Obama: Election wasn't about me

Sure, the Democrats suffered crushing losses last week, President Barack Obama acknowledged Monday.

But, he argued, it wasn’t any sort of repudiation of his party leadership or presidency.


If Obama has done any second-guessing since President-elect Donald Trump’s shocking victory last week, he didn’t betray any of it during his most extensive set of comments since the election.

In a press conference and in two separate conference calls with supporters, Obama rejected the idea of a bigger meaning in the election results. His policies? Helped millions and maybe even billions. His personal popularity? Still sky-high. His party? Well, he was busy with Syria and the economy – you can’t expect him to do everything.

“We are indisputably in a stronger position today than we were when I came in eight years ago. Jobs have been growing for 73 straight months. Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling. The uninsured rate is at the lowest level on record. Carbon emissions have come down without impinging on our growth,” Obama said during Monday’s press conference, his first since Election Day.

“We’ve helped millions of people in this country and probably billions of people around the world,” he added on another call with donors, elected officials and other supporters organized by the Democratic National Committee.

During the campaign, as Trump threatened to undo much of what Obama is most proud of — whether it was tearing up his landmark executive order on carbon limits, reneging on the Iran deal or repealing Obamacare — Obama saw justification to argue repeatedly that “our progress is on the ballot.”

But on Monday, Obama shot down the idea that rhetoric like what he used on the campaign trail should be taken seriously.

“This notion that somehow all the work we did suddenly gets stripped away,” Obama said on the DNC call. “Let me tell you something: We got more done than any administration in the last who-knows-how-many decades and if they roll back 15 or 20 percent of that, we’re still 80 percent ahead.”

He added, “And that’s not going to be as easy as I think some people feel, particularly if we continue to make the case and mobilize.”

By failing to win a majority in the Senate, Democrats lost their legislative way to soften the blow of Trump’s sledgehammer. But Obama predicted that his policies are either too popular or too entrenched to eliminate.



Take the Affordable Care Act, the president said. “It's one thing to characterize this thing as not working when it's just an abstraction. Now, suddenly, you're in charge and you're going to repeal it. OK, well, what happens to those 20 million people who have health insurance? Are you going to just kick them off and suddenly they don’t have health insurance?”

Indeed, Trump has already signaled he wants to keep some central components of Obamacare, including provisions to keep young adults on their parents’ plans and ban insurers from rejecting people with pre-existing conditions.

Same goes for Obama’s executive action to let undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children gain temporary legal status, the president said. Trump will have to think “long and hard” before eliminating that provision.

“It is my strong belief that the majority of the American people would not want to see suddenly those kids have to start hiding again,” Obama said.

Even one of his newer and more fragile executive orders, a set of power plant regulations that could substantially reduce carbon emissions, is nearly a fait accompli, Obama said, with 40 percent of the country operating under state rules that align with his Clean Power Plan, and private companies adopting more efficient standards to save money.

Obama acknowledged that Democrats’ losses were all the more stunning given that his approval ratings are the highest of his second term.

“There’s that little mismatch,” he said on a call with members of Organizing for Action, the force that drove his two campaigns for president and sought to push his agenda.

But he offered an explanation for that in his press conference.

“I believe that we have better ideas,” Obama said. “But I also believe that good ideas don’t matter if people don’t hear them. That’s why Democrats need to compete nationwide, he added. “We have to work at a grass-roots level — something that's been a running thread in my career.”

Given his expertise, Obama said he regretted that he hadn’t done more to help elect more Democrats — over the course of his presidency, his party has lost ground at virtually every level, from statehouses to Congress to the White House — but there was only so much he could do.

“Look, one of the challenges that I’ve discovered being president is I’d like to be organizer-in-chief, but it’s hard,” Obama said. “You got Syria, and you got NATO, and you have summit meetings and economic issues that you have to deal with on ongoing basis. You try to get legislation done.”

Obama did work hard to get out the vote for Hillary Clinton and Democrats, even taking the unusual step of endorsing more than 150 down-ballot candidates. And he gave his loyalists the hard sell, warning the Congressional Black Caucus in September that it would he would take personally an “insult to my legacy” if African-Americans didn’t turn out.

On Monday, for one of his top strategists at least, that was merely another sign of Obama’s exceptionalism.

“The Obama coalition,” David Plouffe said on the OFA call, was simply that: “the Obama coalition. And not all parts of it were as committed to showing up every time."

Plouffe, who was also an adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign, apologized to activists for getting the race so wrong.

“Part of my misplaced confidence was just assuming how many of the things you guys accomplished were going to be transferable,” Plouffe said. “I have deeper respect and appreciation for what we accomplished and our president.”

Plouffe isn’t the only one who has rejected the suggestion that the vote was a repudiation of Obama’s presidency.

“No, I think it's a moment in time where politicians for a long period of time have let people down,” Trump said in a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast Sunday. “I think it was just a repudiation of what's been taking place over a longer period of time than that.”

