President Obama “wasn’t offended” when Republicans cheered his admission in the State of the Union address Tuesday that he could not run for the White House again.
The applause from conservatives on Capitol Hill prompted Obama to ad-lib arguably the most memorable line of his address, telling Republicans, “I know because I won both of them.”
“It was a spontaneous reaction to the smattering of applause that was on the Republican side,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday, explaining that Obama “wasn’t offended” by the GOP response.
Democrats welcomed the defiant tone from Obama, having previously accused him of not doing enough to confront conservatives throughout much of 2014.
Obama is traveling to red-state Idaho Wednesday to push additional spending on research, and his top spokesman insisted that the president had emerged from his State of the Union address more “energized.”
