Asked Wednesday why so many people seem to believe that the country is on the wrong track, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough blamed it largely on the 2008 recession, an event now seven years in the past. His comments came the morning after President Obama boasted of the “longest streak of private-sector job creation in history” in his final State of the Union speech Tuesday night.
The comments were made during a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. When a reporter asked about a December New York Times poll that put the nation’s “wrong track” numbers at 68 percent, McDonough replied that the “economy is changing [and] even people who are working are having a hard time keeping pace with that change.” He said that some government institutions meant to help people “were not living up to their traditional role.”
“Add on top of that the depth of the recession of 2007-2008 and the impact that that had on people across the board, from housing values to retirement and education savings, and people are right to be — and understandably — uneasy,” McDonough said.
McDonough said Obama would “redouble” his efforts during his eighth and final year in office to try to “buy back” greater trust in government institutions and that he had “very concrete ideas” on how to do that.
Asked about what Obama said was his greatest regret during his tenure in office — that partisan rancor had grown, not diminished — and who in particular was responsible for that, McDonough candidly responded, “The reason you asked me the question is the reason I don’t really want to answer it.”
He continued: “But I think there is probably a lot of us to blame, you know? The structure of our campaigns, the structure of our districts, what’s happening in terms of news media — that is to say you can select your news media in the way you can select your neighborhood or your church. You can end up in an echo chamber unless you aggressively work to get out of that, to seek different chambers of information and friendships and ideas.”
