President Obama said he was humbled by the “shellacking” Democrats took in Tuesday’s congressional elections, and signaled a willingness to negotiate with Republicans on his top legislative agenda items, including tax cuts, energy policy and his much-maligned health care reforms.
“Over the last two years, we’ve made progress,” Obama said at an East Room news conference Wednesday. “But, clearly, too many Americans haven’t felt that progress yet, and they told us that yesterday. And as president, I take responsibility for that.”
The president accepted some of the blame for Democrats’ historic losses at the polls, when Republicans took control of the House and increased the size of their Senate minority. He said he is “doing a whole lot of reflecting” on what the election meant for him, Democrats and their shared agenda.
But Obama rejected Republican claims that the election proved the public opposes the president’s initiatives, including health care reform.
“We’d be misreading the election if we thought that the American people want to see us for the next two years relitigate arguments that we had over the last two years,” he said.
Obama pinned Americans’ frustration — as illustrated by the elections — on the ballooning unemployment rate and the public’s perception of his health care measure, economic stimulus and bailouts of Wall Street and automakers as distractions from their chief concerns rather than responses to them.
He defended the policies as emergency measures that successfully derailed a second recession. But he also offered to compromise a number of his key initiatives, including cap-and-trade environmental legislation.
“Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat,” Obama said. “It was not the only way. It was a means, not an end. And I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.”
Obama suggested he’d also back off his demand that the Bush-era tax cuts be extended only to people who earn less than $200,000 a year.
Obama has repeatedly insisted that the public’s coolness toward his policies was not a rejection of his approach, but rather a White House failure to fully explain to Americans what its trying to do and how these changes will benefit them.
Noting that “great communicators” like former Presidents Reagan and Clinton faced similar public doubts following their parties’ losses in midterm elections, Obama said the public is just concerned that “the party in power wasn’t listening to them.”
“This is something that I think every president needs to go through,” he said, “because the responsibilities of this office are so enormous and so many people are depending on what we do, and in the rush of activity, sometimes we lose track of the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place.”
