We are going to have more on the president's trip to India in a few minutes, including a very heated confrontation between the White House press secretary and Indian security all on behalf of the U.S. news media. We will explain what's going on. Stand by for that.
Before he left on his Asian tour, President Obama gave an interview that's still generating a lot of buzz. He's talking candidly about where his administration went wrong, leading to the Democrats' trouncing on Election Day. Listen to what he told CBS' "60 Minutes."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "60 MINUTES")
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think that, over the course of two years, we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that, you know, leadership isn't just legislation, that it's a matter of persuading people and giving them confidence and bringing them together and setting a tone. We haven't always been successful at that.
And I take personal responsibility for that, and it's something that I have got to examine carefully as I go forward.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BLITZER: Let's go deeper with our senior political analyst David Gergen.
David, admitting failures, is that going to help the president going forward?
DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I think it does help when he shows humility, as he did in that interview.
What I think does not work is when he claims that this was a communications failure and that essentially is what derailed Democrats. The fact -- I think the facts show, Wolf, that the president and his team did not take their eye off the ball about trying to persuade people.
The president was out regularly. By a CBS tally, in the first 423 days of the president's time in office, he gave 471 speeches, comments, remarks. He was out in the public eye trying to persuade people more than once a day. That's far more exposure than any of his predecessors, even including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
So, it was not a lack of exposure. Take health care. He gave 54 speeches on health care. Now, it wasn't that people didn't get the message. They did get the message. But it's this -- that old line about people who sell dog food. You can package it any way you want and make it -- and beautiful ribbons and a great bow, but sometimes the dogs just don't like the dog food.
BLITZER: So, looking forward, what does he need to do now?
GERGEN: Well, Wolf, I think it's an interesting question. He clearly -- you had a conversation with Gloria Borger in the last hour, I thought, that was important.
And that is, he's got to get this unemployment rate down. I think that that's partly a question of coming back with some ideas for how to advance the economy, and then actually getting some momentum. And I don't think it's a matter of just giving tons more speeches and getting into people's backyards.
You know, Americans showed, when George W. Bush, you know, gave speech after speech about the Iraq war, when they thought we were losing it, they just stopped listening. And he could give as many speeches as he wanted. They wanted to see facts change on the ground. He's got to see facts change.
In his case, the unemployment rate has to be coming down by the time he goes into the elections. If I can just take one more second on this, history shows that -- and these are interesting numbers -- that of the last nine elections -- of the last nine presidents who sought reelection, the only three who lost were those who had unemployment rates at 7.5 percent or higher.
And that was, namely, Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush Sr. Those three went down on reelection bids with a high unemployment rate. For Barack Obama, I think the goal has bringing it under 7.5 percent by November of 2012.
BLITZER: That's going to be very, very hard, if you speak to economists, as you well know.
GERGEN: Hard to do.
BLITZER: Yes.
All right, David, thanks very much.