS: Yes, ma’am. Good afternoon.
Q Good afternoon. Robert, there’s a church in Gainesville, Florida, that says it’s going to go ahead and burn copies of the Koran to mark the 9/11 anniversary. Is the White House -- is there anything the White House is doing to discourage that or prevent them from going ahead with that?
MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I think the best place to look for the views of this administration would be to look at the -- look at what General Petraeus said over the weekend. We know that that type of activity -- we know that that type of activity is being transmitted back to places like Afghanistan, when General Petraeus obviously is our lead commander. As he said, it puts our troops in harm’s way. And obviously that -- any type of activity like that would be -- that puts our troops in harm’s way would be a concern to this administration.
Q But is there any thought from anyone at the White House to reach out to the pastor of the church --
MR. GIBBS: I have not heard of any.
Q Are you ready to say what the President is going to do Saturday to mark the 9/11 anniversary? MR. GIBBS: The President will attend a memorial service at the Pentagon. I believe the Vice President will go to New York. And obviously the First Lady and former First Lady Laura Bush are in Pennsylvania. I don’t have the times on the event at the Pentagon with me.
Yes, ma’am.
Q The economic package that you’re rolling out, what is the President’s legislative strategy for that? Is this something he thinks can be passed before Election Day? And also, is he seeking passage of these measures as one big package or separate measures?
MR. GIBBS: On the second one, I don’t know the answer to one package or several packages.
Look, I think what the President -- the President will tomorrow outline a series of the proposals, many of which you all have read about and reported on over the past several days, that he believes continue our strategy to getting our economy moving again and, more importantly, for long-term economic growth.
Look, I don’t think we’re under -- we understand what season we’ve entered in Washington. We know that Congress won’t be here for a lot of time. We certainly hope that there are measures, including some of the ones that the President will outline, that Congress will consider. If they don’t do that prior to the election, the President and the economic team still believe that these represent some very important ideas in continuing along our path toward economic recovery.And as I said, most importantly, this is about -- and look, you’ll hear the President talk about this a lot tomorrow in Cleveland -- this is about long-term economic growth. This isn’t about the next 60 days or the next 90 days. This is about how do we get our economy fully back on track, how do we get the millions that want to work back to work, and how do we repair the economic damage that’s been going on not just over the past two years but over the past 10 years. We didn’t get into this overnight, as I’ve said countless times.
But I think one of the things the President will do tomorrow is will go through the notion of for 10 years we saw rules written for the special interests. We saw a blind eye turned to some of their activities. We saw wages decrease. We saw families rightly more concerned about the future of their children and whether or not the economy that they were going to raise their children in was going to be one that was capable of passing on the American Dream to each and every one of their children. Read the rest
