President Obama said that if re-elected, he believes he would have a mandate to resolve the fiscal cliff in a “balanced way” with a deal on both the Bush tax cuts and automatic spending cuts, in an interview with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and aired on “Morning Joe” Monday.
“And after the election, I think that both Democrats and Republicans have to step back and say, you know what, this is something the country wants to solve,” Obama said. “If I’ve won then I believe that’s a mandate for doing it in a balanced way. We’ve already made a trillion dollar worth of cuts. We can do some more cuts. We can look at how deal with the healthcare costs in particular on the Medicare and Medicaid in a serious way. But we are also going to need some revenue. If we get that piece done, and we kind of settle on the big question, ‘How much government are we going to have and how are we going to pay for it?’ Then a lot of the other stuff falls into place.”
As he did in an interview last week with the Des Moines Register, Obama pointed to immigration reform as something both parties could come together on in his second term. “[I]mmigration reform I think is there to get done,” Obama said. Nodding at Scarborough, he continued: “And I think your side is going to need to get it done, because you can’t continue to alienate the fastest-growing segment of the country. And it’s the right thing to do.”
