NPR's Interview With President Obama About 'Obama's Years' | Morning Edition | NPR

it's good to see you okay let's go q sir appreciate it you've been told I think that we are doing a documentary we went across a good part of the country to places where you'd given speeches over the years to just talk with people about how their lives have changed it sounds great I'm going to listen to this one that's kinda preciate that and that's the beginning of our discussion right here although we'll range a little bit farther this caused me to go back and look at some of your speeches and there was one in st. Charles Missouri in 2010 in which you said let's face it people have lost faith in government that it started before you were president and it's getting worse yeah do the events of this year suggest that it's getting even worse I'm not sure if it is getting even worse I think that there has been a steady growth in people's cynicism about institutions generally and government in particular and some of it is justified because we've got a Congress that's been dysfunctional now for quite some time and can't seem to organize itself to solve problems you now have a Republican Congress they control both chambers and they can't even pass their own agenda much less pass something that has bipartisan support and at a time when there are a lot of big issues out there people feel as if things aren't working the way they should having said that not all of the cysts ISM is justified so even without Congress cooperating we've been able to make big progress on a whole range of issues and I think people are seeing that when government makes smart decisions it actually has significant impact and part of my hope during the course of this election is that it's clarifying that people say all right here's what each party stands for years what each presidential candidate and various congressional candidates stand for if we're going to move forward in a democracy then the ultimate arbiter of making things work is the voter and putting people in charge who were serious about America's business as opposed to just playing to various narrow constituency groups if some of the cynicism is not justified are you concerned that voters this year will go too far in overturning things you know ultimately I have confidence in our voters of you know if you look at American history there have been times where we've taken some tough turns primarily fed by fear and disruptions and dislocations but with a very substantial exception of the Civil War generally speaking the democratic process muddled through and we emerged better and stronger than we were before and I have no doubt that the same thing will happen this time but I do think that part of what has changed during the course of my presidency I've seen it is the splintering of media the power of social media and the Internet has turbocharged what previously might have been marginal views or marginal groups has made it harder to generate consensus because people aren't looking at the same set of facts there I've said this before if you're watching Fox News you have a different set of facts than here reading the New York Times a editorial page and and that I think has led or increased the polarization and that makes it harder for people to sort through who's telling the truth and how we actually get stuff done me yes no mr. president you still get the biggest megaphone people can even see you on Fox News if you've been president for almost seven and a half years and people have still no faith in government are you accountable for that well look as a general proposition I don't spend a lot of time looking at polls but I will what's interesting is is right now there's a poll you like Thomas well right right now I think the majority of the American people think that I'm doing a good job that does not necessarily give me a lot of comfort if I can't move this Congress forward and the question then becomes and I've heard some people in the Republican Party suggest that in some fashion I'm responsible for what's happened to them and the rise of Trump and the dysfunction that you see in their party generally what I would say is that I came into office wanting to work on a bipartisan basis and if you've looked at my old speeches you would see that they made determination that it was good politics to oppose everything that I did the problem was is that by opposing everything I did even things that previously they had been for it pushed their party further and further to the right and look at the risk of sounding partisan but I believe if you look at the facts that this is a pretty accurate description when we talk about dysfunction in government it's not as if both parties are equally dysfunctional the Democrats have a pretty well thought-through agenda when we were governing in the first two years of my administration we got a lot done we were probably as productive as any any Congress in 20 34 years you have a particular problem in the Republican Party right now that needs to get sorted through now that's not unique in the annals of American history there have been times where the Democrats were wrapped around the axle and extreme wings were setting the agenda and I think the Republicans will get out of this I don't think that it is something that you know will last the next 10 15 20 years but right now at least partly in reaction to my presidency and the political decisions that they made they find themselves having created an atmosphere in which even somebody like Paul Ryan is viewed as not sufficiently conservative or if he does just some of the basic work of governance that somehow he's betrayed you know the basin and is decried as as a Republican in name only and and when you have that kind of environment it's very hard