Jarrett: Obama to Change Washington by Spending More Time Away

Senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said that in a second term, President Obama would change Washington by spending even more time away from D.C.

“I think everybody grows. Everybody matures. Everybody develops their, you know, their confidence,” Jarrett said of the first term in an interview airing this morning on MSNBC.

“As I think one of the things that he has said upon reflection is that he’s going to spend a lot more time traveling around the country,” she said after a New Hampshire rally. “A day like today is energizing, and the American people are hungry to be engaged and he wants to be able to spend more time doing it. And that will hold Congress accountable.”

“As you know, what we said in the last campaign was ‘yes, we can,’ not ‘yes, I can,’ for the president. He cannot take on these challenges alone. We need to keep the kind of crowd we had in New Hampshire, what we’ve seen all over the country. Going past the election, we need to win the election and then we need to move into a second term. And we need to bring our country forward together,” Jarrett added.

Last month, Obama said the most important lesson learned in his first term is that “you can’t change Washington from the inside,” prompting criticism from the Romney camp.

Jarrett reflected on going through this last campaign with her longtime friend Obama.

“It is a little bit like I can’t believe that this is the last time he’ll ever run for office again,” she said. “But then I know that we have four more years and a lot of hard work left to do. Right?”