US President Barack Obama said in an interview released on Monday that politics in the US had become “meaner” than when he took office, but expressed hope that Republicans would eventually turn away from the “expression of frustration” and anger that presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and US Senator Ted Cruz were offering to voters.
Speaking to Politico’s Glenn Thrush for the Web site’s “Off Message” podcast, Obama said the Republican candidates for president were more outside the mainstream than US Senator John McCain was during the 2008 campaign.
“John McCain was a conservative, but he was well within, you know, the mainstream of not just the Republican Party, but within our political dialogue,” Obama told Politico.
The president said voters would have to judge “the degree to which the Republican rhetoric and Republican vision has moved, not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.”
The president’s comments came one week before voters in Iowa gather to caucus in the first presidential voting of this year’s campaign to succeed him.
In the interview, he expressed hope that voters in Iowa and in later contests would “steer back towards the center.”
Obama also talked at length about the Democratic contest between former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and US Senator Bernie Sanders, describing both as “passionate about giving everybody a shot.”
He disputed the idea that Sanders was idealistic while Clinton was pragmatic, saying the two candidates have elements of both qualities in their political outlook.
The president said Sanders had succeeded in speaking bluntly to an American public that was eager to break free from conventional political limitations.
“Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose,” Obama said.
He added that Sanders “has the virtue of saying exactly what he believes, and great authenticity, great passion and is fearless.”
Clinton, by contrast, entered this year’s contest with the “privilege and burden” of being the frontrunner, Obama said.
Her experience in government, as a senator and secretary of state, is both a strength and a weakness, the president said.
He said that being “wicked smart” about policy “could make her more cautious and her campaign more prose than poetry.”
However, he added that those same experiences meant that “she can govern and she can start here, day one, more experienced than any non-vice president has ever been who aspires to this office.”
Obama said that in 2007, Clinton demonstrated “sheer strength, determination, endurance, stick-to-it-ness, never-give-up attitude” as she fought him for the Democratic nomination.
He said she had to work harder than he did during that contest.
“We had as competitive and lengthy and expensive and tough a primary fight as there has been in modern American politics, and she had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” Obama said. “She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her. She had a tougher job throughout that primary than I did.”
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