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The idea of a property-owning democracy has long roots in American political thought. In their book, "The Citizen’s Share," Joseph
R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman and Douglas Kruse argue that the Founding
Fathers wanted everyone (well, everyone who was white and male) to own a
small slice of property. Both Madison and Washington praised the
relatively equal distribution of property in the United States (compared
with Europe). Thomas Jefferson wrote, “It is not too soon to provide by
every possible means that as few as possible be without a little
portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a
state.” Indeed, the concept is still popular today, even on the right.
James Poulos writes,
“Without an ownership society, where citizens are prudent stewards of
broadly distributed private property, freedom tends to become what it
was in revolutionary France — an abstract ideal that can easily arouse
destructive political feelings that know no bounds.” But new data
suggests America may no longer be such a society, and that has worrying
implications for democracy.
The idea of a property-owning democracy is no longer the reality in the United States. Edward Wolff finds
that the wealthiest 10 percent own 90.9 percent of all stocks and
mutual funds, 94.3 percent of financial securities but only 26.5 percent
of the debt. For the middle class, their home makes up 62.5 percent of
their limited wealth. (The bottom 40 percent have negative wealth.) The
Gini coefficient for net worth has increased from 0.803 in 1962 to 0.871
in 2013. (By way of comparison: A Gini coefficient of 1 means that 1
person owns all of the wealth.) As the chart below shows, financial
instruments and wealth are far more unequally distributed than income.
The United States is no longer more equal than European nations, but actually deeply more unequal. The chart below shows
that the United States has the most unequal distribution of the wealth
of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) member country examined. Across the OECD, the bottom
60 percent own about 13.3 percent of the wealth. (The bottom 40 percent
own only 3.3 percent.) In Canada, the bottom 60 percent own 12.5 percent
of the wealth, and the bottom 40 percent own 2.2 percent. In France,
the respective numbers are 11.6 percent and 1.8 percent. And in Britain,
they are 16 percent and 4.7 percent.
In the United States, however, the bottom 60 percent own a mere 2.5 percent of the wealth and the bottom 40% own negative 0.4 percent of the wealth.
As
wealth and stock ownership has become more concentrated, good jobs that
lead to a middle class lifestyle are increasingly eroded.
Unfortunately, not enough people seem to be noticing.
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal recently reported
that “apps do your chores” -- but the unfortunate reality is that
workers, not “apps,” are doing those chores. The workers are called
“contractors,” instead of employees, meaning that they don’t get the
protections full-time employees do. And examples of exploitation are
piling up.
A startup called CrowdFlower Inc. -- which, according to WSJ "breaks down digital jobs,
such as data entry, into tiny tasks performed by millions of workers"
-- was recently sued for paying some of those workers between $2 and $3
an hour. Industry leader Uber, meanwhile, has been criticized for
exaggerating the wages of its contractors. This practice is becoming
widespread. A recent study finds
that 53 million Americans are doing some sort of freelancing work. Of
those, 40 percent are full-time independent contractors, meaning they
have no other source of income.
The
rich are driven by two main desires: First, to make sure they have more
money; and, second, that someone else does the work. There is literally no job the rich
are not lazy enough to outsource.
Because they cannot figure out the
location of their post office, they need “Shyp.” With “Luxe,” they can
get a person to park their car for them. And with “Saucey,” they can
save themselves a trip to the liquor store. In a recent article for The New Yorker,
Patricia Marx describes some of the more absurd tasks that were
included on TaskRabbit, including “Lego sorting,” locating “a reptile
handler who is in legal possession of a rattlesnake” and finding a fake
wedding ring that looks just like a real one.
It
is not of insignificant concern that the rich may cease to be capable
of performing the basic tasks necessary in the modern economy. The
result is something like the dystopia described in the recent
science-fiction film "In Time," except that the rich elongate their lives by making the poor do their mundane tasks.
To
get an assignment, an aspiring Rabbit offers to do the chore for less
money than he or she thinks other prospective Rabbits are bidding.
That’s what makes it a metaphor for the new economy, a dystopia where
regular careers are vanishing, every worker is a freelancer, every labor
transaction is a one-night stand, and we collude with one another to
cut our wages.
Together
these trends should be worrying: The vast majority of Americans own no
assets, but are instead laden with debt. The social safety net is being
shredded by plutocrats and their political henchmen. Conservatives say
workers should instead get benefits from their (preferably privately
owned) employers. But those companies are supporting workers less and
less: Defined benefit pensions are a thing of the past, and even basic retirement plans are in decline. And that’s just for those who are lucky enough to have jobs with benefits. Many workers are misclassified,
or are never employees to begin with, meaning they must manage for
retirement and health insurance without all the benefits the government
funnels through the employee-employer relationship.
"employers
often handle sickness (health insurance, subsidized by federal
government), old-age insurance (401k and defined-benefit pensions,
subsidized by federal government), survivor's insurance (life insurance,
subsidized by federal government), family benefits (paid leave and
health insurance for children), unemployment (severance, though more
typically rely heavily on public unemployment insurance), on top of
providing socially adequate levels of cash income."
That
is, government has funneled important social benefits through
corporations. This not only makes a corporate job more cushy than
otherwise, it also makes freelance work more precarious.
Christopher
Mims notes
that, “Uber isn’t the Uber for rides — it’s the Uber for low-wage
jobs.” A large portion of Americans now have two choices: Become
servants to the rich for minimal wages, or starve to death. The idea
that low-wage work is merely a short-term part of the rung towards a
better life is also largely illusory: Upward mobility has been destroyed.
America
has fallen into neo-feudalism: A wealthy capital-owning class exists
behind a servile class with no assets, and only a life of drudgery ahead
of them. The master-servant relationship will only further degrade
social trust and civic values. Americans can’t see themselves as equals
in the political sphere when large portions are consigned to wait upon
the whims of new aristocracy. Conservative politics relies on the middle
class making a devil’s bargain, believing they have more in common with
the rich than the poor. It won’t be long before that facade crumbles.
If the Republican tax plan passes Congress,
it will mark a watershed for the United States. The medium- and
long-term effects of the plan will be a massive drop in public
investment, which will come on the heels of decades of declining
spending (as a percentage of gross domestic product) on infrastructure, scientific research, skills training
and core government agencies. The United States can’t coast on past
investments forever, and with this legislation, we are ushering in a
bleak future.
The tax bill is expected to add at least $1 trillion
to the national debt over the next 10 years, and some experts think the
real loss to federal revenue will be much higher. If Congress doesn’t
slash spending, automatic cuts will kick in unless Democrats and Republicans can agree to waive them. Either way, the prospects for discretionary spending look dire,
with potential cuts to spending on roads and airports, training and
apprenticeship programs, health-care research and public-health
initiatives, among hundreds of other programs. And these cuts would
happen on top of an already difficult situation. As Gary Burtless
of the Brookings Institution points out, combined public investment by
federal, state and local governments is at its lowest point in six
decades, relative to GDP.
The United States is at a breaking
point. In August, the World Bank looked at 50 countries and found that
the United States will have the largest unmet infrastructure needs over
the next two decades. Look in any direction. According to the American
Road & Transportation Builders Association, the United States has
almost 56,000 bridges with structural problems (about 1,900 of which are on interstate highways), and these are crossed 185 million times a day.
Another industry report says that in 1977 the federal government provided 63 percent of the country’s total investment in water infrastructure,
but only 9 percent by 2014. There’s so much congestion in America’s
largest rail hub, Chicago, that it takes longer for a freight train to
pass through the city than it takes to get from there to Los Angeles,
according to Building America’s Future, a public interest group.