to get the kind of cooperation that is necessary for us to solve problems that people are concerned about them that I'm assuming during the course of your conversation conversation is that they've raised repeatedly let me ask about one of those concerns in Kansas we spoke with a woman named Heather gray who said 16 years ago I was making $10 an hour right today she said I make $10 an hour the problem of stagnant wages of course did not start with your presidency yeah but it hasn't improved much right why not well we've got some long-term trends that we have to battle and when I came into office we were in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression we have successfully dug ourselves out of that hole and the country has but the wages have not even understood I'm going to answer your question okay okay yeah just give it a little context here okay so we had unemployment at 10 percent it's now below 5 we had a housing market that can play we collapsed it's now normalized we had a situation in which people have lost trillions of dollars in in wealth in their 401ks and they were recovered in fact Americans have wha gotten back about thirty trillion dollars worth of wealth since since I came into office so by every measure the economy has improved but the long-term trends that had occurred before I took office and have continued is a combination of globalization and automation leading to more downward pressure on wages because you need fewer workers to make a certain amount of stuff and entire job sectors being shrunk or eliminated more and more people going into the service sector and in the service sector historically wages have been lower and that's all been compounded by some very specific policies both of the federal in the state level that's made it harder for workers to organize and get more leverage to get higher wages this is why we fought for higher minimum wages this is why we've fought for making it easier to collectively bargain this is why I think it is so important that as we move forward if we are going to benefit from all the huge productivity increases and you know efficiencies that arise out of the global supply chain and automated everything then we're going to have to redesign that social compact to make sure that everybody's getting a decent wage and that is possible to do it's not as if we need you know a radical restructuring of the economy if if we had a minimum wage that required everybody to get be above poverty if they're working full-time that would go a long way towards alleviating some of the trends that you've talked about and in fact we've seen wage growth now begin to occur over the last couple of years but it's not happening as fast as it should there is a writer for the Financial Times Philip Stevens who wrote something interesting after Britain voted to leave the European Union last week he wrote in a column globalization is not working that it may make countries richer but the majority of people are not benefiting he was writing about Britain but you mentioned globalization in the context to the United States is he right globalization isn't working I think he's right that what you're seeing across the advanced economies is that when you have globalization and suddenly there's competition from everywhere that empowers people who have a lot of skills can use the internet suddenly they have access to all the markets and what that means is if you're very good at something if you are LeBron James or you are Seinfeld or you are Steve Jobs then suddenly you can leverage your skills in ways that you could never do before if you are a manual worker and are doing work that can be replaced not just by a lower wage worker somewhere else but more frequently by machine then you're in a tougher spot because you now are competing against the entire world instead of just the people who live around you and that's why it's so important for us to think about how do we make sure that everybody is participating in that global economy if you continue on the current trends then what you're going to see is a continuing increase in inequality and that is not going to be economically sustainable because it turns out that the economy works best when everybody has a stake in it and workers have money in their pockets and are spending it and that's good for business but it's also not politically sustainable because people start and frustrated and they start getting resentful and I think you see that somewhat in the brexit boat you see some of it in both the Sanders campaign and the the Trump campaign people feeling as if we are potentially being left behind now the question then is what's the prognosis or what's what's the cure to this whole thing and the notion is that from my perspective we're not going to suddenly eliminate the global supply chain we're not going to disentangle the world economy it's just too integrated now by virtue of technology and the Internet and so what we have to do is to make sure that wages around the world are beginning to rise that environmental standards around the world are beginning to rise that within our own countries we are providing the education that people need to compete in this global economy with new skills for the new industries that are out there that we invest more in things like infrastructure that make us competitive and also by the way can't be shipped away the issue is not that the world shrinking and globalization is inherently a bad thing I actually think that over time it can raise everybody's living standards and create a more peaceful world but if you do it in a way that where the benefits of globalization are only for the elites who are flying around from capital to capital and looking at their investment portfolios on on a laptop or a computer screen