Barack Obama pledged to spend 2014 wielding his pen to write executive orders circumventing Congress; now he has warned that 2015 will require him to “pull out his veto pen”, to prevent Congress from overriding his wishes.



In an uncompromising interview released on Monday, the president said he expected that the Republican takeover of the Senate would cause him to spend much of his last two years in office blocking attempts to unpick his domestic reforms.



“I haven’t used the veto pen very often since I’ve been in office, partly because legislation that I objected to was typically blocked in the Senate even after Republicans took over the House,” Obama told NPR, in a conversation recorded before he left for a Christmas vacation in Hawaii.

“Now I suspect there are going to be some times where I’ve got to pull that pen out. And I’m going to defend gains that we’ve made in healthcare; I’m going to defend gains that we’ve made on environment and clean air and clean water.”

The language of Obama’s pledge echoes his 2014 State of the Union address, in which he promised to use his “pen and phone” to overcome an intransigent Congress and seek alternatives to legislation.

The Democrats’ loss of the Senate in November’s midterm elections means Republicans are likely to try to reverse that momentum and pass legislation. Such legislation can be blocked by the White House, unless there is a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress.

Obama’s NPR interview also acknowledges openly for the first time that since the midterms, the White House has shifted toward a more confrontational policy.

“The moves like the Cuba diplomatic initiative are ones that I want to make sure I continue to pursue partly because, frankly, it’s easier for a president to do at the end of his term than a new president coming in,” said Obama, who agreed he was shifting from things he “had to do” to things he “wanted to do”.

He added: “I’m in a position now where, with the economy relatively strong, with us having lowered the deficit, with us having strong growth and job growth, for the first time us starting to see wages ticking up, with inflation low, with energy production high – now I have the ability to focus on some long-term projects, including making sure that everybody is benefiting from this growth and not just some.”

The tone of Obama’s end-of-year interview, much like his end-of-year press conference on 19 December, reaffirmed a bolder mood that is likely to infuriate critics and delight supporters.

He also pointed to limited opportunity for compromise with Republicans on issues like immigration, where he said could not work with “nativists” who opposed reform efforts.

However, the president once again ducked opportunities to side with protesters over recent clashes with police in Ferguson and New York, arguing that the US was “probably in its day-to-day interactions less racially divided” now than when in became president.

“I actually think that the issue has surfaced in a way that probably is healthy,” said Obama. “I mean, the issue of police and communities of colour being mistrustful of each other is hardly new; that dates back a long time. It’s just something that hasn’t been talked about – and for a variety of reasons.”

Instead, he said, one of his priorities was to reach out to white voters who feel left out of the economic recovery.

“Right now there are a lot of white working-class voters who haven’t seen enough progress economically in their own lives”, he said, “and despite the work that we’ve done to try to strengthen the economy and address issues like childcare or minimum wage or increasing manufacturing, that’s not what they read about or hear about in the newspapers.”