Midterms 2010: Barack Obama admits he needs to do better job

Midterms 2010: Barack Obama admits he needs to do better job

Barack Obama admitted that he had to do a better job as US president as his party digested the loss of total control of Congress to their Republican opponents.

By Toby Harnden, Washington

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

U.S. President Barack Obama holds post-election news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington Photo: REUTERS


Mr Obama acknowledged that his Democratic party had received “a shellacking” in Tuesday’s midterm elections and signalled that he was ready to compromise with Republicans.

“Some election nights are more fun than others,” he said at a White House press conference after Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives and made sweeping gains across the country. “Some are exhilarating. Some are humbling.”

He said it had been a long night and that the result, the biggest shift in the House for any party since 1948, had prompted “questioning on my part”. But he stuck largely to the formula that his policies were right but they had been explained badly or misunderstood and that it was taking time for the benefits to come into effect.

“Over the last two years, we’ve made progress,” he said. “But clearly, too many Americans haven’t felt that progress yet, and they told us that yesterday. And as president, I take responsibility for that.”

The overall result “underscores for me that I’ve got to do a better job, just like everybody else in Washington does”.

Republicans were on track to gain about 67 seats in the House with John Boehner ousting Democrat Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. But they fell short of winning control in the Senate, gaining six or possibly seven seats.

In addition, Republicans won eight more governorships with four still undecided and won control of 17 state legislatures they had targeted.

Although it was a big night for the anti-tax, small-government Tea Party, who sent new stars like Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky to the Senate, several high-profile Tea Party candidates lost seats that Republicans had hoped to win.

Senior Republicans said that more moderate and competent candidates would have fared much better.

Mr Obama defended his agenda as an emergency response to an economic crisis rather than a doctrinaire desire to expand government. But he conceded that people didn’t see his policies as temporary measures.

“I think people started looking at all this, and it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people’s lives than they were accustomed to,” he conceded.

Asked about Republican plans to try and repeal his health care legislation, Mr Obama said he was willing to consider “tweaks” to the programme but did not intend to engage in a broad debate over its fate.

“We’d be misreading the election if we thought that the American people want to see us for the next two years re-litigate the arguments that we had for the last two years.”

Mr Obama indicated that he was willing to strike a deal with Republicans over extending President George W Bush’s tax cuts to all Americans rather than everyone except the wealthy.

The president’s prospects of re-election in 2012 will rest largely on his ability to stimulate the economy. As a measure of how disappointing growth has been so far, the Federal Reserve was forced to announce that it would buy another $600 billion (£372.7 billion) Treasury bonds in an effort to breath new life into the struggling economy.



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