and they're not worrying they feel this disengaged from their national economies and their national workers and the national communities then you're going to see a reaction to it Donald Trump talked about global elites after the vote in Britain is Trump right then that there are big parallels between what motivated the British vote and what people are feeling and thinking about in the election this year in the United States well first of all I think it's important remember that mr. Trump embodies couple elites and has taken full advantage of it his entire life and so he's hardly a spokesperson for a legitimate spokesperson for a populist surge from working-class people on either side of the Atlantic I think that some of the concerns around the immigration some of the concerns around a loss of control or a loss of national identity those are similar I think there's a xenophobia an anti-immigrant sentiment that is that's flashing up not just in Great Britain but throughout Europe that has some parallels with what mr. Trump has been trying to stir up here having said all that the US economy has not only recovered but we're about 10 percent larger than we were pre crisis when I came into office and Europe is just now beginning to get back to where it was pre crisis you've had a decade of stagnation there partly because of austerity measures that we did not duplicate the Republicans attempted to impose those kinds of strategies here and I resisted them and I would argue that that's part of the reason why we did a lot better we reformed our banking system a lot faster and so overall I think that the differences are greater than the similarities but what is absolutely true is that the ability to tap into a fear that people may have about losing control and to offer some sort of vague nostalgic feelings about how you know will make Britain greater ground again or will make America great again and the subtext for that is somehow that a bunch of foreigners and funny-looking people are coming in here and changing the basic character of the nation I think that some of that is is out there yeah both in Europe and in the United States and again that's not unique to England you've seen in the lepen party in France you see it and some of the far-right parties in other parts of Europe as well you mentioned people fearful of change the way that voters express that when we talk with them as they're concerned about changing the traditions values or institutions of this country that have made the country great over time immigrants do bring new ideas new cultures different religions other things does it matter particularly if they do change the country well I think that there's some bedrock values that shouldn't change and in fact haven't changed it's the immigrants that change not the values themselves the values of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights the values of free speech the values of religious tolerance the values of pluralism the values of us being a nation of immigrants that can absorb people from every corner of the world and yet at the end of the day because we all pledge allegiance to a flag and a Creed we become one those traditions should not change I think ironically that if you look at the values that immigrants bring when they come here whether they're coming from Poland or Italy or now Vietnam or South Korea or India the values they bring are quintessentially American values there's strivers values there are the values that say we're going to make something of ourselves regardless of the station in which we were born when you look at second-generation immigrants or third generation immigrants they are as American as any kid here and that's been our strength that's part of what separates us from the United Kingdom or Europe is we've had that tradition of being a nation of immigrants and so you know when people are concerned about some of the changes that immigrants may bring they need to go back and read what people were saying about their grandparents or great-grandparents when they came you read about the description of Irish who arrived and the language that is being used is identical to the language that mr. Trump uses about Mexicans you know when southern Europeans were coming instead of Northern Europeans there was absolute certainty that America was going down the tubes because these swarthy you know folks were were coming here and they had different attitudes and Catholics were coming which meant that the Pope was going to control us and this kind of xenophobia is part of the American tradition and the good news is is that you know after these spasms of it it typically fades away because the immigrants who come here in fact are coming here precisely to embrace the opportunities of being American a couple of follow-ups one on each side of the Atlantic is there a danger that Europe after this brexit vote will turn inward focus increasingly on his own problems its own turmoil and be less active in the world well I think that the best way to think about this is a pause button has been pressed on the project of full European integration I would not overstate it there's been a little bit of hysteria post brexit vote as if somehow NATO is gone the transatlantic alliance is dissolving and every countries rushing off to its own corner that's not what's happening what's happening is that you had a European project that was probably moving faster and without as much consensus as it should have you have a monetary union although England wasn't a part of that that was always going to be difficult to manage because the economy in Germany is very different than the economy in Italy or Greece and you have a European Union government in Brussels that because it needs consensus from you know more than more in a