President Obama brushed off polls reflecting that more than half of Americans have lost confidence in his ability to lead, telling ABC News, “I’ve been dealing with stuff like this since 2009.”
“There have been a number of times where, you know, the punditry said, ‘Gosh,’ you know, ‘how do you turn it around?’ And what we do is stay focused on what matters and chip away at it and try to make progress. People have healthcare. The economy has gotten a lot better. What I do worry about is that right now we’ve got a Republican Party that seems to only care about saying no to me,” Obama said.
He called House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) impending lawsuit for executive overreach a “stunt.”
“You notice that he didn’t specifically say what exactly he was objecting to. I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something while they’re doing nothing,” the president said. “…You’re going to squawk if I try to fix some parts of it administratively that are within my authority while you are not doing anything?”
Obama also touched on the influx of child immigrants at the southern border, stressing “the problem is that under current law, once those kids come across the border, there’s a system in which we’re supposed to process them, take care of them, until we can send them back. It’s a lengthy process.”
“Our message absolutely is, ‘Don’t send your children unaccompanied on trains on through a bunch of smugglers.’ That is our direct message to the families in Central America. Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.”
When asked if the U.S. is under a serious threat from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), Obama replied, “You know, I think we have been under serious threat my entire presidency. And we have been under serious threat pre-dating 9/11 from those who embrace this ideology.”
He acknowledged they’re “gaining strength in some places, but we’ve also got a lot better at protecting ourselves.”
Obama said Americans aren’t always going to support his foreign policy at every minute “because there are going to be times where the world is messy.”
“One of things you also realize during the course of five years is is that if the problems were easy, somebody else would have solved them already,” he said. “And one of the great challenges of this job, but one of the great privileges of this job is that, you know, you’re tackling stuff that is really tough. And I’m glad that after five years, I’m still here able to do it.”
#Kafranbel‘s message today to @BarackObama. #Syria #WeAreAllFarmersAndDentists pic.twitter.com/ZGgqVxwVow
— Lina Sergie Attar (@AmalHanano) June 27, 2014
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