奥巴马的AIG时刻

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The President’s second prime-time news conference at the White House since he took office (is) dominated by the financial crisis. The president’s saying that in the short term, he believes there're some signs of progress, some signs that maybe the economy is starting to turn around. And he also tried to turn the corner to make the case that for the long term, he believes his budget will fund key priorities on education, health care and energy, really rebuild the economy in the United States long term. But when I pressed the president about those AIG bonuses, he seemed to be taking off message ever so slightly, got a little bit testy about an issue that has really been difficult for this White House to handle.

“So, on AIG, why did you wait, why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? (I…) It seems like the action is coming out of New York in the attorney general’s office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and Say, look, we're outraged. Why did it take so long?”

“It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak, all right? ”

And the president now is gonna have an uphill fight on his budget, in fact if you look at his schedule on Wednesday, immediately after this news conference, he is going to Capitol Hill to lobby not Republicans, but some of his fellow Democrats in the Senate who were skeptical that the president can really pay for this budget. They are worried that with the national debt doubled under former-president Bush, in the words of Democrat Kent Conrad, the Chairman of Central Budget Committee, he thinks that the president’s new budget could double the debt once again, and that could add somewhere from 7 to 9 trillion dollars in new deficit spending, says president has an uphill battle on that, but what he did in summation at his press conference was say that he's gonna bring persistence to this and all the other fights in his administration. And he said he hopes the American people realize that he sort of has an ocean liner that he's trying to turn around. This is not speed boat, this economy. That's gonna take some time. It's gonna take some patience. It's clear this president realized it can be some tough days ahead as he tries to deal with this financial crisis.

For cnnMoney.com, Ed Henry at the White House.

Vocabulary:

1.       Prime-time: the time period when the television or radio audience is the largest

2.       turn the corner: to get past the worst part of a difficult or dangerous situation

3.       uphill: something that is very difficult to do and needs a lot of effort and determination

4.       Capitol Hill: The U.S. Congress

5.       ocean liner: 远洋轮船（比喻扭转经济形势就像调转轮船一样并不容易）