Obama on his presidency: ‘You can’t argue that we are not better off’

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President Barack Obama says he did the right thing for America during his presidency. While there is no question his run wasn’t the smoothest, he has no intention of letting it turn him bitter.

On Friday, he argued that his administration was not the failure that many Republicans like to paint it as but rather a historic success.

This was his final press conference of 2016, and he spoke of his actions on important issues from the economy and Syria to the passing of Obamacare and the Russian hacking scandal.

“I am very proud of the work I’ve done. I think I’m a better president now than when I started,” he said.

He said that while not everything he did was successful, he always had the best of intentions, and his failures were often due to a lack of better options.

— Michelle Obama: Trump election is what ‘not having hope feels like’ — 

Hard time with Republicans

He did seem unhappy with one aspect of his terms. He had a hard time with the Republicans who opposed him seemingly at every turn. He also mentioned how the press tends to dwell over trivial matters and the coarsening of political culture.

While there is an ever deepening gulf between the White House and President-elect Trump over the Russian hacking scandal, he seemed most angry with Putin.

“I always feel responsible,” Obama stated. “There are places around the world where horrible things are happening and because of my office, because I’m President of the United States, I feel responsible. I ask myself every single day, ‘Is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn’t deserve to suffer?'”

Obama argued that while some people claim he should have dealt with Assad in Syria long before it got to this point, he said that only a massive deployment by the exhausted American military would have done the job. That is why he turned to diplomacy.

“I cannot claim that we have been successful. That’s something that, as is true with a lot of issues and problems around the world, I have to go to bed with every night,” he said. “But I continue to believe that it was the right approach given what realistically we could get done.”

Obama on Obamacare

When the speech turned to Obamacare, he held firm on its merits.

“When I came into office, 44 million people were uninsured. Today, we have covered more than 20 million of them. For the first time in our history, more than 90% of Americans are insured.”

Next, he spoke of the unemployment rate and how he has brought it down to the lowest it has been in almost a decade.

“As I was preparing to take office, the unemployment rate was on its way to 10%. Today it is at 4.6%, the lowest in nearly a decade.”

Obama went on to say, “What I can say with confidence is that what we’ve done works. That I can prove. I can show you where we were in 2008 and I can show you where we are now. And you can’t argue that we are not better off. We are.”