There is no better indication of the U.S. government’s myopia than the decline in funding for research. A recent report in Science notes that for the first time since World War II, private funding for basic research now exceeds federal funding. Research and development topped 10 percent of the national budget in the mid-1960s; it is now less than 4 percent. And the Senate’s version of the tax bill
removed a crucial tax credit that has encouraged corporate spending on
research, though the House-Senate compromise version will probably keep
it. All this is happening in an environment in which other countries, from South Korea to Germany to China, are ramping up their investments in these areas. A recent study found that China is on track to surpass the United States as the world leader in biomedical research spending.
When
I came to America in the 1980s, I was struck by how well the government
functioned. When I would hear complaints about the IRS or the Federal
Aviation Administration, I would often reply, “Have you ever seen how
badly these bureaucracies work in other countries?” Certainly compared
with India, where I grew up, but even compared with countries such as
France and Italy, many of the federal government’s key offices were
professional and competent. But decades of criticism, congressional
micromanagement and underfunding have taken their toll.
Agencies such as
the IRS are now threadbare. The Census Bureau
is preparing to go digital and undertake a new national tally, but it
is hamstrung by an insufficient budget and has had to cancel several
much-needed tests. The FAA
lags behind equivalent agencies in countries such as Canada and has
been delayed in upgrading its technology because of funding lapses and
uncertainties. The list goes on and on.
There are genuine problems beyond underfunding. The costs of building
American infrastructure are astronomical. But during the Depression,
World War II and much of the Cold War, a sense of crisis and competition
focused America’s attention and created a bipartisan urgency to get
things done.
Ironically, at a time when competition is far more fierce,
when other countries have surpassed the United States in many of these
areas, America has fallen into extreme partisanship and embraced a
know-nothing libertarianism that is starving the country of the
essential investments it needs for growth. Those who vote for this tax
bill — possibly the worst piece of major legislation in a generation —
will live in infamy, as the country slowly breaks down.
Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.
These metaphors for
condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive.
They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance
between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that
goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate
the soaring inequality in the United States.
A growing body of
recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant
attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been
observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute
get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer
signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status
people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial
expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and
interrupt or look past the other speaker.
Bringing the
micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social
power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.
Of course, in any
society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a
given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails.
Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in
other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status —
and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.
A prerequisite to
empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008,
social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University
of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another
about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a
loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself
in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less
compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus,
an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the
attention deficit.
Mr. Keltner suggests
that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the
wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to
value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on
your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you
get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a
behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal
relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than
the rich are, because they have to be.
While Mr. Keltner’s
research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly
attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those
with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention
to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend
to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.
This has profound
implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to
the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy,
which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the
circumstances are right, compassionate action.
In politics, readily
dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing
inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans
in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the
implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those
with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance
coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap. As political scientists
have noted, redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation
of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even
have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize
with them.
Social distance makes
it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to
put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our
own.
Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,” a theme repeated by Vamik D. Volkan,
an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who
was born in Cyprus to Turkish parents. Dr. Volkan remembers hearing as a
small boy awful things about the hated Greek Cypriots — who, he points
out, actually share many similarities with Turkish Cypriots. Yet for
decades their modest-size island has been politically divided, which
exacerbates the problem by letting prejudicial myths flourish.
In contrast, extensive
interpersonal contact counteracts biases by letting people from hostile
groups get to know one another as individuals and even friends. Thomas F. Pettigrew,
a research professor of social psychology at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, analyzed more than 500 studies on intergroup
contact. Mr. Pettigrew, who was born in Virginia in 1931 and lived there
until going to Harvard for graduate school, told me in an e-mail that
it was the “the rampant racism in the Virginia of my childhood” that led
him to study prejudice.
In his research, he
found that even in areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and viewed
one another through lenses of negative stereotypes, individuals who had
close friends within the other group exhibited little or no such
prejudice. They seemed to realize the many ways those demonized “others”
were “just like me.” Whether such friendly social contact would
overcome the divide between those with more and less social and economic
power was not studied, but I suspect it would help.
Since the 1970s, the
gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income
inequality is at its highest level in a century. This widening gulf
between the haves and have-less troubles me, but not for the obvious
reasons. Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an
entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a
less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing the economic gap may be
impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.
The attack on Republican members of Congress in the United
States this week is a product of America's increasingly toxic political
climate. Democracy is at stake in a country where two, deeply divided
sides are no longer capable of reasonable debate.
Once the attacker was dead and the injured cared for, once quiet had
returned to Congress and the investigation had begun, a hint of harmony
briefly descended over Washington. Democrats said prayers for
Republicans, adversaries found warm words for each other and even Donald
Trump acted like a statesman. America is strongest, he said, "when we
are unified and when we work together for the common good."
This, from Trump -- arguably America's most divisive figure.
It sounded as if he had forgotten recent months -- the tirades and
hate-filled speeches. As if there were no gaping rift between the
opposing political camps, right and left, long since unbridgeable. For a
moment, it seemed the president had swept aside all the rage -- and the
nation was thankful.
What happened on Wednesday in Alexandria, a Washington suburb, was
not Donald Trump's fault. The attacker opened fire on Republican members
of the House and Senate. It was not an attempted political
assassination, but it was an act that was at least partly motivated by
politics. The perpetrator, James Thomas Hodgkinson, was a disturbed
Bernie Sanders supporter who considered Trump to be a "traitor." It was
an attack on democracy, but above all provided evidence of just how
toxic the political environment in the United States has become. And of
course, this president, both directly and indirectly, bears his share of
the blame for this climate.
A political battle is raging in the United States in which the
competing camps are no longer engaging in debate. Instead, each side is
denying the other's right to participate in the democratic process. Both
sides are raising the specter of treason as a way of justifying
violence. The rage against elites has become impossible to contain, with
ring leaders on the right speaking of "war" and those on the left of
"resistance." The two sides are united by the thirst for confrontation
and by the occasional repudiation of their opponents' humanity. Eric
Trump, one of President Trump's sons, recently said that critics of the
American leader are "not even people."
Debates have often been shrill in the United States. And violence
has reared its head in political life before -- and not just since the
assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Profiteering from Polarization
But today, a man is sitting in the White House who profits from the
polarization and is further fanning the flames. It is not the language
of moderation that is spoken in Trump's Washington -- it is one of
revolt, revenge, rage and cynicism, and that isn't by chance.
Journalists have become "enemies of the state," judges are ridiculed,
government prosecutors getting too close to the president are threatened
with dismissal and the head of the FBI is fired.
But Trump isn't sowing the seeds of rage on his own. His opponents
are also doing a fine job of escalating this rhetorical arms race with
talk of street battles, as if guerilla warfare were the solution.
Comedienne Cathy Griffin had herself photographed recently holding
Trump's fake decapitated head by the hair. At the point in a debate when
the physical well-being of one's opponent is no longer sacred, there
are no boundaries left.
The ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans has never
been as wide as it is today. The most dangerous aspect of this
development is that the two sides are no longer able to agree on basic
facts. One wonders whether Republicans and Democrats could even agree
that the sky is blue. If everything is relative and nothing is certain,
when a president lies so openly, then who can you trust? When the
language of this government is so corrupt and misguided, what is one to
do?
There are few institutions left that both sides accept as being
nonpartisan. At the moment, Trump's helpers are busy casting aspersions
at independent special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been tasked with
investigating Russian influence on the presidential campaign and
potential ties between Moscow and the Trump team. Until his appointment,
he had been accepted by Republicans and Democrats alike as an
independent official with integrity. The campaign against Mueller is
destroying any possibility, at least on this question, that one side's
version of the truth might ultimately be accepted.
The harmony following the attack in Alexandria didn't last long. The
next morning, Trump tweeted he was the victim of a "WITCH HUNT." He was
referring, of course, to special counsel Mueller.
Debate is one of the foundations of democracy, but in the U.S. it's
hardly possible anymore. And when the people of a country are no longer
capable of speaking to each other, when they constantly believe their
opponents are involved in a conspiracy, then a country's institutions
are also imperiled. And with them, democracy itself.
