Barack Obama - Letterman - 2015.05.04

Oh gentlemen it's a thrill for us and quite an honor to introduce our first guest this evening please welcome the 44th President of the United States Barack Obama thank you I just say this when I say the words ladies and gentlemen Barack Obama president of the United States and I look over and it's you walking over here I get a little you know kind of a thing it's it's overwhelming well I feel kind of overwhelmed I am so honored to be one of your last guests now let me ask you but yeah that's a big deal I was thinking about this today many days when I wake up and I find out what I have to do during the day there's a couple of things where I said oh god now are you saying that's how you felt this morning I'm checking this No but when they this interview is from starting well it's fine I thought after it will sell this time worried no ok so when you are reminded that today is today do you say to yourself oh god today's the day I have to go see Letterman oh I'm excited about it the first first of all which I know you'd like Michelle a little bit more than me oh my god which is ok he was here last I know which and I assure you you are not alone but but I'm not going to let her have all the fun and mainly I came by to say goodbye to Biff and Paul since design thank you but they said I couldn't get on the set unless I also spoke but I want to tell you your wife and I've met her I don't know four or five times in various circumstances and and yeah last week she brought with her your own Marine Corps band pretty cool oh my goodness and you're just seeing it you can't the hair on the back your hand stands up when these men and women merge you're amazing and I don't know if she mentioned that first of all these folks are all active duty and they can play anything mm-hmm you know you want them to play jazz they'll play jazz they want them to play classical yo-yo ma came by the white house one time and suddenly he sat down with them and they were all playing a cello suites and I mean you name it they can play it and in the meantime they're also putting their life on the line it is one of the great honors of the presidency to be their commander-in-chief right what to hear that kind of live music is quite close it is a remarkable thing and these are people in the Marine Corps for they've made this a career well they made it a career but as I said they're not just playing music they're serving in all kinds of ways and and a guy in a huge bear skin hat brings them out here serious sort of thing yes and then they have a whole different conductor yes yes they do and these are the games if you were really paying attention that's good well anyway your wife was a delightful and man just what a great asset to have for representation of the administration representation of women representation of Americans and and I'm sure she talked about everything she's doing for military families which has become such a passion for her you know we travel all around the world and everywhere you go you've got our members of the Armed Services stationed and they are away from their families for months in some cases years at a time sometimes the families are moving as well the kids are adapting all the time to new circumstances and they are great ambassadors for us but part of Michelle's mission is to make sure that we're standing by them when when they come home we've got to make sure that they've got the kinds of benefits that they've earned that their housing childcare all those things are taken care of and she's her and Joe Biden have done a great job it's an easy mistake yes absolutely it's an easy mistake to believe or to assume that once they come home and are no longer in uniform and defending our country that their lives will be just fine again well that and and you know we've got a lot more work to do because of the length of the Iraq war the Afghan war we got well over a million people are coming back and they are incredibly talented part of our mission is to communicate to employers if you want to get the job done right hire veteran because they will do it they're ready to go we'll continue with the President of the United States Barack Obama it if you had been here three months ago or four months ago we would have been talking about one thing or another six months before that something completely different and and it seems to be that each one of these is is epic in its tragedy obscenely a tragic and now the topic that has consumed us all for the last couple of months for example the situation in Baltimore but that's one of many situations we could be talking about here tonight how do you feel about that what can be done about that what went wrong there what continues to go wrong around the country why well first of all it's important that now the charges have been brought in Baltimore that we let due process play itself out you know those officers who've been charged they deserve you know to be represented and to let the legal system work its way through we don't have all the facts yet and that's going to be presented in a court of law I think it's also really important to remember that the overwhelming majority of police officers are doing an outstanding job we're in New York today we're in New York today where a young officer lost his life doing his job and you know families officers all across the country every day they're wondering is my loved one going to come home and so they've got a really tough job what we also know though is that for far too long for decades you have a situation in which too many communities don't have a