Obama Reflects on Big Government

In a press conference Wednesday, President Obama said he had been "doing a whole lot of reflecting" on "where we're going to have to do a better job" in the wake of Tuesday's drubbing of Democrats in the midterm elections. And that reflection immediately turned to the issue of creating the sense among voters that he was committed to a dramatic, permanent expansion of government and its role in people's lives.

Here's what the president said:

What is absolutely true is that with all that stuff coming at folks fast and furious -- a recovery package, what we had to do with respect to the banks, what we had to do with respect to the auto companies -- I think people started looking at all this and it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people's lives than they were accustomed to.

Now, the reason was it was an emergency situation. But I think it's understandable that folks said to themselves, you know, maybe this is the agenda, as opposed to a response to an emergency. And that's something that I think everybody in the White House understood was a danger. We thought it was necessary, but I'm sympathetic to folks who looked at it and said this is looking like potential overreach.

In addition, there were a bunch of price tags that went with that. And so, even though these were emergency situations, people rightly said, gosh, we already have all this debt, we already have these big deficits; this is potentially going to compound it, and at what point are we going to get back to a situation where we're doing what families all around the country do, which is make sure that if you spend something you know how to pay for it -- as opposed to racking up the credit card for the next generation.