Barack Obama: Economic Woes Will Slow Progress on Campaign Goals

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama said Sunday he was unlikely to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in the first 100 days of his presidency and noted that not everything he promised to do during the campaign would be accomplished as quickly as he had hoped.

Obama also urged Congress on Sunday to move quickly on the stimulus package to calm what he called the worst recession since the Great Depression.

"We can't afford three, four, five, six more months where we're losing half a million jobs per month. And the estimates are that if we don't do anything, we could see 4 million jobs lost this year," Obama said during an appearance on ABC's "This Week."

The president-elect is looking for Congress to pass what could wind up being a $1 trillion package of direct spending and tax cuts by mid-February. If it doesn't, he said, "then Congress is going to hear from me."

Senate Democrats on Sunday met with Larry Summers, Obama's top economic adviser, to discuss the shape and details of the stimulus package, as well as how an additional $350 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program would be administered.

Lawmakers said they appreciated that the administration was interested in their ideas and called the discussion "constructive" and "non-confrontational."

A spokesman for the Obama transition said they have no announcement about when a final package will be introduced.

During the Obama interview, which was taped Saturday, he acknowledged that not everything he promised to do during the campaign would be able to happen quickly, given the country's economic quagmire.

"Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient," he said. "Not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped."

In particular, he mentioned the closing of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. "It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize -- and we are going to get it done -- but part of the challenge ... is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom ... may be very dangerous, who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication," Obama said.

While some evidence against terrorism suspects may be tainted by the tactics used to obtain it, Obama said, that doesn't change the fact there are "people who are intent on blowing us up."

He described homeland security as his top priority. Obama also indicated that he is not interested in prosecuting to investigate possible crimes such as torture and warrantless wiretapping during the Bush administration.

"We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth," he said. "And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

Obama defended his nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., and predicted the Senate would confirm him despite questions about actions he took leading to former President Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, among others.

"If the criteria for getting confirmed was never making a mistake, no one would get in," said Obama, noting that Holder was responsible for prosecuting "the most powerful Democrat on the Hill," former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois. "You can't find a guy more qualified."