By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism
of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic
fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as
every other elected office — to the person who gets the most votes.
And
so for the second time in 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular
vote has won the presidency. Unlike 2000, it wasn’t even close. Hillary
Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of
the electorate. That’s a wider margin than 10 winning candidates
enjoyed and the biggest deficit for an incoming president since the 19th century.
Yes,
Mr. Trump won under the rules, but the rules should change so that a
presidential election reflects the will of Americans and promotes a more
participatory democracy.
The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol
of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a
direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with
their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as
three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.
Today
the college, which allocates electors based on each state’s
representation in Congress, tips the scales in favor of smaller states; a
Wyoming resident’s vote counts 3.6 times as much as
a Californian’s. And because almost all states use a winner-take-all
system, the election ends up being fought in just a dozen or so
“battleground” states, leaving tens of millions of Americans on the
sidelines.
There
is an elegant solution: The Constitution establishes the existence of
electors, but leaves it up to states to tell them how to vote. Eleven
states and the District of Columbia, representing 165 electoral votes,
have already passed legislation to have their electors vote for the
winner of the national popular vote. The agreement, known as the National Popular Vote interstate compact,
would take effect once states representing a majority of electoral
votes, currently 270, signed on. This would ensure that the national
popular-vote winner would become president.
Conservative opponents of a direct vote say
it would give an unfair edge to large, heavily Democratic cities and
states. But why should the votes of Americans in California or New York
count for less than those in Idaho or Texas? A direct popular vote would
treat all Americans equally, no matter where they live — including, by
the way, Republicans in San Francisco and Democrats in Corpus Christi,
whose votes are currently worthless. The system as it now operates does a
terrible job of representing the nation’s demographic and geographic
diversity. Almost 138 million Americans went to the polls this year, but
Mr. Trump secured his Electoral College victory thanks to fewer than 80,000 votes across three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
This page has opposed the Electoral College for at least 80 years, and it has regardless of the outcome
of any given election. (In 2004, President George W. Bush won the
popular vote by more than three million, but he could have lost the
Electoral College with a switch of fewer than 60,000 votes in Ohio.)
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. This is the most wonderful press
conference of the year. I've got a list of who’s been naughty and nice
to call on. (Laughter.) But let me first make a couple of quick
points, and then I’ll take your questions.
Typically, I use this yearend press conference to review how far we’ve
come over the course of the year. Today, understandably, I'm going to
talk a little bit about how far we’ve come over the past eight years.
As I was preparing to take office, the unemployment rate was on its way
to 10 percent. Today, it’s at 4.6 percent -- the lowest in nearly a
decade. We’ve seen the longest streak of job growth on record, and
wages have grown faster over the past few years than at any time in the
past 40.
When I came into office, 44 million people were uninsured. Today,
we’ve covered more than 20 million of them. For the first time in our
history, more than 90 percent of Americans are insured. In fact,
yesterday was the biggest day ever for HealthCare.gov. More than
670,000 Americans signed up to get covered, and more are signing up by
the day.
We’ve cut our dependence on foreign oil by more than half, doubled
production of renewable energy, enacted the most sweeping reforms since
FDR to protect consumers and prevent a crisis on Wall Street from
punishing Main Street ever again. None of these actions stifled growth,
as critics predicted. Instead, the stock market has nearly tripled.
Since I signed Obamacare into law, our businesses have added more than
15 million new jobs. And the economy is undoubtedly more durable than
it was in the days when we relied on oil from unstable nations and banks
took risky bets with your money.
Add it all up, and last year, the poverty rate fell at the fastest rate
in almost 50 years, while the median household income grew at the
fastest rate on record. In fact, income gains were actually larger for
households at the bottom and the middle than for those at the top. And
we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by nearly two-thirds and
protecting vital investments that grow the middle class.
In foreign policy, when I came into office, we were in the midst of two
wars. Now, nearly 180,000 troops are down to 15,000. Bin Laden,
rather than being at large, has been taken off the battlefield, along
with thousands of other terrorists. Over the past eight years, no
foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed an attack on
our homeland that was directed from overseas.
Through diplomacy, we’ve ensured that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear
weapon -- without going to war with Iran. We opened up a new chapter
with the people of Cuba. And we brought nearly 200 nations together
around a climate agreement that could very well save this planet for our
kids. And almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and
more respected today than they did eight years ago.
In other words, by so many measures, our country is stronger and more
prosperous than it was when we started. That's a situation that I’m
proud to leave for my successor. And it’s thanks to the American people
-- to the hard work that you’ve put in, the sacrifices you’ve made for
your families and your communities, the businesses that you started or
invested in, the way you looked out for one another. And I could not be
prouder to be your President.
Of course, to tout this progress doesn’t mean that we’re not mindful of
how much more there is to do. In this season in particular, we’re
reminded that there are people who are still hungry, people who are
still homeless; people who still have trouble paying the bills or
finding work after being laid off.
There are communities that are still
mourning those who have been stolen from us by senseless gun violence,
and parents who still are wondering how to protect their kids. And
after I leave office, I intend to continue to work with organizations
and citizens doing good across the country on these and other pressing
issues to build on the progress that we’ve made.
Around the world, as well, there are hotspots where disputes have been
intractable, conflicts have flared up, and people -- innocent people are
suffering as a result. And nowhere is this more terribly true than in
the city of Aleppo. For years, we’ve worked to stop the civil war in
Syria and alleviate human suffering. It has been one of the hardest
issues that I've faced as President.
The world, as we speak, is united in horror at the savage assault by
the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies on the city of
Aleppo. We have seen a deliberate strategy of surrounding, besieging,
and starving innocent civilians. We've seen relentless targeting of
humanitarian workers and medical personnel; entire neighborhoods reduced
to rubble and dust. There are continuing reports of civilians being
executed. These are all horrific violations of international law.
Responsibility for this brutality lies in one place alone -- with the
Assad regime and its allies Russia and Iran. And this blood and these
atrocities are on their hands.
We all know what needs to happen. There needs to be an impartial
international observer force in Aleppo that can help coordinate an
orderly evacuation through safe corridors. There has to be full access
for humanitarian aid, even as the United States continues to be the
world’s largest donor of humanitarian aid to the Syrian people. And,
beyond that, there needs to be a broader ceasefire that can serve as the
basis for a political rather than a military solution.
That’s what the United States is going to continue to push for, both
with our partners and through multilateral institutions like the U.N.
Regretfully, but unsurprisingly, Russia has repeatedly blocked the
Security Council from taking action on these issues. So we’re going to
keep pressing the Security Council to help improve the delivery of
humanitarian aid to those who are in such desperate need, and to ensure
accountability, including continuing to monitor any potential use of
chemical weapons in Syria. And we’re going to work in the U.N. General
Assembly as well, both on accountability and to advance a political
settlement. Because it should be clear that although you may achieve
tactical victories, over the long term the Assad regime cannot slaughter
its way to legitimacy.
That’s why we'll continue to press for a transition to a more
representative government. And that’s why the world must not avert our
eyes to the terrible events that are unfolding. The Syrian regime and
its Russian and Iranian allies are trying to obfuscate the truth. The
world should not be fooled.
And the world will not forget.
So even in a season where the incredible blessings that we know as
Americans are all around us, even as we enjoy family and friends and are
reminded of how lucky we are, we should also be reminded that to be an
American involves bearing burdens and meeting obligations to others.
American values and American ideals are what will lead the way to a
safer and more prosperous 2017, both here and abroad.
And by the way, few embody those values and ideals like our brave men
and women in uniform and their families. So I just want to close by
wishing all of them a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
With that, I will take some questions. And I'm going to start with Josh Lederman, of AP.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. There’s a perception that you're
letting President Putin get away with interfering in the U.S. election,
and that a response that nobody knows about or a lookback review just
won’t cut it. Are you prepared to call out President Putin by name for
ordering this hacking?
