Facetime with Barack Obama

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The pattern we're on right now—having added $4 trillion worth of debt in the name of our children and our grandchildren and borrowing from China, South Korea, and Mexico, as well as the oil-producing states—that's not a recipe for long-term economic growth. And look, I would prefer lowering taxes for everybody, including myself. But it wouldn't be the responsible thing to do. You can't fight a war that is costing $10 billion a month, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, educate our kids to compete with China and India, make sure that our senior citizens aren't wasting away, and still eliminate taxes for the wealthiest Americans. You can't do all those things at once. You've got to make choices.

What about the top marginal rate for ordinary income?
What I've said is that we should go back to probably a top marginal rate of 39%—what it was before the Bush tax cuts. I would not increase taxes for middle-class Americans, and in fact I want to provide a tax cut for people who are making $75,000 a year or less. For those folks, I want an offset on the payroll tax that would be worth as much as $1,000 for a family. I don't want senior citizens who are bringing in less than $50,000 a year to have to pay income tax on their Social Security. And I want to provide an additional 10% mortgage deduction, a mortgage interest credit, for those who currently don't itemize. Because if you live in a house that's pretty expensive, like I do, and I itemize, I get a pretty big break from Uncle Sam. If you own a $100,000 house, and you're making $65,000, $75,000 a year, you're not getting that same deduction. I think that will actually help relieve some of the pressure on homeowners.

Why raise taxes in a slowdown? Isn't that going to put a further strain on people?
There's no doubt that anything I do is going to be premised on what the economic situation is when I take office next January. The thing you can be assured of is that I'm not going to make these decisions based on ideology. I'm not a dogmatist. My opponents to the right would like to paint me as this wild-eyed liberal, but I believe in the market. I believe in entrepreneurship. I believe in capitalism, and I want to do what works. One of the problems with the Bush Administration has been its rigidness when it comes to economic policy. It doesn't matter what the problem is, they'll say tax cuts. Trade deficit? Tax cuts. Slowdown in manufacturing? Tax cuts. At a certain point, if you've only got one arrow in the quiver, you're going to have problems.

Tell me how you've been managing your campaign and how that relates to how you'll manage the White House.
My basic approach to leadership is to hire very good people, set a clear vision for where I want the organization to go…then give people a lot of power to do their jobs and hold them accountable for doing them. I said early on that I wanted to have a cooperative atmosphere. I didn't want a lot of drama. I wanted to focus on building a broad-based network of support rather than just relying on all the usual suspects in politics. We put together a budget, and we stuck to it. We've put together clear objectives and we've achieved them. So I think it's fair to say that having started from scratch and competing against organizations built over 20 years—including an organization built by a former President—we have outperformed the others in terms of fund-raising, volunteer participation, votes, and states won. And we've done so without a lot of turmoil or turnover. And I think it should give people some confidence that I know how to manage a team.

Maria Bartiromo is the anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell .