http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23589412/obamas_moment/print

Here are some interesting snippets:

It's January 20th. You take office. Look at what you're confronting: the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, the climate heating up faster than anyone imagined, dangerous nuclear instability around the world...
Two wars. Yeah, we got some problems.

Do you still want the job?
I tell you what —— now is the time, I think, to want the job. Because this is going to be a transitional moment for the United States. We have these moments periodically. Obviously, I wish that the Bush administration had not run things into the ground so bad, but no matter what, we would have had some big decisions to make. We have a big decision to make about our energy. We have a big decision to make about health care. We have a big decision to make about how do we revamp our education system to compete in a global economy. We have a big decision to make about our foreign policy and how we deal with transnational threats like terrorism, climate change —— eventually pandemic, refugee flows, genocide.
---------
What makes you better prepared than John McCain to handle a crisis —— whether it's a terrorist attack, a financial meltdown or a natural disaster?
We've had two significant moments where the judgment of a commander in chief would have to be applied in a very deliberate fashion. One is the war in Iraq, and the other is what's happened just over the last three and a half weeks on Wall Street. In both instances, what you've seen is John McCain being impulsive, not getting all the information that he needs, surrounding himself with people who are predisposed to agreeing with him. And as a consequence, I think he's made bad judgments. In Iraq he embraced a theory of preventive war without thinking through all the consequences. He embraced the intelligence that was patently bad, and we're suffering the consequences of it. And just over the last three and a half weeks, he's gone from being always for deregulation to now presenting himself as this champion of regulatory toughness. He's gone from the economy being fundamentally sound to two hours later saying that we're in crisis. I don't get a sense that that kind of approach is what's going to be needed right now. I think we need somebody who is able to see all sides of an argument, bring the best people together, evaluate all our options, make decisive decisions, correct those decisions when they're not working out, and has a strategic sense or a vision of where the country needs to go —— who's not simply reacting all the time or thinking tactically.
------------------------
You've talked about the need for Washington to "stop acting like an industry advocate and start acting like a public advocate." Yet your campaign donors include executives of some of the most troubled financial companies, like Lehman Brothers. You've also accepted more money from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae than any senator except Chris Dodd, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee...
Let me just interrupt there. We've raised so much more money than anybody that these kinds of statistics can be misleading. I don't take money from lobbyists. None of the lobbyists for these industries has organized any fundraisers specifically for me. It's not as if we had a Lehman Brothers fundraiser or what have you.

You're not out on their yacht, in other words.
Yeah. What happens is that people have sent us a lot of money. It was interesting with the oil companies, for example. When I talked about how John McCain met with oil company executives and reversed himself on offshore drilling, and that same week raised a whole bunch of money from oil executives, they came back and said, "Well, you've raised all this money from oil companies, too." What they're doing there is they're counting the $25 check from some secretary who works in a back office somewhere. Cumulatively, it ends up looking like a lot of money. But there is a very big difference between us getting money from employees of all sorts of industries and us getting bundled big checks from industry lobbyists, which we never do...

Now, does that make me completely pure? No. Because the fact of the matter is, there is a danger that if you're spending a lot of time on fundraising, you're spending time with the one percent of the population that can afford to write you a check. And you may end up losing touch with what ordinary folks are going through. That's why the model that we've built where huge amounts of money are raised in small increments has done two things. One is, it means that they have ownership over the campaign. The other is that it frees me up from having to do a lot of big-dollar fundraisers. I've maybe done [pauses]...10 in the last two or three months? Don't hold me perfectly to that, but I actually don't spend much time on fundraising, and I don't really know, most of the time, who is writing checks.
--------------------
When do you see us being completely out of Iraq —— no troops, no bases, nothing beyond an ordinary presence?
I envision us having combat troops out in 16 months. Prosecuting a war as we currently understand it, I anticipate us being finished with that in 2010. The time frame for having no residual troops, no trainers, no strike forces to go after terrorists that may pop up again in Iraq —— that is very hard to anticipate, because we just don't know what the situation is going to be.
-------------------
Afghanistan: How do you make a course correction without just throwing more troops at the situation? Won't more troops just give the Taliban more targets and escalate the violence?
I think you have to have what we should have had in the first place: a much better plan for rebuilding the country, a much better plan for making the apparatus of the state functional, a much better plan to replace poppy crops in Afghanistan and, probably the most important thing, a much better plan to deal with Pakistan. It is going to be difficult for us to execute a long-term success in Afghanistan if the northwest provinces of Pakistan continue to serve as safe havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
-------------------------------
Looking back over the past eight years, what's the thing that Bush screwed up the worst?
I think Iraq has to rank number one. Although the economy and his failure, utterly, to anticipate the dangers of such a highly leveraged Wall Street, combined with such a highly leveraged federal government, combined with such highly leveraged consumers, at a time when we knew that baby boomers are about to retire and we need to start storing the acorns for the
winter —— it's breathtaking. The level of irresponsibility that's taken place over the last eight years is breathtaking.
-----------------------
What's going to be the hardest part of his legacy for you to undo?
The budget. We are going to be in a massive hole. Now, if this rescue package is structured properly and the market recovers, it is possible that it doesn't end up costing us anywhere close to $700 billion —— we might even make money on it. That was true with the Home Owners' Loan Corporation during the New Deal, which refinanced homes to prevent foreclosure. We're not putting up $700 billion without getting a return. But keep in mind that we did subsidize Bear Stearns, we did subsidize AIG. We've already put a lot of money out. We have a half-trillion-dollar deficit.
Even under my Iraq plan, our military is going to have to be reset. National Guards don't have equipment. The future cost for veterans care will be enormous. So digging ourselves out of the fiscal mess we're in is going to be a big, big challenge, and it's going to require some tough decisions that will not always be popular —— particularly when there's going to be a lot of pent-up energy among Democrats. If I win, every member of Congress on the Democratic side, and some on the Republican side, is going to have ideas about pressing needs and worthy programs. Trying to set some very hard, clear priorities is going to be tough.