And do you agree with what Hillary Clinton now
says, that the hacking was actually partly responsible for her loss?
And is your administration’s open quarreling with Trump and his team on
this issue tarnishing the smooth transition of power that you have
promised?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, with respect to the transition, I
think they would be the first to acknowledge that we have done
everything we can to make sure that they are successful as I promised.
And that will continue. And it’s just been a few days since I last
talked to the President-elect about a whole range of transition issues.
That cooperation is going to continue.
There hasn’t been a lot of squabbling. What we’ve simply said is the
facts, which are that, based on uniform intelligence assessments, the
Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC, and that, as a
consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that and
make sure that we are preventing that kind of interference through
cyberattacks in the future.
That should be a bipartisan issue; that shouldn’t be a partisan issue.
And my hope is that the President-elect is going to similarly be
concerned with making sure that we don’t have potential foreign
influence in our election process. I don’t think any American wants
that. And that shouldn’t be a source of an argument.
I think that part of the challenge is that it gets caught up in the
carryover from election season. And I think it is very important for us
to distinguish between the politics of the election and the need for
us, as a country, both from a national security perspective but also in
terms of the integrity of our election system and our democracy, to make
sure that we don’t create a political football here.
Now, with respect to how this thing unfolded last year, let’s just go
through the facts pretty quickly. At the beginning of the summer, we’re
alerted to the possibility that the DNC has been hacked, and I
immediately order law enforcement as well as our intelligence teams to
find out everything about it, investigate it thoroughly, to brief the
potential victims of this hacking, to brief on a bipartisan basis the
leaders of both the House and the Senate and the relevant intelligence
committees. And once we had clarity and certainty around what, in fact,
had happened, we publicly announced that, in fact, Russia had hacked
into the DNC.
And at that time, we did not attribute motives or any interpretations
of why they had done so. We didn’t discuss what the effects of it might
be. We simply let people know -- the public know, just as we had let
members of Congress know -- that this had happened.
And as a consequence, all of you wrote a lot of stories about both what
had happened, and then you interpreted why that might have happened and
what effect it was going to have on the election outcomes. We did not.
And the reason we did not was because in this hyper-partisan
atmosphere, at a time when my primary concern was making sure that the
integrity of the election process was not in any way damaged, at a time
when anything that was said by me or anybody in the White House would
immediately be seen through a partisan lens, I wanted to make sure that
everybody understood we were playing this thing straight -- that we
weren’t trying to advantage one side or another, but what we were trying
to do was let people know that this had taken place, and so if you
started seeing effects on the election, if you were trying to measure
why this was happening and how you should consume the information that
was being leaked, that you might want to take this into account.
And that's exactly how we should have handled it. Imagine if we had
done the opposite. It would have become immediately just one more
political scrum. And part of the goal here was to make sure that we did
not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more
questions about the integrity of the election right before the election
was taking place -- at a time, by the way, when the President-elect
himself was raising questions about the integrity of the election.
And, finally, I think it's worth pointing out that the information was
already out. It was in the hands of WikiLeaks, so that was going to
come out no matter what. What I was concerned about, in particular, was
making sure that that wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could
hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself.
And so in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt
that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to
talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, and there were going to
be some serious consequences if he didn’t. And, in fact, we did not
see further tampering of the election process. But the leaks through
WikiLeaks had already occurred.
So when I look back in terms of how we handled it, I think we handled
it the way it should have been handled. We allowed law enforcement and
the intelligence community to do its job without political influence.
We briefed all relevant parties involved in terms of what was taking
place. When we had a consensus around what had happened, we announced
it -- not through the White House, not through me, but rather through
the intelligence communities that had actually carried out these
investigations. And then we allowed you and the American public to make
an assessment as to how to weigh that going into the election.
And the truth is, is that there was nobody here who didn’t have some
sense of what kind of effect it might have. I'm finding it a little
curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked
like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton because you guys wrote about
it every day. Every single leak. About every little juicy tidbit of
political gossip -- including John Podesta's risotto recipe. This was
an obsession that dominated the news coverage.
So I do think it's worth us reflecting how it is that a presidential
election of such importance, of such moment, with so many big issues at
stake and such a contrast between the candidates, came to be dominated
by a bunch of these leaks. What is it about our political system that
made us vulnerable to these kinds of potential manipulations -- which,
as I've said publicly before, were not particularly sophisticated.
This was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme. They hacked
into some Democratic Party emails that contained pretty routine stuff,
some of it embarrassing or uncomfortable, because I suspect that if any
of us got our emails hacked into, there might be some things that we
wouldn’t want suddenly appearing on the front page of a newspaper or a
telecast, even if there wasn’t anything particularly illegal or
controversial about it. And then it just took off.
And that concerns me. And it should concern all of us. But the truth
of the matter is, is that everybody had the information. It was out
there. And we handled it the way we should have.
Now, moving forward, I think there are a couple of issues that this
raises. Number one is just the constant challenge that we are going to
have with cybersecurity throughout our economy and throughout our
society. We are a digitalized culture, and there is hacking going on
every single day. There’s not a company, there’s not a major
organization, there’s not a financial institution, there’s not a branch
of our government where somebody is not going to be phishing for
something or trying to penetrate, or put in a virus or malware. And
this is why for the last eight years, I’ve been obsessed with how do we
continually upgrade our cybersecurity systems.
And this particular concern around Russian hacking is part of a broader
set of concerns about how do we deal with cyber issues being used in
ways that can affect our infrastructure, affect the stability of our
financial systems, and affect the integrity of our institutions, like
our election process.
I just received a couple weeks back -- it wasn’t widely reported on -- a
report from our cybersecurity commission that outlines a whole range of
strategies to do a better job on this. But it’s difficult, because
it’s not all housed -- the target of cyberattacks is not one entity but
it’s widely dispersed, and a lot of it is private, like the DNC. It’s
not a branch of government. We can’t tell people what to do. What we
can do is inform them, get best practices.
What we can also do is to, on a bilateral basis, warn other countries
against these kinds of attacks. And we’ve done that in the past. So
just as I told Russia to stop it, and indicated there will be
consequences when they do it, the Chinese have, in the past, engaged in
cyberattacks directed at our companies to steal trade secrets and
proprietary technology. And I had to have the same conversation with
Prime Minister -- or with President Xi, and what we’ve seen is some
evidence that they have reduced -- but not completely eliminated --
these activities, partly because they can use cutouts.
One of the problems with the Internet and cyber issues is that there’s
not always a return address, and by the time you catch up to it,
attributing what happened to a particular government can be difficult,
not always provable in court even though our intelligence communities
can make an assessment.
What we’ve also tried to do is to start creating some international
norms about this to prevent some sort of cyber arms race, because we
obviously have offensive capabilities as well as defensive capabilities.
And my approach is not a situation in which everybody is worse off
because folks are constantly attacking each other back and forth, but
putting some guardrails around the behavior of nation-states, including
our adversaries, just so that they understand that whatever they do to
us we can potentially do to them.
We do have some special challenges, because oftentimes our economy is
more digitalized, it is more vulnerable, partly because we’re a
wealthier nation and we’re more wired than some of these other
countries. And we have a more open society, and engage in less control
and censorship over what happens over the Internet, which is also part
of what makes us special.
Last point -- and the reason I’m going on here is because I know that
you guys have a lot of questions about this, and I haven't addressed all
of you directly about it. With respect to response, my principal goal
leading up to the election was making sure that the election itself went
off without a hitch, that it was not tarnished, and that it did not
feed any sense in the public that somehow tampering had taken place with
the actual process of voting. And we accomplished that.
That does not mean that we are not going to respond. It simply meant
that we had a set of priorities leading up to the election that were of
the utmost importance. Our goal continues to be to send a clear message
to Russia or others not to do this to us, because we can do stuff to
you.
