Today Obama addressed and took questions from Republicans during a Republican retreat.

When Bush made his rare addresses most questions were usually scripted and the crowds were controlled to have friendly audiences.

It is refreshing that we have an intelligent president that is brave enough to come in for the first time in history to talk to his harshest critics and take on all comers without notes on television.

Obama talked about the unpopular stimulus bill and how if people are asked about the individual parts of the bill, they are in favor of each and every part of the bill. The stimulus reduced taxes on 95% of the people and provided hundreds of thousands of jobs and provided the money so local communities didn't have to lay off thousands of teachers, police and firemen.

Obama pointed out that in Health care reform he had signaled openness to many of the Republican ideas, like Tort reform and being able to select insurance across borders, but that he had few takers willing to work for those ideas.

He pointed out that most of the ideas in the Health Care Reform the Democrats had proposed, were ideas that the Republicans had proposed to Clinton when he was working on reform, but this time around the same ideas were demonized as a Bolshevik takeover that would destroy the country.

He said that the Republicans had been boxing themselves in with their extreme rhetoric, so that if they were to work with Democrats on common sense things that their party had traditionally supported, like the middle class tax breaks and the job creation proposals he was now proposing, that their constituents would think that they were selling out.

Obama was able to address all of the Republican questions and when told that the Republicans had a health care plan that wouldn't cost a dime, or was half the cost of the Democrat's plan, he said that it just wasn't true that you could provide health care for an additional 30 million people without it costing anything. He said that he was willing to listen to Republican ideas, and that many of them had been incorporated into the Health Care Proposals, but that those ideas had to make sense to objective economists.

Obama urged both sides to tone down the rhetoric and to work together on the problems of the country.

For a full transcript and a video of the exchange, go to:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/29/transcript-of-president-o_n_442423.html

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