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When President Obama entered the White House, the economy was in a free-fall. The auto industry: on its back. The banks: frozen up. More than three million Americans had already lost their jobs. And America's bravest, our men and women in uniform, were fighting what would soon be the longest wars in our history.
President Obama has offered a plan with 4 trillion dollars in debt reduction over a decade, with two and a half dollars of spending reductions for every one dollar of revenue increases, and tight controls on future spending. It's the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.
President Obama is a utopian at heart. He wants to improve the lives of the downtrodden, which is a good thing. But, he doesn't understand that damaging the free marketplace in pursuit of 'social justice' will eventually harm those whom he wants to help. The nation's crushing debt is a tsunami brewing off shore.
Now, President Obama has to make a decision. He can either propose a nominee who can win over the majority in the Senate or defer his choice to the voters, who in November will elect a new President and a new Senate, which will be responsible for confirming a nominee who will provide balance to the Supreme Court.
The reality of split government puts a premium on creativity within the administration. President Obama needs to put the right people in charge of the agencies and then have them push the bounds of administrative power to change policy through those agencies. President Obama has a pretty good track record of this.
I'm very, very concerned ultimately, as Medicaid costs increase in my state and most states, it's going to reduce funding for state aid to our public schools, to our higher education institution or higher taxes on the middle class that President Obama said he didn't want to do. And that's exactly where he's headed.
I'll give President Obama credit that he's dealing with big issues. I've seen administrations come to town and only deal with the little ones. You know, he's confronting a lot of major concerns here, and he's the only president we're going to have for the next four years, so we hope he's got some degree of success.
In order for President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden to be moderates, they just have to present themselves between the extremes of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's isolationism and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's hawkishness - the difference between living in a cave or conducting ourselves so that we're in need of one.
President Obama is highly concerned with education. He's a champion on early-childhood development strategies. So I like the work he's doing, and I support it, and I realise that he's one of very few political leaders around the world that actually has early-childhood development strategise at the top of his agenda.
The time has come for President Obama to formally rescind his order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and end his irresponsible allegations of injustices at the facility, which operates in a framework that respects the rule of law, keeps terrorists off American soil, and bolsters our national security.
We have held forums here at the White House on workplace flexibility, and the first major bill signed into law by President Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Lilly was here a few weeks ago because we were trying very hard to push paycheck fairness through the Congress. Unfortunately, we fell two votes short.
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to serve President Obama and the country and proud of the progress we've made toward rebuilding trust in our financial system and moving our economy closer to recovery. It was a privilege to work with such a fine group of people at the White House and across the administration.
The administration must act promptly to ensure that the central premise of the Affordable Care Act is executable and, rather than dismissing criticism, should examine it in good faith and work to serve the needs of the people. President Obama must approach this problem like a CEO confronting a very bad product launch.
President Obama is also standing up for women in North Carolina and across our country. He has helped women fight for equal pay for equal work; he has fought to guarantee that women have access to quality, affordable health care, including making sure that insurance plans cover birth control with no out-of-pocket cost.
On healthcare, climate change, nuclear disarmament, gun control and countless other issues, President Obama consistently made difficult choices and put the national interest over his own political interest to do what was right. All the while, he resisted the politics of cynicism in a system that too often encourages it.
It's pretty clear that over the last three months the economy has paused. And it's also pretty clear the American people are still demanding and asking the question, 'Where are the jobs?' And the reason we don't have new jobs is because of the job-killing agenda pursued by President Obama and his allies in the Congress.
Take a lesson from President Obama, and don't go around Congress. When given the opportunity to work with lawmakers on the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement, Obama chose to forgo the hard fight of treaty ratification and instead ruled by executive order. And now the United States is party to neither pact.
Frankly that's what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don't think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.
When some Republican governors asked to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama Administration said they would only do it if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20%. You hear that? More work. So the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform's work requirement is just not true.
President Obama stands ready to work with everyone, because that's what the American people expect and deserve - not for the short term political advantages, but the long term health of our country. We don't spend time trying to figure out what's in the minds of Republicans, we try to keep our focus on the American people.
President Obama likes to say Guantanamo Bay is a terrorist recruiting tool, and while that may be an easy excuse, it's simply not true. The reality is the motivations of radical Islamic jihadism existed before Guantanamo Bay. The ideology is premised on a narrative of conquest, in the spiritual as well as the earthly world.
I think President Obama wanted to have the right fit for his different cabinet positions, and I believe that experience is what mattered most to him. In my case, I have been working to improve the overall quality of life for working families for most of my adult life, and I think that experience resonated with the president.
I can't imagine being mayor and not having had the experience working for President Clinton or President Obama, or, for that matter, working in Congress. On the other hand, I think I would have been a better adviser had I been mayor first. If I had had this job first, I could have seen the implications of things I was doing.
Sadly, if President Obama is willing to ignore the pain of race-based discrimination and injustice so as to make whites comfortable - and this, after he has already been elected and the campaign is long over - then the likelihood he will ever speak the truth about these matters, let alone address them, shrinks to nearly zero.
Under President Obama, we have spent more money - he has spent more money than any other president in this history, actually, the combined total from Washington up to George W. Bush. President Obama has racked up more spending, $1 trillion deficits. And it's time that he join us in this effort to get our fiscal house in order.
