that we re on the arc of progress as dr. king would say. that s the arc of progress that joe biden has been working on for all of his life. when you think about what happened in his own family life, more recently with his son beau and back when he was 29 with the death of his wife and daughter, the car wreck, in all those circumstances he s always pulled himself back up and he s always persevered and he s going to persevere again. i d look more forward to working with him on this campaign and i look forward to him being president of the united states. i m here in denver i remember in february of 2009 i flew out with president obama. he signed the recovery bill to save the country from a second great discussion. joe biden received a call from president obama. i want you to run this recovery. so joe biden did that, and because of that the united states avoided a second great depression and the economic foundation which was set forth by president obama and joe biden
have our home, a jewish home, and our kids educated in chicago without my work in any way challenging that. and you had to throw that over. and not only that, you walked into an unholy mess. not only did i have to walk away from that, i had to leave my family behind. let me take you back to those first months, because what i remember must we? abject fear. you were very much in the hub of the financial discussions. how close were we to the collapse of the financial system and the second great depression? we were in a small d depression. what we had to do was both, obviously, get resources into the economy and then also restore confidence in both the government and the economy. and what and i take everybody back. one, we re because you are interviewing me just in the shadows of president bush laying
today. the motion is adopted. we are rescued. we have acted boldly to help prevent the crisis on wall street from becoming a crisis in communities across our country. even though it is not conservative orthodoxy i think what they did in 2008 was the right thing to do to save the economy and i think they probably did prevent a wipe out of a tremendous number of people and the second great depression. cnn presidential historian is joining us now. as you know george w. bush took heat from all sides, a lot of heat from the bank bailout of sorts about the economy survived. the bush administration s response to the crisis of 2008 is a reminder that pragmatism can be a good thing for an administration. you know, we forget that we
don t just want a president who comes into office and does absolutely everything they campaigned on because sometimes presidents learn when they are in office and they learn some of the things they brought to the white house, some of their assumptions were wrong. and george w. bush explained back in 2008 that this is not the approach to the economy that he would normally endorse, but his advisers who were conservative for the most part were saying, mr. bush, if you don t do this we are going to have a financial disaster that will compare with the great depression. he therefore used our tax money to prop up our financial system. if you would have asked him in 2000 when running for office should the government do this he would probably say no. in 2008 he made the tough call and did it. even though it wasn t popular
and begin again the work of remaking america. [cheers and applause] we begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action. one of the things president obama had to do right out of the gate was get the economy up and running. so the stimulus package became the golden bow of that. he had to get that through congress. it s a plan that will save or create 3 million to 4 million jobs over the next few years. we would lose 800,000 jobs in that month that we took office. with a one in three chance that we d have a second great depression. the recovery act, if we didn t have a recovery act, we wouldn t have a recovery. it s as simple as that. i do hope that we can all put politics aside and dot americ t