couple dozen countries often times seems overly bureaucratic and deadlocked and I think this will be a moment in which all of Europe says alright let's take a breath and let's figure out how do we maintain some of our national identities how do we preserve the benefits of integration and how do we deal with some of the frustrations that our own voters are feeling but the basic core values of Europe the the tenants of liberal market-based democracies those aren't changing the interests that we have in common with Europe remain the same and our concerns internationally are the same so Europe can't afford to turn in we're going to have to worry about working with us on the Middle East and they're gonna have to worry about us working together to deal with an aggressive Russia they're going to have to deal with us with respect to how do we continue to uphold international rules and norms around the world that have served both the US and Europe very well and so I don't anticipate that there's going to be major cataclysmic changes as a consequence of this keep in mind that Norway is not a member of the European Union but Norway is one of our closest allies they align themselves on almost every issue with Europe and us they are a place that is continually supporting the kinds of initiatives internationally that we support and if over the course of what is going to be at least a two year negotiation between England and Europe Great Britain ends up being affiliated to Europe like Norway is the average person is not going to notice a big church should Britain vote again as summer suggests I think that's entirely up to the okay on this side of the Atlantic we heard from a number of people about immigration when we travelled across the country one of them was a man named jose luis valdez he's a business owner a restaurant owner in kansas city kansas he's a new citizen so he's getting ready to vote for the first time but he's followed politics for a long time he knows that you won the Latino vote very heavily in both your elections and speaking about the failure to pass immigration reform he said of you he used us he used our votes felt you should have done it when you had a chance we had a Democratic Congress you should have done more yeah what would you say to him well what I'd say to him is his restaurant might not be doing so well if I hadn't focused my first two years on saving the economy so it's not as if I didn't have anything else to do and I think it'd be pretty hard to argue that I haven't put everything I've had into getting this done but you know one of the things that I have learned in this presidency is that until you get something done people are going to be frustrated you think of the incredible progress that we've made during the course of my presidency with respect to LGBT rights the rights of gays lesbians bisexuals transgender the historic speed with which we've consolidated equal treatment for that population is been amazing and you know these days if I go before an LGBT crowd you know people are cheering and saying I'm have been one of their greatest champions but it was only about three or four years ago when I get heckled in some LGBT events because marriage equality hadn't gotten done yet or before that Don't Ask Don't Tell hadn't gotten done yet and it didn't matter how many times I told him look you know it's it's it's going to get done it's just it turns out that the wheels and democracy don't always move as quickly as you'd hope and I can't just do these things with a stroke of the pen you know that's that's sort of the nature of all social change here and so if you if you were interviewing one of the DREAM Act kids who over the last several years have been able to get a driver's license a permit to work are going to school have joined our military they'd they wouldn't say that they'd been used they would say thank you and I think that's the the reason the vast majority of Latino voters continue to support me because they see the effort that's been put in now one last point I'll make because I write after this most recent Supreme ruling or lack of ruling came down because we have 4/4 time I said to them look everything's teed up and instead of despairing you just need to understand we got four months five months and you've got a very clear choice between two candidates one of whom not only supports all the initiatives that I've put forward but is going to be in a position if I don't get a ninth Supreme Court justice to break that tie and to one way or another by next year we're going to have either my administrative solution to immigration reform done it will be in train because it will have been decided on and and will no longer be blocked or alternatively you know mr. Trump will win in which case you will have a whole bunch of other problems on our hands with respect to immigration so in some ways this is how the democratic process works and I'm constantly reminding young people who are full of passion that I want them to keep their passion but they've got to gird for the fact that it takes a long time to get stuff done in this democracy it's not as convenient as you know people would always like but this is a big country with a lot of diverse views let me ask you about a passionate young person then we met along the way his name is Kwame Rose he is an activist now in Baltimore he was active in the protests after the death of Freddie gray who was in a police van and died later as you know and he was unhappy with the statement that you made at the time when you were supportive of peaceful protests but also criticized what you called criminals and thugs who had looted stores he felt that you were being too harsh and went on to say in our interview that you were speaking from a position of privilege his suggestion