It is Day 100 in President Obama’s second term, not the milestone moment it was in the first term, but still an opportunity for stock-taking.
In a hastily called press conference Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama laughed at a reporter’s suggestion that he may not have the “juice” to get the rest of his agenda through a divided Congress, after the defeat of a gun-control measure that had strong public backing and the president’s vocal support.
“Maybe I should just pack up and go home,” the president joked, speaking in the White House briefing room. “As Mark Twain said, you know, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point.”
What a difference a few days, and a wholly different context, make. At last Saturday night’s black-tie White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama stepped to the podium to the rap tune “All I Do Is Win” and said, “Rush Limbaugh warned you about this – second term, baby.”
The reality, of course, is somewhere in between. Each issue on the table has its own political dynamic. Obama expressed confidence that “a range of things” will get done, despite the “dysfunction” on Capitol Hill.
“I feel confident that the bipartisan work that's been done on immigration reform will result in a bill that passes the Senate and passes the House and gets on my desk,” the president said.
Obama also voiced caution over how the US would proceed on Syria, given the recent signs that chemical weapons had been used in that nation’s civil war.
“We now have evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria,” the president said. “But we don’t know when they were used, how they were used, or who used them.... If we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective evidence, then we can find ourselves where we can’t mobilize the international community to support what we do."
On the Boston Marathon bombings, the president backed up the Federal Bureau of Investigation, following the revelation that the FBI had been tipped off by the Russian government over the activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers alleged to have detonated bombs at the marathon.
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