On the Obama administration’s jobs rhetoric:

The administration was talking it down on the weekend. They were burned . . . from predictions early on with the stimulus. They were so wildly off in what was the implied promise with this stimulus [package]: [it] would keep [unemployment] from reaching . . . 8.8 percent. They have had trouble with the stimulus politically ever since. So that is not going to happen again.
They also understand, as Romer indicated, that with [GDP] growth of 3 percent, the job recovery will be really slow.
Secondly, I think one thing unstated was we now have had a significant spike in oil prices up to $87. And if you think about what happened in ‘07, ‘08, we went through astronomical oil prices with the banking crisis, and that really made it much worse. So we’re going to get a squeeze on the American economy as a result of our dependence on oil and the rise in prices.
And lastly there is this quirk in the way we do numbers in that the discouraged are not counted, if you stop looking [for work]. So as the economy improves — as it slowly improves — you get people who return and look for jobs. And they get added onto the unemployed, so you get an artificially higher number than you would otherwise.
It’s for those reasons I think that Romer and the others are very cautious in predictions about a recovery in unemployment.

On President Obama’s 17-minute answer to a question at the town-hall meeting in Charlotte about Obamacare raising taxes:

I don’t know why you’re so surprised. It’s only nine times the length of the Gettysburg Address, and Lincoln was answering an easier question: the higher purpose of the Union and [of the death of] soldiers who fell in battle.
The president had an easy answer. He could have said: I wanted to make history with health care and to do it, I have to raise your taxes. Sure, it’s not a good time economically in the middle of a recession, but politically, I had to, because I have a majority in Congress and I’m going to lose it in November. End of answer.

On Hamid Karzai’s statement about the possibility that he would join the Taliban:

What we have here is the problem of an unruly client. The problem with Karzai is that he’s the worst ally except for all the others. We’re stuck with him, and we’re not in Afghanistan because of him but for our own perceived national interest. We’re stuck with him. We’re going to have to tolerate this.
Now, I think there is a way you can play this to your advantage. That is, you want a client. . . to have nationalist credentials. So the more he builds them up, the better it is, because he then gets authority in the country.
We have a similar issue with Maliki in Iraq. There were times he defied us and there were times he wouldn’t do what we wanted. But in the end, you have to play it in a way where you use it to your own advantage because the stronger he is internally, the better it is for us.
And what you do is you do not attack him as we did, as Obama [did], on his way over to Afghanistan, saying we’re going to read him the riot act on corruption. You don’t do that and leak it. You do it in quiet — and in public hail him as a liberator.