being that maybe you didn't quite get what was going on in the streets what would you say to him well obviously I don't know him personally so we'd have to have a longer conversation I'd what I would say is that the black lives matter movement has been hugely important in getting all of America to see the challenges in the criminal justice system differently and I could not be prouder of the activism that has been involved and it's making a difference you're seeing it at state and local levels and the task force that we pulled together in the wake of Ferguson has put forward recommendations that were shaped both by the people who organized the Ferguson protests as well as police officers and it turns out that there's common ground there in terms of how we can be smart about crime smart about policing respectful to all communities and try to bring some of the racial bias that exists in the criminal justice system out of it what I would also say though is that if somebody is looting they're looting and the notion that they're making a political statement is not always the case because these are businesses oftentimes owned by african-americans you have situations in which suddenly friends of mine in Baltimore their mothers who are elderly have to now travel across town to get their medicines because the local drugstore got torn up and making excuses for them I think is a mistake there are ways of bringing about social change that are powerful and that have the ability to pull the country together and maintain the moral high ground and there are approaches where I may understand the frustrations but they're counterproductive and tearing up your own neighborhood and stealing is counterproductive if I were to summarize what else this young man said I might say that he feels that he is trying to overturn what he sees as a racist or corrupt system and that you've become part of it yeah look steve-o I think that you can always find folks who are going to feel as if change hasn't happened fast enough that's the nature of these issues and by virtue of being present in the United States if there's a problem out there there's then I'm the ultimate public official that people know and if it hasn't gotten fixed in a couple of weeks and people are going to say why didn't you fix it I think I think people would be pretty hard pressed to not see the efforts that we put in around criminal justice reform where we're supporting it fully the initiatives that we've made with local mayors and state officials around the country to reform the criminal justice system the fact that as president I've been the first ever to even visit a federal prison that the positions I've taken on criminal justice issues are unprecedented by any president the work we're doing with commutations is unprecedented and I've now commuted more sentences for nonviolent drug offenses than the last seven or eight presidents combined but if you're interviewing a 18 or 20 year old or 20 to 22 year old kid on the streets of Baltimore who is still feeling frustrated then I'm not going to be surprised if that frustration is expressed as part of this project we also had a look at your 2008 campaign speech in Philadelphia about race in which you talked in one passage about anger in the black community which you said is sometimes counterproductive but it's real and there are reasons for it there's another passage which I hadn't even noticed before in which you say there is a similar anger among some in the white community who don't feel particularly privileged by their race and do feel frustrated that they're losing jobs losing pensions feel like they're losing ground right looking back were you describing there the same force that is driving much of our election discussion here in 2016 well darling the election discussion driving 2016 this has been an ongoing theme in American history you can go back and during Jim Crow and segregation and you've got black sharecroppers who have nothing and alongside them poor white farmers who don't have that much more except for the fact that they're white and the degree to which a lot of politics in the south were specifically designed to make sure that that sharecropper and that white farmer didn't get together to question how the economy was structured and how they both could benefit I that's that's one of the oldest stories in American politics so so it's not surprising that what I said in 2008 still holds true today it was true for a long time the nature of racial bias in this country is unique and the challenges that African Americans have faced are aren't operable Native Americans in this country you know were burdened by extraordinary bias and cruelty and as well and and it's probably not useful to sort of catalogue every possible groups grievances what is true though is that as I travel around the country what a black working class person has in common with a white working class person is significant and what prevents them from voting along the same lines or working together on the same projects have to do with the whole range of cultural and identity issues which you know Beibei obviously feel are important and valid but what I've tried to do throughout my presidency is get try to get people to recognize themselves in each other and that's probably partly related to my own upbringing I was raised by a white mom and white grandparents who you know never suffered the kinds of discrimination that their black cohorts might have experienced but who had their own struggles who went through a Great Depression who grandmother who had to work her way up without ever at college education starting in the steno pool or as a secretary to be and and experienced her own discrimination because of being a woman and and and so I've seen the degree to