'Let’s put the whole elephant out there,' he said. | Reuters | REUTERS Obama: ACA repeal a GOP 'fixation'

President Barack Obama used a long-awaited pre-vacation press conference Friday to weigh in on a series of issues he hasn’t had much to say about in recent weeks, including the delay of part of his health care law, heightened tensions with Russia and Americans’ demands for more information about national security surveillance programs.

Obama led off his question-and-answer session, which lasted less than an hour, by announcing plans to introduce “appropriate reforms” to domestic surveillance programs that hinge on getting Congress to approve greater oversight.


“It’s not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence as well,” he said in the East Room of the White House. “We can and must be more transparent.”

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Obama said he will work with Congress to create new oversight for intelligence programs, and will establish a task force that will present recommendations by the end of the year. “Let’s put the whole elephant out there,” he later added.

The Friday afternoon gathering was Obama’s first full-scale press conference since April 30 — and given that gap, reporters’ questions were especially wide-ranging.

On health care, Obama said his administration’s decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate by a year — a move announced just before the July 4 holiday — was the kind of “glitch” that only drew criticism because of the politicization of the health law, and was just the same kind of obstacle that Apple might run into when releasing a new iPad.

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“In a normal political environment, it would have been easier to simply call up the Speaker and say, ‘You know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law,’” he said. “But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to ‘Obamacare.’”

Then he turned tough, cutting into Republicans for their single-minded focus on killing the health care law. “The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care,” he said. “It’s just become an ideological fixation.”

Though former national security contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations helped force a debate on government surveillance, Obama said his view of the leaker hasn’t changed. “No, I don’t think that Mr. Snowden was a patriot,” he said.

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Russia’s decision to grant temporary asylum to Snowden helped precipitate the White House’s decision not to hold a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin that had been slated for early September, but Obama said the decision didn’t reflect a newly adversarial relationship. “There’s always been some tension in the U.S.-Russian relationship after the fall of the Soviet Union,” he said.

“I’ve encouraged Mr. Putin to think forwards as opposed to backwards … with mixed success,” but there have been “a number of emerging differences,” including on Syria and human rights issues, the president said. “It is probably appropriate for us to take a pause” and “calibrate the relationship so that we’re doing things that are good for the United States and hopefully good for Russia as well.”

Though Obama’s relationship with Putin is often cast by the media as less-than-warm, the president insisted that he doesn’t “have a bad personal relationship with Putin.” Their conversations are “candid,” “blunt” and sometimes “constructive,” he said, though he did concede that Putin’s body language isn’t too inviting. “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.”

There have been calls for the United States to boycott the Olympics over Russia’s anti-gay rights positions, but Obama said he does not “think it’s appropriate to boycott the Olympics.” Rather, he’d like to see some openly gay American athletes bring home medals from the Winter 2014 games in Sochi.

And amid new threats against U.S. diplomatic facilities abroad, Obama said he stood by his assessment that the “core” of Al Qaeda is “very weak” — but acknowledged that offshoot groups do pose new threats. He declined to comment on the drone strikes that reportedly targeted some of those Al Qaeda affiliates in recent weeks. “I will not have a discussion about operational issues,” he said.

Obama said the investigation into the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that took place nearly a year ago “remains a top priority for us.” He pointed to his administration’s success in tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden as a sign he’ll be successful again, despite the lack of results to date. “I also said we’d get Bin Laden and I didn’t get him in 11 months ….We’re going to stay on them until we get them,” he said.

The president also revealed some of his thinking around nominating a new chair of the Federal Reserve, which he’s expected to do this fall. Former Obama and Clinton economic adviser Larry Summers has been floated as a frontrunner and has faced attacks, prompting pushback by the president and his allies.

Summers has been attacked “pre-emptively, which is sort of a standard Washington exercise,” Obama said. The exercise is something “I don’t like, because when somebody’s worked hard for me and worked hard on behalf of the American people, and I know the quality of those people and I see them getting slapped around in the press for no reason before they’ve even been nominated for anything, then I want to make sure that somebody’s standing up for them.

“I felt the same way when people were attacking Susan Rice before she was nominated for anything,” he added. Still, Summers isn’t the only candidate Obama is weighing: He’s also considering Janet Yellen, and other candidates whose names he did not mention.

The president used his opening statement on Friday to call on Congress to pass legislation to expand oversight of the PATRIOT Act, specifically of Section 215, a provision interpreted to allow the collection of details of nearly every telephone call placed in the United States. “I believe that there are steps we can take to give Americans confidence that there are greater safeguards in place,” he said.

He said he will work with Congress to revamp Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which critics argue hasn’t been sufficiently skeptical of the National Security Agency’s requests. “We can provide greater assurances that the court is looking at this from both perspectives — security and privacy,” he said. The administration will also propose adding a civil liberties advocate to the process.

The administration plans to release a seven-page document detailing the NSA’s authorities, and the intelligence community will also launch a website that will serve as “hub for further transparency.”

Obama is also commissioning an outside task force to study government surveillance and consumer privacy. “We need new thinking for a new era,” he said. The panel will produce a preliminary report within 60 days, and a final report by the end of the year.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Brendan Buck, said he was skeptical of Obama’s promise for greater transparency. “Much of any public concern about this critical program can be attributed to the president’s reluctance to sufficiently explain and defend it,” Buck said.

“Transparency is important, but we expect the White House to insist that no reform will compromise the operational integrity of the program,” he said. “That must be the president’s red line, and he must enforce it. Our priority should continue to be saving American lives, not saving face.”