But it is also important for us to do that in a thoughtful, methodical
way. Some of it we do publicly. Some of it we will do in a way that
they know, but not everybody will. And I know that there have been
folks out there who suggest somehow that if we went out there and made
big announcements, and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that
somehow that would potentially spook the Russians. But keep in mind
that we already have enormous numbers of sanctions against the Russians.
The relationship between us and Russia has deteriorated, sadly,
significantly over the last several years. And so how we approach an
appropriate response that increases costs for them for behavior like
this in the future, but does not create problems for us, is something
that’s worth taking the time to think through and figure out. And
that’s exactly what we’ve done.
So at a point in time where we’ve taken certain actions that we can
divulge publically, we will do so. There are times where the message
will go -- will be directly received by the Russians and not publicized.
And I should point out, by the way, part of why the Russians have been
effective on this is because they don't go around announcing what
they're doing. It's not like Putin is going around the world publically
saying, look what we did, wasn't that clever? He denies it. So the
idea that somehow public shaming is going to be effective I think
doesn't read the thought process in Russia very well.
Okay?
Q Did Clinton lose because of the hacking?
THE PRESIDENT: I'm going to let all the political pundits in this town
have a long discussion about what happened in the election. It was a
fascinating election, so I'm sure there are going to be a lot of books
written about it.
I've said what I think is important for the Democratic Party going
forward rather than try to parse every aspect of the election. And I've
said before, I couldn't be prouder of Secretary Clinton, her
outstanding service. I thinks she's worked tirelessly on behalf of the
American people, and I don't think she was treated fairly during the
election. I think the coverage of her and the issues was troubling.
But having said that, what I've been most focused on -- appropriate for
the fact that I'm not going to be a politician in about, what is it, 32
days? 31?
Q Thirty-four.
THE PRESIDENT: Thirty four? (Laughter.) But what I've said is, is
that I can maybe give some counsel and advice to the Democratic Party.
And I think that that the thing we have to spend the most time on --
because it's the thing we have the most control over -- is how do we
make sure that we are showing up in places where I think Democratic
policies are needed, where they are helping, where they are making a
difference, but where people feel as if they're not being heard and
where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte-sipping,
politically-correct, out-of-touch folks. We have to be in those
communities. And I've seen that when we are in those communities, it
makes a difference.
That's how I became President. I became a U.S. senator not just
because I had a strong base in Chicago, but because I was driving around
downstate Illinois and going to fish frys and sitting in VFW halls and
talking to farmers. And I didn't win every one of their votes, but they
got a sense of what I was talking about, what I cared about, that I was
for working people, that I was for the middle class, that the reason I
was interested in strengthening unions, and raising the minimum wage,
and rebuilding our infrastructure, and making sure that parents had
decent childcare and family leave was because my own family's history
wasn't that different from theirs, even if I looked a little bit
different. Same thing in Iowa.
And so the question is, how do we rebuild that party as a whole so that
there's not a county in any state -- I don't care how red -- that we
don't have a presence and we're not making the argument. Because I
think we have the better argument. But that requires a lot of work.
It's been something that I've been able to do successfully in my own
campaigns. It is not something I've been able to transfer to candidates
in midterms and sort of build a sustaining organization around. That's
something that I would have liked to have done more of, but it's kind
of hard to do when you're also dealing with a whole bunch of issues here
in the White House.
And that doesn't mean, though, that it can't be done. And I think
there are going to be a lot of talented folks out there, a lot of
progressives who share my values who are going to be leading the charge
in the years to come.
Michelle Kosinski of CNN.
Q Thank you. So this week we heard Hillary Clinton talk about how
she thinks that the FBI Director's most recent announcement made a
difference in the outcome of the election. And we also just heard in an
op-ed her campaign chairman talk about something being deeply broken
within the FBI. He talked about thinking that the investigation early
on was lackadaisical in his words. So what do you think about those
comments? Do you think there's any truth to them? Do you think there's
a danger there that they're calling into question the integrity of
institutions in a similar way that Donald Trump's team has done?
And the second part to that is that Donald Trump's team repeatedly -- I
guess, giving the indication that the investigation of the Russian
hack, as well as the retaliation, might not be such a priority once he's
in office, so what do you think the risk is there? And are you going
to talk to him directly about some of those comments he made?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, on the latter point, as I said before, the
transition from election season to governance season is not always
smooth. It's bumpy. There are still feelings that are raw out there.
There are people who are still thinking about how things unfolded. And
I get all that. But when Donald Trump takes the Oath of Office and is
sworn as the 45th President of the United States, then he's got a
different set of responsibilities and considerations.
And I've said this before: I think there is a sobering process when
you walk into the Oval Office. And I haven’t shared previously private
conversations I've had with the President-elect. I will say that they
have been cordial and, in some cases, have involved me making some
pretty specific suggestions about how to ensure that regardless of our
obvious deep disagreements about policy, maybe I can transmit some
thoughts about maintaining the effectiveness, integrity, cohesion of the
office, of various democratic institutions. And he has listened. I
can't say that he will end up implementing, but the conversations
themselves have been cordial as opposed to defensive in any way. And I
will always make myself available to him, just as previous Presidents
have made themselves available to me as issues come up.
With respect to the FBI, I will tell you, I've had a chance to know a
lot of FBI agents, I know Director Comey, and they take their job
seriously, they work really hard, they help keep us safe and save a lot
of lives. And it is always a challenge for law enforcement when there's
an intersection between the work that they are doing and the political
system. It's one of the difficulties of democracy, generally. We have a
system where we want our law enforcement investigators and our
prosecutors to be free from politics, to be independent, to play it
straight, but sometimes that involves investigations that touch on
politics. And particularly in this hyper-partisan environment that
we've been in, everything is suspect, everything you do one way or the
other.
One thing that I have done is to be pretty scrupulous about not wading
into investigation decisions or prosecution decisions, or decisions not
to prosecute. I have tried to be really strict in my own behavior about
preserving the independence of law enforcement, free from my own
judgments and political assessments, in some cases. And I don’t know
why it would stop now.
Mike Dorning of Bloomberg.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. On Aleppo, your views that what happens
there is the responsibility of the Russian government, the Iranian
government, the Assad regime are pretty well aired. But do you, as
President of the United States, leader of the free world, feel any
personal moral responsibility now at the end of your presidency for the
carnage that we’re all watching in Aleppo, which I’m sure disturbs you
-- which you said disturbs you?
And, secondly, also on Aleppo, you’ve again made clear your practical
disagreements with the idea of safe zones. And President-elect Trump
has, throughout his campaign, and he said again last night that he wants
to create safe zones in Syria. Do you feel like, in this transition,
you need to help him toward implementing that? Or was that not
something that you should be doing?
THE PRESIDENT: Mike, I always feel responsible. I felt responsible
when kids were being shot by snipers. I felt responsible when millions
of people had been displaced. I feel responsible for murder and
slaughter that’s taken place in South Sudan that’s not being reported on
partly because there’s not as much social media being generated from
there.
There are places around the world where horrible things are happening,
and because of my office, because I’m President of the United States, I
feel responsible. I ask myself every single day, is there something I
could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some
child who doesn’t deserve to suffer.
So that’s a starting point. There’s not a moment during the course of
this presidency where I haven’t felt some responsibility. That’s true,
by the way, for our own country. When I came into office and people
were losing their jobs and losing their homes and losing their pensions,
I felt responsible, and I would go home at night and I would ask
myself, was there something better that I could do or smarter that I
could be that would make a difference in their lives, that would relieve
their suffering and relieve their hardship.
So with respect to Syria, what I have consistently done is taken the
best course that I can to try to end the civil war while having also to
take into account the long-term national security interests of the
United States.
