So this isn’t exactly what Todd thinks but you can sorta tell by the questions he asks, where he is on energy policy.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38277607/ns/msnbc_tv-the_daily_rundown/

Chuck Todd interviews President Obama

Chuck Todd sits down with President Obama in Grand Rapids, Mich., exclusively for NBC News

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — CHUCK TODD: Mr. President, thank you very much.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Great to be here, Chuck. Thank you.

CHUCK TODD: All right, let’s start with why you’re here. It’s another groundbreaking for one of these battery plants, an attempt to show some positive results from a stimulus program that is being received a little more skeptically by the public now, even as opposed to where things were 15 months ago. Why the difference?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well — the — the first thing to know is specifically what’s happening here in Holland, Michigan, but also all across the country. You know, when we came into office, America counted for about two percent of the advanced battery markets for electric and hybrid cars.

And what we did was, we said, ‘Look, let’s put up $2.4 billion that has to be matched by private dollars.’ And now you’ve got nine advanced battery manufacturing facilities already up on line. Ultimately there are gonna be 21. And we expect that, by 2015, we are going to have about 40 percent of the market in advanced battery technology.

And — and that’s going into, by the way — couple of the cars that we saw today — the — the — the Chevy Volt, as well as the Ford Focus. So this is an example, I think, of what our economic strategy has been from the start. We had a disaster on our hands. We’ve been able to stabilize the economy and prevent the freefall.

Instead of 750,000 jobs a month being lost, we’ve now gained jobs in the private sector for five consecutive months. But, we’ve still got a long way to go, and so, not surprisingly, the American people who are out of work or still struggling to pay the bills, they still wanna see more action when it comes to jobs. And I don’t blame them. But what I do wanna point out is the very specific things that are being done as a consequence of some [unintelligible] that were taken by Democrats last year.

dotty dot dot

The other thing that — the main thing that keeps me up at night right now is we lost eight million jobs. The month I was sworn in, we lost 750,000 jobs. We’ve regained about 600,000 this year so far, and if we stay on pace, hopefully we’ll gain several hundred thousand more.  But making up for that eight million is still gonna be a challenge.

And that’s gonna require us tapping into the new sectors, like the clean energy economy where there is growth to be had. It also means that we’ve gotta start selling more than we’re buying, which is why I’m emphasizing export growth so much. But, look, nobody in the White House is satisfied with where we are right now. What we absolutely are convinced of, though, is that we’re on the right track. And I think that the statistics bear that out.

CHUCK TODD: You know, in your remarks in Holland, you seem to also make a political argument about the other side saying that they, you know, weren’t for these plans. What do you [unintelligible] tell the person who may have voted for you, can’t find a job or got laid off since you took office? Why they should still keep the Democrats in charge? Because they’re not feeling any of the positives yet.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Look, if somebody’s out of work right now, the only answer that I’m gonna have for them is when they get a job. Up until that point, from their perspective, the economic policies aren’t working well enough.

:}

More tomorrow.

:}