Obama Meets With Families of San Bernardino Shooting Victims

Obama trod carefully around the subject of how to get Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to leave power, saying Assad needed to leave for civil war to cease, but declining to say whether that would happen in the next year.

“In 2016, I’m going to leave it all out on the field”. But he doesn’t think a Republican president would actually pull out of the deal.

Still, Obama contended about Syria, “Five years later, I was right”.

The president defied expectations over the last 12 months.

But the past month has been a rough stretch.

Jerry Brown issued a state of emergency declaration for San Bernardino County Friday to help the community as it recovers from the December 2 terrorist attack.

“Early investment… ignited a clean energy industry boom”, Obama said. Meantime, city officials said they were grateful the president made an appearance for the sake of the victims’ loved ones.

But he warned the group would continue to be a menace: “In any fight, even as you make progress, there are still dangers involved”.

Obama appeared to acknowledge, however, that his initial response to the strikes were off-key. “We’ve gotten kind of used to last-minute crises and shutdown threats”, Obama said, but the passage of a spending and tax bill this week was more representative of how USA democracy should work.

At home, Obama acknowledged that the government could not stop all potential strikes in advance and said Americans need to remain vigilant. Obama says the government does review public postings on Facebook, for example, when someone applies for a visa, but that’s not where Malik’s alarming communications were carried out.

The president tried to demonstrate he’s learned from his mistakes, too.

After the news conference, Obama was to depart for San Bernardino, California, where he planned to meet with families of the 14 victims of the terror attack.

Both pledged allegiance to Islamic State. He cited a Pacific trade pact and criminal justice reform as examples.

Obama’s acknowledgement that the country is vulnerable to continued attack is unlikely to settle an American public spooked by the prospect of fresh strikes by radical Islamists. “There will probably be a lot of noise about that”, Obama said. “…I think you’ve seen me, on a whole bunch of issues, like immigration, I’m not gonna – I’m not gonna be forward-leaning on what I can do without Congress before I’ve tested what I can do with Congress”.

“I’m not wild about everything in it, but it is a budget that invests in our military and our middle class”, he said.

Obama said although much progress has been made toward his administration’s goals, there is still a bit of “unfinished business”.

“It was a good win…”

“We will wait until Congress has definitely said no to a well-thought-out plan with numbers attached to it, before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here”, Obama said.

HORSLEY: And given that success, Obama says he’s optimistic there might be some chance to work with Congress again in the year ahead.