And throughout this process, based on hours of meetings, if you tallied
it up, days or weeks of meetings where we went through every option in
painful detail, with maps, and we had our military, and we had our aid
agencies, and we had our diplomatic teams, and sometimes we’d bring in
outsiders who were critics of ours -- whenever we went through it, the
challenge was that, short of putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the
ground, uninvited, without any international law mandate, without
sufficient support from Congress, at a time when we still had troops in
Afghanistan and we still had troops in Iraq, and we had just gone
through over a decade of war and spent trillions of dollars, and when
the opposition on the ground was not cohesive enough to necessarily
govern a country, and you had a military superpower in Russia prepared
to do whatever it took to keeps its client-state involved, and you had a
regional military power in Iran that saw their own vital strategic
interests at stake and were willing to send in as many of their people
or proxies to support the regime -- that in that circumstance, unless we
were all in and willing to take over Syria, we were going to have
problems, and that everything else was tempting because we wanted to do
something and it sounded like the right thing to do, but it was going to
be impossible to do this on the cheap.
And in that circumstance, I have to make a decision as President of the
United States as to what is best -- I’m sorry, what’s going on?
Somebody’s not feeling good? All right. Why don’t we have -- we’ve
got -- we can get our doctors back there to help out. Does somebody
want to go to my doctor’s office and just have them -- all right --
where was I?
Q Doing it on the cheap.
THE PRESIDENT: So we couldn’t do it on the cheap. Now, it may be --
Can somebody help out please and get Doc Jackson in here? Is somebody grabbing our doctor?
Q Thank you, Mr. President, for stopping.
THE PRESIDENT: Of course. In the meantime, just give her a little
room. The doctor will be here in a second. You guys know where the
doctor’s office is? Just go through the Palm doors. It’s right next to
the Map Room. There he is. All right, there’s Doc Jackson. He’s all
right. Okay. The doctor is in the house.
Q You were saying you couldn’t do it on the cheap.
THE PRESIDENT: And I don’t mean that -- I mean that with all
sincerity. I understand the impulse to want to do something. But
ultimately, what I’ve had to do is to think about what can we sustain,
what is realistic. And my first priority has to be what’s the right
thing to do for America.
And it has been our view that the best thing to do has been to provide
some support to the moderate opposition so that they could sustain
themselves, and that we wouldn’t see anti-Assad regime sentiments just
pouring into al Nusra and al Qaeda or ISIL; that we engaged our
international partners in order to put pressure on all the parties
involved, and to try to resolve this through diplomatic and political
means.
I cannot claim that we’ve been successful. And so that’s something
that, as is true with a lot of issues and problems around the world, I
have to go to bed with every night. But I continue to believe that it
was the right approach, given what realistically we could get done
absent a decision, as I said, to go in a much more significant way. And
that, I think, would not have been sustainable or good for the American
people because we had a whole host of other obligations that we also
had to meet, wars we had already started and that were not yet finished.
With respect to the issue of safe zones, it is a continued problem. A
continued challenge with safe zones is if you’re setting up those zones
on Syrian territory, then that requires some force that is willing to
maintain that territory in the absence of consent from the Syrian
government and, now, the Russians or the Iranians. So it may be that
with Aleppo’s tragic situation unfolding, that in the short term, if we
can get more of the tens of thousands who are still trapped there out,
that so long as the world’s eyes are on them and they are feeling
pressure, the regime and Russia concludes that they are willing to find
some arrangement, perhaps in coordination with Turkey, whereby those
people can be safe. Even that will probably be temporary, but at least
it solves a short-term issue that’s going to arise.
Unfortunately, we’re not even there yet, because right now we have
Russians and Assad claiming that basically all the innocent civilians
who were trapped in Aleppo are out when international organizations,
humanitarian organizations who know better and who are on the ground
have said unequivocally that there are still tens of thousands who are
trapped and prepared to leave under pretty much any conditions. And so
right now, our biggest priority is to continue to put pressure wherever
we can to try to get them out.
Q Notwithstanding --
THE PRESIDENT: I can’t have too much --
Q On the second question, your intentions are well aired, but do you
feel responsibility notwithstanding a move in that direction or help
President-elect Trump move in that direction?
THE PRESIDENT: I will help President Trump -- President-elect Trump
with any advice, counsel, information that we can provide so that he,
once he’s sworn in, can make a decision. Between now and then, these
are decisions that I have to make based on the consultations I have with
our military and the people who have been working this every single
day.
Peter Alexander.
Q Mr. President, thank you very much. Can you, given all the
intelligence that we have now heard, assure the public that this was,
once and for all, a free and fair election? And specifically on Russia,
do you feel any obligation now, as they’ve been insisting that this
isn’t the case, to show the proof, as it were -- they say put your money
where your mouth is and declassify some of the intelligence, some of
the evidence that exists? And more broadly, as it relates to Donald
Trump on this very topic, are you concerned about his relationship with
Vladimir Putin, especially given some of the recent Cabinet picks,
including his selection for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who
toasted Putin with champagne over oil deals together? Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: I may be getting older, because these multipart questions, I start losing track. (Laughter.)
I can assure the public that there was not the kind of tampering with
the voting process that was of concern and will continue to be of
concern going forward; that the votes that were cast were counted, they
were counted appropriately. We have not seen evidence of machines being
tampered with. So that assurance I can provide.
That doesn’t mean that we find every single potential probe of every
single voting machine all across the country, but we paid a lot of
attention to it. We worked with state officials, et cetera, and we feel
confident that that didn’t occur and that the votes were cast and they
were counted.
So that’s on that point. What was the second one?
Q The second one was about declassification.
THE PRESIDENT: Declassification. Look, we will provide evidence that
we can safely provide that does not compromise sources and methods. But
I’ll be honest with you, when you’re talking about cybersecurity, a lot
of it is classified. And we’re not going to provide it because the way
we catch folks is by knowing certain things about them that they may
not want us to know, and if we’re going to monitor this stuff
effectively going forward, we don’t want them to know that we know.
So this is one of those situations where unless the American people
genuinely think that the professionals in the CIA, the FBI, our entire
intelligence infrastructure -- many of whom, by the way, served in
previous administrations and who are Republicans -- are less trustworthy
than the Russians, then people should pay attention to what our
intelligence agencies have to say.
This is part of what I meant when I said that we’ve got to think about
what’s happening to our political culture here. The Russians can’t
change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country. They
are a weaker country. Their economy doesn’t produce anything that
anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate.
But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact
us if we abandon our values. Mr. Putin can weaken us, just like he’s
trying to weaken Europe, if we start buying into notions that it’s okay
to intimidate the press, or lock up dissidents, or discriminate against
people because of their faith or what they look like.
And what I worry about more than anything is the degree to which,
because of the fierceness of the partisan battle, you start to see
certain folks in the Republican Party and Republican voters suddenly
finding a government and individuals who stand contrary to everything
that we stand for as being okay because that’s how much we dislike
Democrats.
I mean, think about it. Some of the people who historically have been
very critical of me for engaging with the Russians and having
conversations with them also endorsed the President-elect, even as he
was saying that we should stop sanctioning Russia and being tough on
them, and work together with them against our common enemies. He was
very complimentary of Mr. Putin personally.
That wasn’t news. The President-elect during the campaign said so.
And some folks who had made a career out of being anti-Russian didn’t
say anything about it. And then after the election, suddenly they’re
asking, well, why didn’t you tell us that maybe the Russians were trying
to help our candidate? Well, come on. There was a survey, some of you
saw, where -- now, this is just one poll, but a pretty credible source
-- 37 percent of Republican voters approve of Putin. Over a third of
Republican voters approve of Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB.
Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave.
And how did that happen? It happened in part because, for too long,
everything that happens in this town, everything that’s said is seen
through the lens of "does this help or hurt us relative to Democrats, or
relative to President Obama?" And unless that changes, we’re going to
continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence, because we’ve lost track
of what it is that we’re about and what we stand for.
