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Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, are motivated by all kinds of issues. They're sincerely interested in the economy, in terrorism, in social issues. But the one overriding thing they're interested in is getting reelected. And if they think that it's harder for them to get reelected by cooperating with each other, then they won't cooperate.
And we remember the end of our combat mission and the emergence of a new dawn - the precision of our efforts against al Qaeda in Iraq, the professionalism of the training of Iraqi security forces, and the steady drawdown of our forces. In handing over responsibility to the Iraqis, you preserved the gains of the last four years and made this day possible.
The small irritations or indignities that we experience are nothing compared to what a previous generation experienced... It’s one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala. It’s another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed or, worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress.
I think we've set the bar with respect to the notion that it is possible to provide health care for people. Now I know that the incoming Congress and administration talks about repealing it. But we've set a bar that shows that this can be done. And that core principle is one that the majority of Americans, including supporters of Donald Trump believe in.
When any kind of military action is popular it's because either there's been a very clear, direct threat to us - 9/11 - or an administration uses various hooks to suggest that American interests were directly threatened - like in Panama or Grenada. And sometimes, those hooks are more persuasive than others, but typically, they're not put before Congress.
My biggest frustration so far is the fact that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage. We're the only developed country on Earth where this happens. ... And it happens once a week. And it's a one-day story. ... The country has to do some soul-searching on this.
I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.
What makes us exceptional - what makes us American - is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
I think, the argument sometimes that I've had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of "We want society to see what's happened, and internalize it, and answer it in demonstrable ways." And those impulses I very much understand.
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home that's no excuse ... Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No one's written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.
The president is eager to get to work and looks forward to working with the new Congress on policies that will make sure middle-class Americans are sharing in the economic recovery, but the president is clear that he will not let this Congress undo important protections gained -- particularly in areas of health care, Wall Street reform and the environment.
The rise in health care costs since Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act was passed, have been at their lowest rate in 50 years. Those savings have extended the Medicare trust fund by 11 years. So we've got a baseline of facts.So it is true theoretically that all that progress can be undone, and suddenly 20 million people or more don't have health insurance.
I think that [Donald Trump] clearly was able to tap into a lot of grievances. And he has a talent for making a connection with his supporters that overrode some of the traditional benchmarks of how you'd run a campaign or conduct yourself as a presidential candidate. What will be interesting to see is how that plays out during the course of his presidency.
America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before.
Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program, it's not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit.
America must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership. But U.S. military action cannot be the only - or even primary - component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.
I want my children - I want Malia and Sasha - to understand that they've got responsibilities beyond just what they themselves have done. That they have a responsibility to the larger community and the larger nation, that they should be sensitive to and extra thoughtful about the plight of people who have been oppressed in the past, are oppressed currently.
I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it's my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don't inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you.
We can't discount how scary and shaken not just the Turkish government is, but Turkish society is. Imagine if you had some rump group of military officials here in the United States who started flying off with F-16s or other artillery and were taking shots at government buildings, and people were killed and injured. People would be scared and rightfully so.
But I also want to give them a pathway so that they can earn citizenship, earn a legal status, start learning English, pay a significant fine, go to the back of the line, but they can then stay here and they can have the ability to enforce a minimum wage that they're paid, make sure the worker safety laws are available, make sure that they can join a union.
As Commander in Chief, I will maintain the strongest military in the world, keep faith with our troops and go after those who would do us harm. But after a decade of war, I think we all recognize we've got to do some nation building here at home, rebuilding our roads, our bridges and especially caring for our Veterans who sacrificed so much for our freedom.
When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.
Nobody's cooler than my two girls. They just seem to take whatever comes with, you know - happiness and - steadiness. And they're loving school. They're making friends... and - they've already joined some clubs. And Sasha, you know - I think maybe to endear - myself to her, she - she decided she wanted to join a basketball team. So - what more could I want?
We have to deal with issues like inequality, we have deal with issues of economic dislocation, we have to deal with peoples fears that their children won't do as well as they have. The more aggressively and effectively we deal with those issues, the less those fears may channel themselves into counter-productive approaches that pit people against each other.
When people are oppressed, and human rights are denied - particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines - when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism, it creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit. When peaceful, democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only answer available.
We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them,and drives us further apart.
Well, I think that when you think about the challenges we face, these are challenges that require us to look forward and not backwards. When it comes to the economy I think we have to recognize that we are now in a global economy. And that the measure of our success is: how well are we training our workers? How well are we investing in the new energy economy?
