Web Video: President Obama's first address to Congress

MS. IFILL: President Obama is biting an awful lot, but is it more than he can chew? We tackle that tonight on "Washington Week."
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: (From videotape.) I want every American to know this: we will rebuild. We will recover. And the United States of America will emerge stronger than before. (Applause.)
Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31st, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.
This budget is an honest accounting of where we are and where we intend to go.
MS. IFILL: The president piled a lot more on his plate this week, but how to turn those promises into policy?
HOUSE MINORITY LEADER JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): (From videotape.) The era of big government is back and Democrats are asking you to pay for it.
MS. IFILL: By any measure, the president is asking for a lot. Now comes the hard part.

MS. IFILL: Good evening. Big week, big address to a joint session of Congress. Big budget -- $3.5 trillion worth -- and today a big foreign policy speech complete with a promise to get U.S. troops out of Iraq entirely by 2011. Even President Obama admitted that he has a tremendous amount going on all at once. He said as much in an interview with Jim Lehrer today.
(Begin video segment.)
JIM LEHRER (Host, PBS "Newshour"): Do you feel burdened by the full plate?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I won't lie to you. I wish that they weren't all having to be made at once. It would be nice to be able to stage them, one another. Let's -- we'll take the economy first and then we'll take Afghanistan after that and then Iraq after that and Iran after that, and banking system somewhere out there, autos. It would be wonderful if we didn't have all the planes in the air at the same time.
(End video segment.)
MS. IFILL: But the planes are in the air and only these three reporters around the table know how it's all going to turn out, or at least they wish they did. Did the president decide to throw everything at the wall at the same time, or did it all just catch up with him, Peter? (Laughter.)
MR. BAKER: Well, this is certainly the big bang theory of politics: do everything at once, right? But part of that is circumstance, as the president seemed to say in the interview, and part of it is design. He can't obviously escape when he has to address failing banks or the circumstances in Afghanistan as they deteriorate, but some of this is intended to try to capture the moment, to use the momentum of his popularity and his election to accomplish a lot of the goals all in the same time.
Look at the speech he gave on Tuesday night. He's going to not only fix the economy, which everybody would admit it has to be his first priority, he's going to fix healthcare. He's going to fix climate change. He's going to fix the education system all at once.
MS. IFILL: I know that those kinds of speeches are supposed to set a big, big table, but it seemed that even that in the annals of over-reaching felt a little bit like it qualified. (Laughter.)
MR. BAKER: I think you wouldn't see a speech quite like this probably going back a couple of decades, actually. A lot of Bill Clinton's State of the Union's addresses you remember were actually a litany of very small things. We're going to give $3 million to this neighborhood watch group. We're going to do that. George Bush's were more thematic about the nature of terrorism, the nature of national security. This was a political speech, and a document that came out a couple of days later, meant to transform America in a very, very dramatic, even radical way.
MS. IFILL: Let's talk about that document, Dan. Three and a half trillion -- $3.6 trillion budget in which he promises to put meat on the bones of all these promises, except that also constituted a complete change in direction from what we've seen for more than eight years.
MR. BALZ: It is a remarkable document. Not just for the sheer size of it, $3.6 trillion in spending, a deficit this year of $1.75 trillion. As a percentage of the economy, it's the biggest since World War II. But also, as Peter said, the scope of what he is trying to do. This budget document is very clearly a repudiation of the last eight years and they are explicit in what they say about that. They say we have essentially inherited a terrible situation born out of irresponsibility and essentially we're going to try to fix that.
But I think the other thing, as Peter suggests, is this transformational aspect of it, which is he is undoing the public policy framework that has existed since Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981. Reagan put us into a conservative era and Obama's goal is to move us back into an era where government has a much, much, much bigger role.
MS. IFILL: To what degree is this just a campaign -- a campaign of keeping his promises? He said he was going to tax the wealthy. He said he was going to provide middle class tax cuts. All of this is in this budget.
MR. BALZ: Yes. That's exactly right. And that is what he and his people will say, that he is simply keeping his commitments. I think one of the interesting questions that we've all been wondering about since the election was, with the very large problems that he was inheriting, would the economy force him to scale back on his very large ambitions that had been laid out in the campaign.
And this is an all-in document.
This basically says we're going to deal with the problems that confront us right now with the economy: the stimulus package that has been passed, dealing with the banks, dealing with the home foreclosure problem. But we are also going to deal with long-term issues that have not been dealt with in a long time: healthcare, energy, education. When you try to do all of that, you are biting off a huge amount.