President Barack Obama is set to step out into the House chamber tonight [Tuesday, January 12] to give his last State of the Union address.
Although this is an emotional and bittersweet moment for him, Obama admits regret he failed to be the unifying force he promised in 2008, according to Politico.
In an interview with Matt Lauer from NBC’s Today, which aired live from the White House on Tuesday morning, “Obama acknowledged his presidential pitch of “hope” and unification had collided with the realities of Washington. ‘It’s a regret,’ Obama said before adding, ‘I could not be prouder of what we’ve accomplished…And sometimes we look at the past through rose-colored glasses. It’s been pretty divided in the past. There have been times where, you know, people beat each other with canes and we had things like the Civil War.’ Politics in the nation’s capital, he hastened to add, ‘are so much more divided than the American people are. And part of what I want to do in this last address is to remind people, you know what, we’ve got a lot of good things going for us and if we can get our politics right, it turns out that we’re not as divided on the ideological spectrum as people make us out to be,’” according to reports.
However, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll released today shows Americans are very much split on whether or not Obama has done a good job as president. “Roughly six-in-10 Democrats (58 percent) said they would like to see the next president continue Obama’s policies, but 38 percent said they would like to see a change,” according to reports.
Obama told Lauer if he had the opportunity to speak to the younger version of himself, “I think the most important thing I would say to an earlier version of myself would be to communicate constantly and with confidence to the American people, because this place has a tendency to isolate you. You recognize that particularly in times of stress, the American people need to hear from their president in terms of what it is exactly that we’re trying to do.”