With respect to the President-elect’s appointments, it is his
prerogative, as I’ve always said, for him to appoint who he thinks can
best carry out his foreign policy or his domestic policy. It is up to
the Senate to advise and consent. There will be plenty of time for
members of the Senate to go through the record of all his appointees and
determine whether or not they’re appropriate for the job.
Martha Raddatz.
Q Mr. President, I want to talk about Vladimir Putin again. Just to
be clear, do you believe Vladimir Putin himself authorized the hack?
And do you believe he authorized that to help Donald Trump? And on the
intelligence, one of the things Donald Trump cites is Saddam Hussein
and the weapons of mass destruction, and that they were never found.
Can you say, unequivocally, that this was not China, that this was not a
400-pound guy sitting on his bed, as Donald Trump says? And do these
types of tweets and kinds of statements from Donald Trump embolden the
Russians?
THE PRESIDENT: When the report comes out, before I leave office, that
will have drawn together all the threads. And so I don’t want to step
on their work ahead of time.
What I can tell you is that the intelligence that I have seen gives me
great confidence in their assessment that the Russians carried out this
hack.
Q Which hack?
THE PRESIDENT: The hack of the DNC and the hack of John Podesta.
Now, the -- but again, I think this is exactly why I want the report
out, so that everybody can review it. And this has been briefed, and
the evidence in closed session has been provided on a bipartisan basis
-- not just to me, it’s been provided to the leaders of the House and
the Senate, and the chairman and ranking members of the relevant
committees. And I think that what you’ve already seen is, at least some
of the folks who have seen the evidence don’t dispute, I think, the
basic assessment that the Russians carried this out.
Q But specifically, can you not say that --
THE PRESIDENT: Well, Martha, I think what I want to make sure of is
that I give the intelligence community the chance to gather all the
information. But I’d make a larger point, which is, not much happens in
Russia without Vladimir Putin. This is a pretty hierarchical
operation. Last I checked, there’s not a lot of debate and democratic
deliberation, particularly when it comes to policies directed at the
United States.
We have said, and I will confirm, that this happened at the highest
levels of the Russian government. And I will let you make that
determination as to whether there are high-level Russian officials who
go off rogue and decide to tamper with the U.S. election process without
Vladimir Putin knowing about it.
Q So I wouldn’t be wrong in saying the President thinks Vladimir Putin authorized the hack?
THE PRESIDENT: Martha, I’ve given you what I’m going to give you.
What was your second question?
Q Do the tweets and do the statements by Donald Trump embolden Russia?
THE PRESIDENT: As I said before, I think that the President-elect is
still in transition mode from campaign to governance. I think he hasn’t
gotten his whole team together yet. He still has campaign
spokespersons sort of filling in and appearing on cable shows. And
there’s just a whole different attitude and vibe when you’re not in
power as when you’re in power.
So rather than me sort of characterize the appropriateness or
inappropriateness of what he’s doing at the moment, I think what we have
to see is how will the President-elect operate, and how will his team
operate, when they’ve been fully briefed on all these issues, they have
their hands on all the levers of government, and they’ve got to start
making decisions.
One way I do believe that the President-elect can approach this that
would be unifying is to say that we welcome a bipartisan, independent
process that gives the American people an assurance not only that votes
are counted properly, that the elections are fair and free, but that we
have learned lessons about how Internet propaganda from foreign
countries can be released into the political bloodstream and that we’ve
got strategies to deal with it for the future.
The more this can be nonpartisan, the better served the American people
are going to be, which is why I made the point earlier -- and I’m going
to keep on repeating this point: Our vulnerability to Russia or any
other foreign power is directly related to how divided, partisan,
dysfunctional our political process is. That’s the thing that makes us
vulnerable.
If fake news that’s being released by some foreign government is almost
identical to reports that are being issued through partisan news
venues, then it’s not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a
greater effect, because it doesn’t seem that far-fetched compared to
some of the other stuff that folks are hearing from domestic
propagandists.
To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is
under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for
partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent
actors -- if that’s the storyline that’s being put out there by whatever
party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that
same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been
listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff
every day from talk radio or other venues, they’re going to believe it.
So if we want to really reduce foreign influence on our elections, then
we better think about how to make sure that our political process, our
political dialogue is stronger than it’s been.
Mark Landler.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. I wonder whether I can move you from Russia to China for a moment.
THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely.
Q Your successor spoke by phone with the President of Taiwan the
other day and declared subsequently that he wasn’t sure why the United
States needed to be bound by the one-China policy. He suggested it
could be used as a bargaining chip perhaps to get better terms on a
trade deal or more cooperation on North Korea. There’s already evidence
that tensions between the two sides have increased a bit, and just
today, the Chinese have evidently seized an underwater drone in the
South China Sea. Do you agree, as some do, that our China policy could
use a fresh set of eyes? And what’s the big deal about having a short
phone call with the President of Taiwan? Or do you worry that these
types of unorthodox approaches are setting us on a collision course with
perhaps our biggest geopolitical adversary?
THE PRESIDENT: That’s a great question. I’m somewhere in between. I
think all of our foreign policy should be subject to fresh eyes. I
think one of the -- I’ve said this before -- I am very proud of the work
I’ve done. I think I’m a better President now than when I started.
But if you’re here for eight years, in the bubble, you start seeing
things a certain way and you benefit from -- the democracy benefits,
America benefits from some new perspectives.
And I think it should be not just the prerogative but the obligation of
a new President to examine everything that’s been done and see what
makes sense and what doesn’t. That’s what I did when I came in, and I’m
assuming any new President is going to undertake those same exercises.
And given the importance of the relationship between the United States
and China, given how much is at stake in terms of the world economy,
national security, our presence in the Asia Pacific, China’s increasing
role in international affairs -- there’s probably no bilateral
relationship that carries more significance and where there’s also the
potential if that relationship breaks down or goes into a full-conflict
mode, that everybody is worse off. So I think it’s fine for him to take
a look at it.
What I’ve advised the President-elect is that across the board on
foreign policy, you want to make sure that you’re doing it in a
systematic, deliberate, intentional way. And since there’s only one
President at a time, my advice to him has been that before he starts
having a lot of interactions with foreign governments other than the
usual courtesy calls, that he should want to have his full team in
place, that he should want his team to be fully briefed on what’s gone
on in the past and where the potential pitfalls may be, where the
opportunities are, what we’ve learned from eight years of experience, so
that as he’s then maybe taking foreign policy in a new direction, he’s
got all the information to make good decisions and, by the way, that all
of government is moving at the same time and singing from the same
hymnal.
And with respect to China -- and let’s just take the example of Taiwan
-- there has been a longstanding agreement, essentially, between China,
the United States, and, to some degree, the Taiwanese, which is to not
change the status quo. Taiwan operates differently than mainland China
does. China views Taiwan as part of China, but recognizes that it has
to approach Taiwan as an entity that has its own ways of doing things.
The Taiwanese have agreed that as long as they’re able to continue to
function with some degree of autonomy, that they won’t charge forward
and declare independence.
And that status quo, although not completely satisfactory to any of the
parties involved, has kept the peace and allowed the Taiwanese to be a
pretty successful economy and a people who have a high degree of
self-determination. But understand, for China, the issue of Taiwan is
as important as anything on their docket. The idea of one China is at
the heart of their conception as a nation.
And so if you are going to upend this understanding, you have to have
thought through what the consequences are, because the Chinese will not
treat that the way they’ll treat some other issues.
They won’t even
treat it the way they treat issues around the South China Sea, where
we’ve had a lot of tensions. This goes to the core of how they see
themselves. And their reaction on this issue could end up being very
significant.
That doesn’t mean that you have to adhere to everything that’s been
done in the past. It does mean that you’ve got to think it through and
have planned for potential reactions that they may engage in.
