OBAMA: ...as well as the homeowner assistance -- if those are contained, my inclination would be to vote for it, understanding I’m not happy about it.

We should have never gotten into this place in the first place. And I think this is a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policy.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let’s just -- let’s just talk about this. When the president came on television and said we need this bailout package, he painted it in the most dire terms.

OBAMA: Right.

SCHIEFFER: How -- do you agree with him?

How crucial is it that this pass?

How bad is this situation right now?

OBAMA: I think this situation is pretty bad. Look, you’re always dealing with probabilities, in this kind of situation. You don’t know exactly how the market might react. You don’t know -- since you’ve got worldwide actors doing all kinds of things.

But think about it. I mean, we had the largest bank failure in our history, and it wasn’t even the major news that day. (LAUGHTER)

It gives you a sense of how fundamentally our financial system is being restructured, as we speak.

If you have a situation where credit markets lock up, then, as I said before, businesses who are making stuff and hiring people and, you know, have nothing to do with wall street, suddenly they’re imperiled.

SCHIEFFER: So it is a serious -- you agree with the president’s assessment that it’s as serious as he said it was?

OBAMA: I agree that this is probably the most serious financial crisis we’ve faced since the Great Depression. And what we can’t do is do nothing.

What I absolutely insist on, though, is that the same sense of urgency that we have about Wall Street, we have about folks on Main Street who have been struggling for a long time.

One of the critical lessons, I think, that have to be learned by this is not only that we have to set up some rules of the road, some regulations that work to keep the system solvent and prevent Wall Street from taking enormous risks with other people’s money, figuring that, tails I win, heads you lose, where they don’t have any risk on the down side.

But the second thing that we have to learn is that, if you think about how this all started, subprime lending -- you’ve got homeowners who ultimately could not make payments on their homes, and that’s an indication of the degree to which family budgets have been under huge stress for years now, and we haven’t been paying much attention about it because the theory has been, well, as long as those at the top are doing well, prosperity somehow is going to trickle down.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you this. You and senator McCain took very different approaches to this. He suspended his campaign. He called for a big summit meeting in Washington.

OBAMA: Right.

SCHIEFFER: You -- you stood back a little bit at that point. Now that this -- it looks like they’ve gotten some agreement, should Senator McCain be getting the credit, here...

(LAUGHTER)

... forcing these people back to the negotiating table?

OBAMA: No. Look, here are the facts. For two weeks, I was on the phone every day with Secretary Paulson and the congressional leaders, making sure that the principles that have ultimately been adopted were incorporated into the bill.

I mean, if you think about it, those items that you mentioned at the top of the show, none of those were in the president’s provision. They are identical to the things I called for the day that Secretary Paulson released his package.

That, I think, is an indication of the degree to which, when it comes to protecting taxpayers, I was pushing very hard and involved in shaping those provisions.

But understand this. The important thing here is making sure that we don’t have a photo op session. Because this is serious. We should not have been here in the first place.

And, you know, I think the critical debate that we’re going to have to have between myself and Senator McCain moving forward is how do we prevent this kind of thing from happening again?

OBAMA: And, you know, the problem with Senator McCain’s positions generally have been that for all his talk about being a maverick and wanting to reform the system, he has supported on economic policy George Bush more than 90 percent of the time. His differences on other issues with the president he likes to tout, but they don’t have to do with his fundamental economic theory that helped to get us into this mess in the first place. And if we’re going to get out, then we have got to fundamentally change course.

SCHIEFFER: This was obviously the first topic, as it should have been, in the debate Friday night. This is your first time to talk about the debate since then. How do you think it went?

OBAMA: Well, I think that the country had a chance to look at two very contrasting visions about where the country needs to go. Senator McCain on economic policy fundamentally agrees with George Bush. I mean, up until this recent crisis, as recently as March, when I was calling for a fundamental overhaul of the regulatory system on Wall Street, senator McCain was saying I’m basically a deregulator. On taxes, he has wanted to continue Bush’s policies and in fact wants to double down on them.

So you have got essentially a continuation when it comes to John McCain of the policies of the last eight years. He’ll talk about earmarks, but that’s not a fundamental shift in our basic economic theories.

What I’ve said is we’ve got to completely reverse course. We’ve got to have economic growth from the bottom up. And that means that my tax cuts, for example, are going to the 95 percent of Americans who are struggling every day, as opposed to providing additional tax cuts to corporations that are doing very well.

So you have a fundamental shift or contrast in terms of where we need to take the economy.

And on foreign policy, likewise, there really wasn’t any indication that Senator McCain wanted a significant shift from George Bush’s foreign policy. And I think we need to end the war in Iraq, refocus attention on Afghanistan, initiate tough diplomacy, but recognize that on a whole host of issues -- from nuclear proliferation to hunting down terrorists -- that we’ve got to enlist and mobilize the support of the world. So I think what we see is that the American people are going to have a very clear choice come November.

SCHIEFFER: All right. We’re going to take a break here and come back and talk about some of that in more detail in just a minute.