relationship of trust with the police and if you just have a handful of police who are not doing the right thing that makes the job tougher for all the other police officers out there it creates an environment in the community where they feel as if rather than being protected and served they're the targets of arbitrary arrests or stops and so our job has to be to rebuild trust and we put forward a task force made up of police officers but also young activists who have been protesting in Ferguson or here in New York they came up with some terrific recommendations about collecting data on what happens when there's a shooting involving police what are we doing in terms of things like body cameras and so there's some very practical concrete things we can do to make the system work better but and and this is something I reminded people of the other day this is not just a policing problem what you have our pockets of poverty lack of opportunity lack of education all across this country and too often we ignore those pockets until something happens and then we act surprised to have the TV cameras come in and essentially we put the police officers in a really tough spot where we say to them just contain the problem and so if young african-american men are being shot but it's not affecting us you know we'll just kind of paper that over and part of the message that I'm trying to deliver is look you've got a crises in these communities that's been going on for years where too many young people don't have hope they don't see opportunity there aren't enough jobs we've created a an approach to drugs that leads to mass incarceration so then you have no father figures in these communities when those folks get out of prison they can't get a job because they got a felony record so today part of what I did in New York was to announce some additional initiatives around what we're calling my brothers keepers how can we send a message to young people of color and minorities particularly young men saying your lives do matter we do care about you but we're going to invest in you before you have problems with the police before you know there's the kind of crisis we see in Baltimore we're going to make sure you got early childhood education we're going to make sure that you you have an opportunity to graduate and go to college and you've got mentors and apprenticeships and and that kind of sustained effort I think is what we have to see in this country not just the episodic a spasms of interest when something tragic happens the conditions that get you up the conditions that you that you mentioned poverty and lack of education affect all people is that what creates racism is racism the factor a factor a residual effect you know I think a residual factor but also a buildup of our history and we can't ignore that look if you have slavery Jim Crow discrimination that built up over time even if our society has made extraordinary strides and I'm a testament to that and and my children my kids and your kids are growing up in America where you know the attitudes of the next generation make you hopeful because I think they genuinely try to judge people much more on the basis of character but but but it's built up over time so if you have a hundred years in which certain communities can only live in certain places or the men in those communities can only get menial labor or they can't start a particular trade because it's closed to them or if they're trying to buy a house or a car it's more expensive and over time that builds up you know that results in communities that where the kids were born there are not going to have as good of a shot and we don't have to sort of accuse everybody of racism today to acknowledge that that's part of our past and if we want to get past this then we got to make a little bit of an extra effort and I think the vast majority mericans are willing to do that right if it's done well I say this all the time I I remember the 60th anniversary of the march in Selma and and when I hear about what seems to be a hate crime a racist motivated crime it's like when you hear about tuberculosis coming back you think no wait a minute right I I thought I thought that had been taken care of and and and I have always thought that the generations going forward would learn from what you describe and be smarter about it and more aware about it and understand that for the love of God it's human beings and that's all it is well and I think that Dave I think that this country is leaps and bounds better than it was in a fairly recent past I may when when I was born it was illegal in many states for my parents to marry that's not institutionalized today some of the problems that we see in terms of law enforcement that used to be the law I've made that the notion that police would potentially be held into account that was you know not at all what the custom was around the country and in some cases not what it was on the books but we have to be vigilant you know it's like tending a garden this country our democracy works because ordinary folks well-meaning people each and every day are trying to make it a little bit better and we're teaching understanding to our kids and when mistakes are made we acknowledge them as opposed to trying to cover them up and most importantly in my mind we think about not just our own kids but we think about all kids and when we say to ourselves that that child in Baltimore has tough circumstances but that child is worth in the eyes of God just as much as my child and we need to make sure we make an investment in them when we get to that point then not only