which their struggles are not been different from Michelle's parents struggles at least in terms of how they think about it and and and the similar values of hoping that their kids are going to do better and that education is the key and that everybody's got to work hard and take responsibility but that they'd like a government that was more responsive to clear out some of the barriers for their advancement and I believe that our politics when our politics are at our best is not based on identity politics but it's based on a sense that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should you know get a fair shake everybody should be responsible for doing their fair share and that theme you'll see in every speech that I've given since I was running for the state Senate and it hasn't changed much now that I'm nearing the end of my political career somebody following this year's election might say well that debates worse it's got worse do you see any sign that that debate is any better that it's moved in some direction you see it in the younger generation if you look at the 18 to 30 cohort or the 18 to 40 cohort they have a very different set of attitudes about all these issues it's true by the way around the world we're talking about brexit now the the younger voter wasn't fearful of global interdependence they embrace it they see themselves as being able to navigate through all these different worlds you see it when I visit Vietnam or countries in Africa or Latin America at the new generation is much more comfortable with diversity with connectivity with the fact that change is constant that they're not going to be working at one job for 30 years and you know they want to make sure that they can get the skills they can get the access but they see a bright future for themselves that's where the hope is here in the United States you talk to young people it doesn't matter where it doesn't matter whether they're black white Latino they're not afraid of the future and so you when you look at the the frustrations and the fear that a Trump are tapping into you know that's an earlier generation that feels unsettled and I think we can be sympathetic and understanding of the fact that they feel unsettled but but also recognize that you know if we get the decisions that need to be made right then 10 years from now 20 years from now we may look back at something like the Trump campaign as the last vestige of a kind of politics of us versus them that really doesn't apply to today and that one last thing I'd say about this because you'll you'll hear sometimes people suggest that well if Democrats and Republicans had been paying attention to white working-class voters than something like Trump would not have happened well the fact is is that my administration for example when we promote a higher minimum wage or stronger union laws or healthcare for that matter that's helping that court that is designed to make sure that they get a better deal in this economy and you know one of the things that you've seen during the course of my presidency is the the ability the power of a certain slice of the media to emphasize to white working-class voters somehow that these things are not good for you that this is Obama and his socialist friends who are trying to take money from you to give to an undeserving Mexican immigrant or black welfare mom and and tapping into deserve an identity politics that you know is powerful and oftentimes can work but it is actually counterproductive and it certainly does not reflect what we've been trying to do what is true and what's what's been interesting to see during this election cycle is that the Republican Party that has opposed minimum wages or union laws or what-have-you they have a populist insurgency on their hands and mr. Trump I think is at times exploited this this gap between what you know the Republican business community has promoted and and what their constituencies are actually looking for we ran across a statement of yours from 2008 about changing the trajectory of the country you said that Ronald Reagan had changed the trajectory of the country partly because the country was ready for it it was his moment that John F Kennedy had done the same thing because it was the right moment the country was going in a certain direction you wanted to see such a moment you believed there was such a moment for you in 2008 is there a risk that Donald Trump could say the same thing in 2016 that he could be the man to change the trajectory of the country now well if he won he could say that I'm to say you think the country might be ready for that no and I think that will be tested over the next four months but I think it's pretty hard to argue that somebody who almost three-quarters the country think is unqualified to be President and as a negative opinion of that is tapping into the the zeitgeist of the country or is speaking for a broad base of the country but we'll find out look that's what elections are for and that I think it's important for Democrats progressives moderates people who care about our traditions who care about pluralism who care about tolerance who care about facts who think climate change is real who think that we have to reform our immigration system and intelligent way who believe that in women's equality and equality for the LGBT community I think it's important for those of us not to be complacent not to be smug and the one thing I've tried to do during the course of my presidency is to take seriously the objections and the criticisms and the concerns of people who didn't vote for me I said on election night back in Grant Park I'm president of everybody I've got a particular point of view I've I don't make any apologies for it I believe that if you go back and read my speeches dating back