I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader's ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances for waiting and for patience is over. Too many lives have been lost, too many billions of dollars have been spent for us to trust the president on another tired and failed policy that's opposed by generals and experts, Democrats and Republicans, Americans and many of the Iraqis themselves.
What we can do is to live out our lives as best we can with purpose, and love, and joy. We can use each day to show those who are closest to us how much we care about them, and treat others with the kindness and respect that we wish for ourselves. We can learn from our mistakes and grow from our failures. And we can strive at all costs to make a better world.
By hook or by crook, we're going to make sure that when I leave this office, that the country is more prosperous, more people have opportunity, kids have a better education, we're more competitive, climate change is being taken more seriously than it was.Those are going to be the measures by which I look back and say whether I've been successful as president.
The Tea Party I have huge disagreements with, obviously. But I give them credit for having activated themselves. And they made a difference in terms of moving the Republican Party, in terms of moving the country in a particular direction. It's a direction I disagreed with. But it showed that, in fact, you get involved, if your voice is heard it has an impact.
There is a little bit of that schoolyard attitude of, it's one thing for a guy your own size to mouth off to you, but if there's a little guy, you should just smack him around. And it's probably bad advice in the schoolyard. It's certainly not a good way to run a foreign policy because even when you are dealing with a non-peer, militarily, war is complicated.
I do think that saving the economy was a pretty big deal. We did a lot of stuff early that ended up having an impact. I believe that the work we've done in moving our energy future in a cleaner direction is going to stick even if some of the individual steps that we took are reversed by future administrations. I think that it's embedded itself in the economy.
In order for us to compete with China, we've also got to make sure, though, that we're taking - taking care of business here at home. If we don't have the best education system in the world, if we don't continue to put money into research and technology that will allow us to create great businesses here in the United States, that's how we lose the competition.
We have to enforce the laws we've already got, make sure that we're keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don't belong on our streets. And so what I'm trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally.
And I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I'm able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don't need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they've got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans.
Number one, it is absolutely critical that we tone down the rhetoric when it comes to the immigration debate, because there has been an undertone that has been ugly. Oftentimes, it has been directed at the Hispanic community. We have seen hate crimes skyrocket in the wake of the immigration debate as it has been conducted in Washington, and that is unacceptable.
[My kids] are, sweet, kind, funny, smart, respectful people, and they treat everybody with respect. That's not just the biases of a parent. We feel pretty good when we hear back from friends, cause they still have sleepovers and they go to other folks houses and when the parents say, oh you know, Malia, she's just so sweet, or Sasha helped to pick up the dishes.
This counter-terrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out Isil wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.
I look forward to hosting Prime Minister Lee [Hsien Loong], whose friendship and partnership I appreciate very much and with whom I've worked throughout my administration. This will also be an opportunity for me to reciprocate the hospitality that the Prime Minister and the people of Singapore showed to me during my visit to Singapore for the APEC summit in 2009.
So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead. Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we're sinful and we're flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God.
I think raising wages, investing in infrastructure, making sure that people have access to good educations that equip them for the jobs of the future. Those are all agenda items that would help alleviate some of those economic pressures and dislocations that people are experiencing. The problem was I couldn't convince the Republican Congress to pass a lot of them.
The incredible story of progress that is America has always been built by those who ask why, what if, and why not. Our schools must begin instilling that wonder in our children again so that their generation will unite around the next great project of our time, whether it be declaring America energy independent or launching the next great technological revolution.
We've got a tax code that is encouraging flight of jobs and outsourcing. And that's why we've specifically recommended in this campaign that Congress change our tax code so that we stop giving tax breaks to companies that are moving to Mexico and China and other places, and start putting those tax breaks into companies that are investing here in the United States.
When I came into office, the world was divided. Iran was resurgent. Iran is at its weakest point, economically, strategically, militarily, then since - then in many years. And we are going to continue to keep the pressure on to make sure that they do not get a nuclear weapon. That's in America's national interest and that will be the case so long as I'm president.
On September 11th, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.
The next phase and this is part of what I'm interested in doing after I get out of the presidency is to make sure that I'm working with that next generation so that they understand you can't just rely on inspiration. There's a little perspiration involved in bringing about change too. That you have to be organized, that you have to vote even when it's not exciting.
The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people. It's not the only country that has psychosis. And yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyone else. Well, what's the difference? The difference is that these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses, and that's sort of par for the course.
America is governed by rules of law, and those are not ones that the President of the United States or anybody else can just set aside for the sake of expediency Even when we are deeply supportive of Turkish democracy, and even when we care deeply about any attempts to overthrow their government or any other illegal actions, we've got to go through a legal process.