All right. Isaac Dovere of Politico.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Two questions on where this all leaves us.
THE PRESIDENT: What leaves us? Where my presidency leaves us?
Q The election --
THE PRESIDENT: It leaves us in a really good spot -- (laughter) -- if we make some good decisions going forward.
Q Well, what do you say to the electors who are going to meet on
Monday and are thinking of changing their votes? Do you think that they
should be given an intelligence briefing about the Russian activity?
Or should they bear in mind everything you’ve said and is out already?
Should they -- should votes be bound by the state votes as they’ve
gone? And long term, do you think that there is a need for Electoral
College reform that would tie it to the popular vote?
THE PRESIDENT: It sounded like two, but that was all one. (Laughter.)
Q It was all one. (Laughter.) You know the way this goes around here.
THE PRESIDENT: I love how these -- I got two questions, each one has four parts. (Laughter.)
Q On the Democratic Party, your Labor Secretary is running to be the
Chair of the Democratic National Committee. Is the vision that you’ve
seen him putting forward what you think the party needs to be focused
on? And what do you say to some of the complaints that say the future
of the Democratic Party shouldn’t be a continuation of some of your
political approach? Part of that is complaints that decisions that
you’ve made as President, as the leader of the party, have structurally
weakened the DNC and the Democratic Party, and they think that that has
led to -- or has helped lead to some losses in elections around the
country. Do you regret any of those decisions?
THE PRESIDENT: Okay.
Q Those are my two. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Good. I’ll take the second one first and say that Tom
Perez has been, I believe, one of the best secretaries of labor in our
history. He is tireless. He is wicked smart. He has been able to work
across the spectrum of labor, business, activists. He’s produced. I
mean, if you look at his body of work on behalf of working people, what
he’s pushed for in terms of making sure that workers get a fair deal,
decent wages, better benefits, that their safety is protected on the job
-- he has been extraordinary.
Now, others who have declared are also my friends and are fine people,
as well. And the great thing is, I don’t have a vote in this, so we’ll
let the process unfold. I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime
soon. I described to you earlier what I think needs to happen, which is
that the Democratic Party, whether that’s entirely through the DNC or
through a rebuilding of state parties or some other arrangement, has to
work at the grassroots level, has to be present in all 50 states, has to
have a presence in counties, has to think about message and how are we
speaking directly to voters.
I will say this -- and I’m not going to engage in too much punditry --
but that I could not be prouder of the coalition that I put together in
each of my campaigns because it was inclusive, and it drew in people who
normally weren’t interested in politics and didn’t participate. But
I’d like to think -- I think I can show that in those elections, I
always cast a broad net. I always said, first and foremost we’re
Americans, that we have a common creed, that there’s more that we share
than divides us, and I want to talk to everybody and get a chance to get
everybody’s vote.
I still believe what I said in 2004, which is this red state/blue thing
is a construct. Now, it is a construct that has gotten more and more
powerful for a whole lot of reasons, from gerrymandering to big money,
to the way that media has splintered. And so people are just watching
what reinforces their existing biases as opposed to have to listen to
different points of view. So there are all kinds of reasons for it.
But outside of the realm of electoral politics, I still see people the
way I saw them when I made that speech -- full of contradictions, and
there are some regional differences, but basically folks care about
their families, they care about having meaningful work, they care about
making sure their kids have more opportunity than they did. They want
to be safe, they want to feel like things are fair. And whoever leads
the DNC and any candidate with the Democratic brand going forward, I
want them to feel as if they can reach out and find that common ground
-- speak to all of America. And that requires some organization.
And you’re right that -- and I said this in my earlier remarks -- that
what I was able to do during my campaigns, I wasn’t able to do during
midterms. It’s not that we didn’t put in time and effort into it. I
spent time and effort into it, but the coalition I put together didn’t
always turn out to be transferable. And the challenge is that -- you
know, some of that just has to do with the fact that when you’re in the
party in power and people are going through hard times like they were in
2010, they’re going to punish, to some degree, the President’s party
regardless of what organizational work is done.
Some of it has to do with just some deep-standing traditional
challenges for Democrats, like during off-year election, the electorate
is older and we do better with a younger electorate. But we know those
things are true, and I didn’t crack the code on that. And if other
people have ideas about how to do that even better, I’m all for it.
So with respect to the electors, I’m not going to wade into that issue
because, again, it’s the American people’s job, and now the electors'
job to decide my successor. It is not my job to decide my successor.
And I have provided people with a lot of information about what
happened during the course of the election. But more importantly, the
candidates themselves, I think, talked about their beliefs and their
vision for America. The President-elect, I think, has been very
explicit about what he cares about and what he believes in. So it’s not
in my hands now; it’s up to them.
Q What about long-term about the Electoral College?
THE PRESIDENT: Long-term with a respect to the Electoral College --
the Electoral College is a vestige, it’s a carryover from an earlier
vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of
premium on states, and it used to be that the Senate was not elected
directly, it was through state legislatures. And it’s the same type of
thinking that gives Wyoming two senators with about half a million
people, and California with 33 million get the same two.
So there are some structures in our political system, as envisioned by
the Founders, that sometimes are going to disadvantage Democrats. But
the truth of the matter is, is that, if we have a strong message, if
we’re speaking to what the American people care about, typically the
popular vote and the Electoral College vote will align.
And I guess part of my overall message here as I leave for the holidays
is that if we look for one explanation or one silver bullet or one easy
fix for our politics, then we’re probably going to be disappointed.
There are just a lot of factors in what’s happened not just over the
last few months, but over the last decade that has made both politics
and governance more challenging. And I think everybody has raised
legitimate questions and legitimate concerns.
I do hope that we all just take some time, take a breath -- this is
certainly what I’m going to advise Democrats -- to just reflect a little
bit more about how can we get to a place where people are focused on
working together based on at least some common set of facts. How can we
have a conversation about policy that doesn’t demonize each other. How
can we channel what I think is the basic decency and goodness of the
American people so it reflects itself in our politics, as opposed to it
being so polarized and so nasty that, in some cases, you have voters and
elected officials who have more confidence and faith in a foreign
adversary than they have in their neighbors.
And those go to some bigger issues. How is it that we have some voters
or some elected officials who think that Michelle Obama’s healthy
eating initiative and school nutrition program is a great threat to
democracy than our government going after the press if they’re issuing a
story they don’t like? I mean, that’s an issue that I think we’ve got
to wrestle with -- and we will.
People have asked me how do you feel after the election and so forth,
and I say, well, look, this is a clarifying moment. It’s a useful
reminder that voting counts, politics counts. What the President-elect
is going to be doing is going to be very different than what I was
doing, and I think people will be able to compare and contrast and make
judgments about what worked for the American people.
And I hope that, building off the progress we’ve made, that what the
President-elect is proposing works. What I can say with confidence is
that what we’ve done works. That I can prove. I can show you where we
were in 2008 and I can show you where we are now, and you can’t argue
that we’re not better off. We are. And for that, I thank the American
people and, more importantly, I thank -- well, not more importantly --
as importantly -- I was going to say Josh Earnest for doing such a great
job. (Laughter.) For that, I thank the American people. I thank the
men and women in uniform who serve. I haven’t gotten to the point yet
where I’ve been overly sentimental.
I will tell you, when I was doing my last Christmas party photoline --
many of you have participated in these; they’re pretty long -- right at
the end of the line, the President’s Marine Corps Band comes in, those
who had been performing, and I take a picture when them, and it was the
last time that I was going to take a picture with my Marine Corps Band
after an event, and I got a little choked up. Now, I was in front of
Marines, so I had to, like, tamp it down.
But it was just one small example of all the people who have
contributed to our success. I’m responsible for where we’ve screwed up.
The successes are widely shared with all the amazing people who have
been part of this administration.
