Look: people are frustrated. And that frustration has expressed itself in a lot of different ways: it expressed itself in the Tea Party; it’s expressing itself in Occupy Wall Street. I do think what this signals is that people in leadership,whether it’s corporate leadership, leaders of the banks, leaders in Washington — everybody needs to understand that the American people feel like nobody’s looking out for them right now.

You know, traditionally, what held this country together was this notion that if you work hard, if you;re playing by the rules, if you’re responsible, if you’re looking out for your family, you’re showing up to work everyday and doing a good job — you got a chance to get ahead, you got a chance to succeed. And right now, it feels to people like the deck’s stacked against them and the folks in power don’t seem to be paying attention to that.

…We are working every single day to figure out how do we give people a fair shake, and how do we make sure that everybody’s doing their fair share. Then people won’t be occupying the streets because they’ll have a job and they’ll feel like they’re able to get ahead. And part of my job over the next year is to make sure that if they’re not seeing it out of Congress, then at minimum they’re seeing out of their President somebody’s who’s going to be fighting for them.