This link has been bookmarked by 5 people . It was first bookmarked on 23 Oct 2008, by someone privately.
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24 Oct 08
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23 Oct 08
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in an environment like this one where people are really paying attention because they are worried and they are scared good policy will end up being good politics—more than I think might have been true during boom times in the nineties when people were just feeling like it was sport, it was a game.
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one thing I have become pretty confident about is being able to tap into the smartest people on any subject and to draw together a lot of contrary or contradictory perspectives. And push people’s arguments against each other, ask the right questions and figure out at a least a framework for solving problems.
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When those troops are attacked, they have a right to defend themselves. Period. Now I think that the most critical task that we have in Afghanistan is to not only strengthen the Afghan government, it's military capacity, it's ability to deliver services to its people, its capacity to work with the agricultural sector there to replace the poppy crop. But it’s to also work through a viable strategy for Pakistan.
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The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.
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For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that's going to be my number one priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to just stabilize the immediate economic situation.
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Now, the one other point I want to make about this, though, we can't divorce the energy issue from what I believe has to be the dominant political theme underlying everything -- the economy, healthcare, you name it. And that is restoring a sense that we're growing the economy from the bottom up and not the top down.
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essentially what we should be doing is setting the rules, setting the incentives, pricing pollution accurately, and then letting technology catch up the same way it did with acid rain. And the one thing that we probably will have to do, and this is where the federal government expenditure side comes in, we've got to pump a lot of separate players to make the initial investment.
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