Interview With Harry Smith on CBS's "Early Show"

[Broadcast Date: April 2, 2010]

Harry Smith: Do you believe the Iranians are trying to develop nuclear weapons?

The President: All the evidence indicates that the Iranians are trying to develop the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. They might decide, once they had that capacity, that they'd hold off right at the edge in order not to incur more sanctions. But if they've got nuclear-weapons-building capacity and they are flouting international resolutions, that creates huge destabilizing effects in the region and will trigger an arms race in the Middle East that is bad for U.S. national security but is also bad for the entire world.

Harry Smith: Sanctions have been tried before. It only seems to bolster the Iranian regime. What makes you think they'll work this time? And if they don't work this time, what's the alternative?

The President: Well, I think the idea here is to keep on turning up the pressure. The regime has become more isolated since I came into office. Part of the reason that we reached out to them was to say, "You've got a path. You can take a path that allows you to rejoin the international community, or you can take a path of developing nuclear-weapons capacity that further isolates you." And now we're seeing them further isolated. Over time, that is going to have an effect on their economy.

Now, you know, I have said before that we don't take any options off the table, and we're going to continue to ratchet up the pressure and examine how they respond. But we're going to do so with a unified international community that puts us in a much stronger position.

Harry Smith: I want to talk about health care; polls still coming out saying the American people are not on board --

The President: A whole week after it passed. [Laughs.]

Harry Smith: -- in significant numbers.

The President: Yeah.

Harry Smith: Health care was declared dead a bunch of different times over the last 14 months or so. Besides the efficacy of why you thought it was important to pass it, what made you think you could get it done?

The President: Well, because it's the right thing to do. Look, when I am --

Harry Smith: But there plenty around you, even people within that building, who said, "Let's do it piecemeal. Let's do it one piece at a time."

The President: The one thing I don't do, Harry, is to think short term based on day-to-day polls. I look at what does the country need long term. And what we know is that insurance rates in the individual market are going up 30, 40 percent for people if they don't work for big companies. Small businesses are getting killed. We know that Medicare and Medicaid costs are unsustainable. And so my attitude was that if I didn't make an effort now to change how we deliver health care, this country was going to go bankrupt.

Harry Smith: I'll ask you the question -- why you thought you could do it.

The President: Why I thought I could do it?

Harry Smith: Yeah.

The President: Because I have confidence that if you have good policy and you're trying to do the right thing, that over time the politics works its way out.

. . .

Harry Smith: I've been spending time out and about, listening to talk radio.

The President: Right.

Harry Smith: The kindest of terms you're sometimes referred to out in America is a socialist, the worst of which I've heard is called a Nazi. Are you aware of the level of enmity that crosses the airwaves and that people have made part of their daily conversation about you?

The President: Well, I mean, I think that when you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, it's --

Harry Smith: It's beyond that.

The President: -- it's pretty apparent. And it's troublesome. But, you know, keep in mind that there have been periods in American history where this kind of -- this kind of vitriol comes out. It happens often when you've got an economy that is making people more anxious and people are feeling as if there's a lot of change that needs to take place. But that's not the vast majority of Americans.

The truth is, some of these comments, when you actually ask, "Well, this is based on what?" -- this notion that Obama's a socialist, for example -- nobody can really give you a good answer, much less when they, you know, make --

Harry Smith: They would say mandating that people have to buy insurance or something like that.

The President: Yeah, the sort of plan proposed by current Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Yeah. So it doesn't make too much sense. It used to be that somebody who said something crazy, they might be saying it to their next-door neighbor or it might be on some late-night AM station at the very end of the radio dial.

Harry Smith: Very last question: Does it bother you?

The President: You know, the -- you end up getting a pretty thick skin in this job. And obviously when you've gone through a presidential campaign, there are a lot of things that are said that thicken your skin.

I am concerned about a political climate in which the other side is demonized. I'm concerned about it when Democrats do it. I'm concerned about it when Republicans do it. I do think that there is a tone and tenor that needs to change, where we can disagree without being disagreeable or making wild accusations about the other side. And I think that's what most Americans would like to see as well.

Betty Nguyen (news anchor): Well, as we have reported, Harry Smith spent some time with President Obama at the White House yesterday. Harry asked Mr. Obama what was behind his surprise decision this week to open large new areas of the U.S. coastline to oil drilling.

[Begin videotaped segment.]

The President: There are going to be areas 150 miles out, 100 miles out, where it is sensible for us to allow for exploration, not because it solves our problem. We can't drill out of our problem, and I said this --

Harry Smith: During the campaign.

The President: -- during the campaign. But we are going to need to make sure that we've got some additional production in order to assure that we can transition into a clean-energy economy.