"What I worry about in our politics is people getting impatient with the slowness of democracy," President Barack Obama said. | Getty Obama warns against impatience with 'slowness of democracy'

President Barack Obama says he's wary of Americans turning away from the "core values and basic institutions" of democracy out of impatience.

During a wide-ranging interview with VICE airing on HBO Friday that ran the gamut from the political gridlock in Congress to the explosive and polarizing 2016 presidential campaign, the outgoing president acknowledged that he had failed to deliver on his calls to reduce D.C. partisanship, pointing to recent political results as cause for concern.


"I have not changed Washington the way I wanted to change it," Obama said. "And what I worry about in our politics is people getting impatient with the slowness of democracy, and the less effective Congress works, the more likely people are to start giving up on the core values and basic institutions that have helped us to weather a lot of storms."

The president added that while he believed in political reform, institutional stability was key to maintaining a functioning democracy.

"The one thing I've learned in this job is that I have really progressive policy beliefs but I'm more conservative when it comes to our institutions," he said. "I've seen enough around the world when it comes to the results of complete revolution or upheaval that it doesn't always play out well."

Confronted with his own 2007 campaign calls for reform in Washington, when upon announcing his presidential bid he asserted that "the ways of Washington must change," a humbled Obama conceded defeat.

"Well, that didn't work out did it?" he quipped.

The president added that while he stood by the work of his administration, many of the practices in Washington he condemned in 2007 remained unchanged in 2016.

"You know, I could not the prouder of the work that my administration's done, but there's no doubt that one of the central goals that I had had, which was to make the politics in Washington work better, to reduce the knee-jerk partisanship, to elevate the debate, I haven't accomplished that."