to 2004 where I first came to national prominence that there's been a consistency there that I have done or tried to do exactly what I said and the core of that message is the e pluribus unum out of many one that that we are better when we are together that I do not believe in tribalism I do not believe in stoking divisions and scapegoating I think that people have common hopes and common dreams and I think that America is at its best when we are unified and working together and during the course of my presidency you've seen polarization and division and all kinds of consternation and frustration but what you've also seen quietly is a country that yanked itself out of a great recession and recovered as well as any country ever has from such a massive financial breakdown you've seen 20 million people have health insurance that didn't have it before and health care inflation actually going down so that you know we've saved trillions of dollars in cost relative to what we were expected to be paying over the course of you know programs like Medicare and Medicaid what we've seen is a financial system that is a lot sounder we see an LGBT community that is is recognized as equal in ways that they weren't before you've seen an entire generation grow up I think feeling as if the old divisions don't make sense and you know I feel pretty confident that as long as we do the work over the next several months and then continue that work over the next several years that we will have emerged from this era stronger more prosperous more secure and adhering more closely to the values and ideals that make America exceptional last question mr. president we've gone across the country we've gone across the country asking people how their lives have changed in the last eight years that was the basic question how was your life changed in the last eight years well everybody's teased me about how gray I am and that's okay my daughters have that picture of you and Derek Jeter that was something that was that was some great but go on go on sir my my daughters have grown up and I think for any father out there seeing your kids come into office when I when I came into office they were were so much younger than I realized at the time I think and for them to be these amazing young women now that changes your life more than just about anything it's interesting though that my fundamental belief in public service my fundamental belief in the capacity of politics to to solve problems my belief in this country is stronger not weaker I'm less cynical now than I was I I've been frustrated by some things that I did not complete that I couldn't rap and mail and ship but before I got out of here the immigration being a good example getting infrastructure done you know we got to trillion dollars with infrastructure if we got working on that now we'd be growing a lot faster the unemployment rate be even lower or wages be higher so there are things that we haven't gotten done obviously there area's internationally where you know I've been enormous ly frustrated you look at Syria being the most prominent example where you've got a heartbreaking situation and not a lot of good choices having said all that you know if you had told me at the beginning of my presidency that we could begin the process of making sure everybody has health insurance in this country that we could recover fully from a terrible economic crisis that you know we could make sure that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon without having to launch a war that we could restore diplomatic relations with Cuba in a way that didn't just transform our relationship with Cuba but has put our relationship with all of Latin America on its strongest footing maybe in history if you told me that we could you know extend democracy to a place like Burma one of the worst military dictatorships in the world and that I could visit there and you'd see millions of people lining the streets if you told me that that you could have gay and lesbian men and women proudly serving in our military without having to hide who they were or that you could have a bipartisan effort to actually reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenses have a cred little chance of getting through Congress you tally it up and you'd say it's not bad for a seven and a half years worth of work and the stuff that has not gotten done it's teed up to get done climate change with the de Paris agreement 200 countries signed on is a classic example of how I think about my work but also the possibilities of government and politics we haven't solved climate change because of that agreement but we've now built an architecture that allows us gives us a chance to overtime collectively in an unprecedented way curb the pollution that contributes to to climate change and have we gotten it all done yet no but have we now given the next president the next Congress the next generation a chance to solve it absolutely and and I've said this before I think of myself as a as a relay runner I take the baton sometimes you take the baton and you're behind in the race and you got to run a little bit harder to catch up hopefully by the time you pass on the baton you're a little bit better positioned in the race and I think there's a humility that comes out of this office because you feel that no matter how much you've done there's more work to do but I think that there is a confidence that well-meaning people working together can can change the country for the better I've seen it happen mr. president thanks very much thank you enjoyed it you

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Keywords: politics, obama, election, npr, trump, brexit

Id: jkfiF_tugU0

Length: 54min 31sec (3271 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2016