Video Interview with Obama and Transcript Available on NPR.org
July 1, 2016; Washington, D.C. — In an exclusive interview, President Obama talked to Morning Edition host Steve Inkseep about how he thinks the country has changed during his presidency. Inskeep spoke with the President at the White House on Monday. The interview is part of Obama's Years, a two-part radio documentary exploring how life has changed for Americans over the last eight years.
Portions of the interview, NPR's sixth on-camera conversation with President Obama, have aired on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and NPR.org throughout the week; now the full interview is available across NPR's digital and broadcast platforms. The video, full transcript and additional reporting are available on NPR.org.
In the first hour of Obama's Years, NPR's Steve Inskeep travels the country to places in which President Obama delivered speeches — from Denver to Kansas City to Philadelphia — and checks in with Americans living in those places to ask about their perspectives on the issues the President discussed, such as immigration, healthcare, guns and race relations. This portion of the documentary will air on participating public radio stations over the coming days and on the NPR Politics Podcast today. In the second hour of this special coverage, Inskeep asks the President about the thoughts, ideas and lives of the people he met during the reporting for this documentary.
The full transcript and video are available. Some excerpts from the interview below:
When asked if he is accountable for the public's distrust of government, President Obama said: "Look, at the risk of sounding partisan, but I believe if you look at the facts this is a pretty accurate description: when we talk about dysfunction in government, it's not as if both parties are equally dysfunctional. The Democrats have a pretty well talked-through agenda. When we were governing in the first two years of my administration, we got a lot done. We were probably as productive as any Congress in 20, 30, 40 years. You have a particular problem in the Republican Party right now that needs to get sorted through.
He continued: "Right now, at least partly in reaction to my presidency and the political decisions that [Republicans] made, they find themselves having created an atmosphere in which even somebody like Paul Ryan is viewed as not sufficiently conservative, or if he does just some of the basic work of governance that somehow he has betrayed the base and is decried as a Republican in name only. And when you have that kind of environment, it's very hard to get the kind of cooperation that is necessary for us to solve problems that people are concerned about."
Asked about voters' fears that immigrants are changing American values — and whether it matters if they do, he said: "I think, ironically, that if you look at the values that immigrants bring when they come here — whether they're coming from Poland, or Italy, or now Vietnam, or South Korea or India — the values they bring, they are quintessentially American values. They're striver's values; they're the values that say, we're going to make something of ourselves, regardless of the station in which we were born."
Asked about remarks he made in response to protests in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray: "There are ways of bringing about social change that are powerful and that have the ability to pull the country together and maintain the moral high ground and there are approaches where I may understand the frustrations, but they're counterproductive. And tearing up your own neighborhood and stealing is counterproductive."
On identity politics: "When you look at the the frustrations and the fear that a Trump are tapping into, you know, that is an earlier generation that feels unsettled. And I think we can be sympathetic and understanding of the fact that they feel unsettled, but also recognize that, you know, if we get the decisions that need to be made right, then 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we may look back at something like the Trump campaign as the last vestige of a kind of politics of us versus them that really doesn't apply to today."
He continued: "One of the things that you've seen during the course of my presidency is the ability, the power of a certain slice of the media to emphasize to white working-class voters somehow that [Obama administration policies] are not good for you, that this is Obama and his socialist friends who are trying to take money from you to give to an undeserving, you know, Mexican immigrant or black welfare mom and tapping into sort of an identity politics that was powerful and oftentimes can work. But it is actually counterproductive, and it certainly does not reflect what we have been trying to do. What's been interesting to see during this election cycle is that the Republican Party that has opposed minimum wages or union laws or what have you, they have a populist insurgency on their hands. And Mr. Trump, I think, has, at times, exploited this gap between what, you know, the Republican business community has promoted and what their constituencies are actually looking for."
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