does that child do better but the country as a whole does bet and that requires the kind of sustained commitment that I'd like to see and and irrespective of what we've come through recently and it just seems like once a week there's something god-awful irrespective of that you believe that race relations in this country are better stronger III think that they are better part of what's happened is is that we just know more today than we did I mean for example it this is a slightly different circumstance but but it sends I think a message about what we need to do when it comes to things like sexual harassment or sexual assault or date rape I don't think that it's happens more frequently today than it did thirty or forty or fifty years ago part of what's happening is we've become more aware of what women have been going through for generations and so part of us fixing it is being aware of it well a lot of the things that we've seen in Ferguson or New York or Baltimore have been going on a long time we're more aware of it in part because when you see something on video it's a lot harder to deny and communications have improved and that's a good thing because you know the first step in curing any problem is being able to diagnose it and acknowledge it and not hide from it and we still have racism in our midst we still have you know problems of ignoring poverty in our midst kids are locked in situations where it's very hard for them to pull themselves out unless they get some help and the more we're aware of it we can solve it the one thing I know about America is that when we decide to solve a problem we can solve it and this is solvable and I think the vast majority people want to solve it but in order to do so we can't just engage in a bunch of rhetoric and and engage in finger-pointing we have to come together and say you know what works and how are we going to make it better and there's cities all across the country where police chiefs are working with activists and clergy and others and they're saying we want to get beyond the status quo and I'm confident if we seize the moment we can really see some serious improvement let me ask you another question is is this the first country you've presidented you know it is it as I suspect the first and last company that I'm presidenting unlike unlike late-night talk show us I am term-limited Oh President Barack here's as you know and as your wife has told you most of everything I say is born of ignorance and the free trade agreement individually I know what those words mean together I have no idea help us out here well you know 95% of the world's markets are outside the United States we're the biggest and most innovative economy although just by sheer size and population China he obviously has caught up but if we're going to succeed economically then we've got to be able to sell our goods to other countries we can't just sell here in the United States and for the last 6 and 1/2 years we dug ourselves out of what was a terrible recession the economy's growing faster than most of the other advanced countries in the world but the next step is to make sure that our exports are going to places that are growing and the big place where we're seeing a lot of growth is in Asia and in the Pacific region so what we've done is to put together a a trade deal with 11 other countries and the objective is to have high standards so that our businesses and our workers aren't disadvantaged some of the past trade deals that hurt us that led to a lot of manufacturing leaving the United States was because we didn't have any enforceable strong labor standards in these countries or environmental standards in these countries so it was an uneven playing field and they could make stuff real cheap they're polluting they're employing child labor and then they're selling back here and our folks get undercut the idea here is you lock them in to higher standards strong labor protections banning child labor making sure that they're not engaging in some of polluting activities we then have legitimate competition that way we've got an even playing field it's a fair playing field and it's going to be important partly because look China is out there competing in these areas and if we don't write the rules they're going to be out there right in the rules and studies have shown that when we enter into a trade agreement with other countries our companies they compete they do well when China enters into a free trade agreement with some of those countries then frankly our companies are disadvantaged and we end up getting the short end of the stick so we've got to be in there we can't just close ourselves off and I know that in the past sometimes people are suspicious of trade deals because they've seen communities that got devastated plants closed jobs left and what I'm saying to folks is the lesson from that is to get the right kind of trade deal it's not to think that we can somehow close off ourselves from the rest of the world because we're going to have to compete we got to sell out there otherwise we're not gonna be able to interesting to me now occasionally and more and more frequently you will find something you buy something and it's proudly championed as having been made in the United States and it I think that's pretty telling as to how far things have shifted that now that's something that we're heroic about well the good news is and people don't know this we're actually seeing companies move back Manufacturing has been growing under my presidency faster than any time since the 90s it's advanced manufacturing so you know we're making the