The show's interviews with Romney and Obama aired Sunday night. | AP Photos Romney, Obama duel on '60 Minutes'

President Barack Obama’s biggest disappointment of the last four years is not being able to change the climate in Washington, even as he has brought change to the nation.

“My biggest disappointment is that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked,” Obama said in an interview with Steve Kroft that aired Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”


A sit-down with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney also aired on the show. That interview was conducted by Scott Pelley.

“I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest but were focused more on problem-solving that, you know, I haven’t fully accomplished that. Haven’t even come close in some cases,” the president added in his interview.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama pulling ahead of Romney)

Obama’s comments aired after he said last week that, over the course of his presidency, he’s learned “you can’t change Washington from the inside,” but with the help of people across the country.

He hit on that theme in Sunday’s interview, acknowledging that he “bear[s] responsibility for everything, to some degree” including not bringing change to the political process. But, he said, “One of the things I’ve realized over the last two years is that that only happens if I’m enlisting the American people much more aggressively than I did the first two years.”

Still, “change has happened and positive change for the American people,” Obama said, pointing to the passage of his health care law and reforms to the financial services industry.

On Thursday, Obama said that not passing immigration reform was the “biggest failure” of his term. As soon as Obama’s comments aired Sunday night, Republicans latched onto the president’s discussion of his “biggest disappointment,” with Romney spokesman Ryan Williams saying that the president “just doesn’t get it.” Obama’s “greatest failure – by far – is his broken promise to fix the economy,” Williams said .

Romney, meanwhile, indicated that he would try to get Washington to work by starting negotiations with something short of all the details of his vision.

“If you want to work together with people across the aisle, you lay out your principles and your policy, you work together with them, but you don’t hand them a complete document and say, ‘Here, take this or leave it,’” he said. “Look, leadership is not a take-it-or-leave-it thing. We’ve seen too much of that in Washington.”

When pressed to go into details on his tax plans, Romney deferred. “That’s something Congress and I will have to work out together,” he said. Though “the devil’s in the details” on taxes, “the angel is in the policy, which is creating more jobs.”

( Also on POLITICO: GOP analysis: Mitt winning in middle)

Under his plan, all tax rates would be cut by 20 percent, Romney said, but because most exemptions and deductions would be eliminated, most Americans would wind up paying about the same in taxes that they do now. “Middle-income people will probably see a little break, because there’ll be no tax on their savings,” he said.

It’s fair, Romney said, for people like him to pay rates below 15 percent on investment income. “I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth — to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work,” he said.

Obama countered in his interview: “The problem that Gov. Romney has is that he seems to only have one note: tax cuts for the wealthy and rolling back regulations as a recipe for success. Well, we tried that vigorously between 2001 and 2008. And it didn’t work out so well.”

The president said that he’s tried to more to boost the economy but has run into obstacles from Republicans in Congress, particularly when it came to passing his American Jobs Act. “There is no doubt that I’ve been disappointed in trying to get more cooperation from those folks,” he said. “And that’s something that we’re going to have to continue to do.”

But what the administration has been able to do on the economy has worked, Obama said. “The fact of the matter is that what we’ve done has been effective in improving the situation in every area that we’re talking about,” he said. “You know, when I made the decision to save the auto industry, that saved a million jobs. One in eight jobs in Ohio is dependent on the auto industry. So, we’ve actually seen success.”

As he’s been doing more often in recent weeks, Obama voiced his expectation that after the election — whether he wins or loses — he and Congress will be able to work together on jobs and the fiscal cliff in the lame-duck session.

“I’m hoping that after the smoke clears and the election season’s over that that spirit of cooperation comes more to the fore,” he said.

Romney was asked in interview about apparent inconsistencies in his record, but instead pointed to Obama’s.

“I understand that my opposition will do its very best to try and change, any way they can the narrative to fit their objectives,” Romney said. But “The president has certainly changed his view on a whole host of things. He was going to close Guantanamo. It’s open. Military tribunals were going to be ended; now military tribunals continue. The president was opposed to same-sex marriage; now he’s in favor of same-sex marriage.”

He did acknowledge that experience has changed certain views, though his principles have remained constant.

“The principles I have are the principles I’ve had from the beginning of my political life,” Romney said. “But have I learned? Have I found that some things I thought would be effective turned out not to be effective? Absolutely. If you don’t learn from experience, you don’t learn from your mistakes, why you ought to be fired.”