I had great admiration for the election of President Obama. I believe that the U.S. at that moment showed tremendous capacity to show that it is a great nation, and it surprised the world. It may be very difficult to be able to elect a black president in the U.S. - as it was very difficult to elect a woman president in Brazil.
Here at home, President Obama early on made the connection between growth and economic opportunity for women. In the depths of our crisis in 2009, one of the first laws the president signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. He established an Equal Pay Task Force led by Valerie Jarrett to help women get paid what they earn.
For nearly three years, President Obama devoted a great deal of effort to finding compromises with Congressional Republicans. That was futile, in my view, since those Republicans had made it clear from the day he was inaugurated in 2009 that their plan was to oppose everything he wanted and then paint him as a failed president.
I believe together, with the OAS, everybody condemned the coup d'etat, and everybody is demanding that President Zelaya should go back to the presidency, and they should call for general elections and realize an election. That's what we want. And I believe that President Obama made the right decisions condemning the coup d'etat.
One wonders whether the Obama re-election campaign may be on the right track as it seeks to apply the you-break-it-you-own-it rule to Bush and the American economy. Hardly a day goes by without President Obama or his surrogates arguing that it takes longer than four years to recover from an economic crisis so long in the making.
My first day at Fox, President Obama gave a primetime address to the nation. That would have been a great chance for Roger Ailes or someone to say, 'Hey, Ed, there is going to be a lot of people watching tonight, maybe you should hit Obama on this or that.' I didn't get a phone call from anyone. I didn't get an email from anyone.
I've been in two different administrations, and I would say, particularly, President Obama was really careful to make sure that he wouldn't invoke executive privilege unless absolutely necessary. He only invoked it once in eight years, even though many years he had Congress opposed to him in terms of being from the opposite party.
We face a choice this election. President Obama is fighting for changes that grow the economy from the middle out and help all Americans succeed - jobs, education, health reform, the DREAM Act, equal pay for women. He is moving us forward with opportunity today for prosperity tomorrow. Mitt Romney wants to take us back to yesterday.
Unlike President Obama, I would say that I support the long-standing bipartisan post-war belief that American global strength and leadership secures our national-security interests, and it also promotes order and stability in the world. And it gives us immense influence in the world and deters our adversaries and reassures our allies.
Cantwell is so extreme that she doesn't see anything wrong with 11-year-old girls getting Plan B without a prescription. She is more liberal than Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and more liberal than President Obama. That is pretty extreme - a lot farther to the Left than most Washingtonians are comfortable with.
President Obama started in public life not as an elected official but as a community organizer. He worked with churches and other groups on the south side of Chicago to push public leaders to fight poverty, improve the local school system and make housing more affordable, and to bring about the change the community needed and deserved.
Watching President Obama, for the first time in my life, one of us was running for president. He seemed like one of us - and I got behind him, and I got excited about his message and what he continues to say he's going to do. The day he was elected president, Prop 8 happened. It was this bizarre dichotomy - world history - good and bad.
Despite the fact that he has run the most incompetent administration in history, President Obama remains a solid bet for re-election in 2012. Obama's frontrunner status springs from two crucial facts: first, by overexposing himself in the public eye, he has made himself larger than life; second, the Republican field is pathetically weak.
Well, first of all, we've got to get away from being offended by the truth. We've seen a 41 percent increase in food stamp recipients across the United States of America since President Obama was sworn in in January 2009. That has nothing to do with black, white, Hispanic or whatever. It's a fact, and we need to, you know, deal with that.
For the first time since 2007 there is political momentum behind fixing the immigration system. President Obama in his State of the Union speech reached out to the right-wing by saying illegal immigrants seeking citizenship will have to pay taxes, learn English and get in line behind people who are trying to enter the United States legally.
It is beyond dispute that President Obama and his aides have an extreme, even unprecedented obsession with concealing embarrassing information, controlling the flow of information, and punishing anyone who stands in the way. But, at least theoretically speaking, it is the job of journalists to impede that effort, not to serve and enable it.
President Obama took charge of the Oval Office seven years ago. He promised a positive reset in relations with Russia. But with the radioactive poisoning of a British spy in London, the downing of passenger jets over Europe, and the aggressive advances of Russian forces from Ukraine to Syria, President Putin of Russia has rebuked Mr. Obama.
On the night of 4 November 2008, Barack Obama was elected on a platform of 'hope' and 'change.' He was hailed as a 'uniter' in an age of 'dividers.' I experienced a political awakening that night. I watched as the hope that President Obama represented was tempered by the shocking passage of Proposition 8 by a majority of voters in California.
The message that President Obama delivered in his speech at Notre Dame was: morality is immoral. Pro-life is the extremist position, not a moral position. Yet we should compromise and work to reduce abortions. Where's the compromise between life and death - and why work to reduce the number of them occurring if there's nothing wrong with them?
Our democratic values also include - and our national security demands - open and transparent government. Some information obviously needs to be protected. And since his first days in office, President Obama has worked to strike the proper balance between the security the American people deserve and the openness our democratic society expects.
Because President Obama had an overall strategy, military and civilian leaders under his command could make reactive decisions that advanced the president's goals. In the military, we call that commander's intent: When there's a decision to be made and you don't have exact guidance at that moment, you at least know overall what your boss wants.