high-end stuff our workers are still better than anybody else's and our innovation is still the best but a week we're not going to be able to compete on the low-end sembly stuff there's always going to be lower wages somewhere which is why we also have to make sure we're providing our kids the best education and training them to compete because what they need to be doing is figuring out how to work a computer or a very complex piece of machinery to make advanced stuff as opposed to the low-end stuff but we're succeeding at that partly because we got great workers we got great universities this is also why we got to invest though in job training and research and development to keep our competitive edge and let me ask you about a tangential to that or essential to that education in this country yeah from talking to your wife and what I know outside it where we want it to be not we've got some great schools and our universities are by far the best in the world but too many of our kids are not up to the levels that we're seeing internationally and you know the first thing to do is to make sure we're honoring our teachers treating them like the professionals that they are paying them a decent salary and we also have to look at the data and it turns out that if that the kids who fall behind typically it's because they're coming form households where there aren't as many books you know maybe the parents didn't have educational opportunity and if we provide them early childhood education it pays huge dividends all the way through so we got to make sure that we focus on the earliest parts of school we'll be right back with the President of the United States like two years two years two years plus till the election and you don't have to really get in that melee you you will a bit here and there but it must be relaxing to know that you're not out there on the front line and second part what will you do when you leave the White House well first of all Dave it is less than two years it's just the not that I'm counting but I just want make sure you don't show up like in the middle of January to vote and know the elections in November of 2016 you think I'm dumb don't you distracted yes but yeah it does feel good not to have to be on the stump there the stakes are big though so I want to make sure that everybody's paying attention it'll be a highly contested election as every presidential election is and you know whatever your political affiliation I just want to make sure you yep you listen to what folks are saying get informed on the issues and then most importantly go out there and vote what we do when you're not president well I was thinking you and me we could play some dominoes together and down the nose we can you know go go to the local Starbucks a bit swap stories I want to say something that the president said to me during the commercial break that I was very impressed by he said to me so when when you retired what do you what are your planning he says are you guys' like me says when I leave the office he says I plan on taking a month off this are you kidding me after eight years of this you're only taking a month off oh my goodness the you know my hope I'll be a pretty young guy when I when I get out of here I mean I'll be 55 and Malia will be in college but Sasha will still have a couple years left and Michelle and I I think are going to continue to want to do the things that we care about in a different capacity so we hope to be able to help young people get opportunity we hope to continue to help our military families you know I I hope that you know I'll be able on issues like climate change that are generational challenges to lend my voice and most importantly to encourage people to continue to get involved in politics and but I really like the idea of playing some dominoes with you I play dominoes I'm pretty good I know you think I'm no good at dominoes I'm pretty good at dumb and I plan to teach law at Columbia you know I beaters and sitting on that class there you go I mean there happens sakes I don't know quite what to say by expression of gratitude here it's particularly meaningful to me because I think like most Americans we feel we know you you've been kind enough to be here many occasions your wife has been here many occasions and you hosted us at your home in Washington DC and and all of these have been very meaningful to me and to my family and I can only wish you all the best let me just say that and I mean this sincerely and I know I speak for Michelle she probably had a chance to say it herself you know we've uh we've grown up with you the country I think has you know after a tough day at the office or coming home from work knowing you'd been there to give us a little bit of joy a little bit of laughter it has meant so much and you're you're part of all of us and so well you do thank you very much you've given us a great gift and we love you you were very funny at the correspond I'm pretty funny guy pretty funny because I learned watching you know sound you have guys writing that stuff they know no I came up with all myself he said I met what I said we love you Dave I love it as well god bless you mr. president Thank You Obama you

Channel: Andrew Lynch

Views: 157,866

Rating: 4.5845976 out of 5

Keywords: Barack Obama, President Barack Obama, Obama, President, United States, United States Of America, USA, POTUS, US President, David Letterman, Letterman, Late Show With David Letterman, Late Show, 2015, May 4, Baltimore riots, Baltimore

Id: 2dVFW2t2gXw

Length: 28min 59sec (1739 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015