President inserts himself into campaign
Obama says GOP isn’t discussing real issues.
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — President Barack Obama issued his strongest warning yet Tuesday about the Republican candidates for president with a twoword message about why voters should choose solemnly: nuclear codes.
Bluntly questioning front-runner Donald Trump’s temperament, Obama said, “Whoever is standing where I’m standing right now has the nuclear codes with them, and can order 21year-olds into a firefight.”
A restive electorate ultimately will decline to elect Trump, he predicted.
“The American people are pretty sensible,” Obama said. “And I think they’ll make a sensible choice in the end.”
Though he referred specifically to Trump, Obama also took care towarn about all of the GOP candidates.
“Not a single one of them” are talking about some of the world’s biggest problems, he complained.
The words represented Obama’s most energetic criticism of the Republicans running to replace him. For months, he has mostly kept a studied distance from the fray and resisted invitations to engage in political analysis.
But GOP candidates are promising to dismantle Obama’s legacy if they win the Oval Office, and polls show Trump dramatically in the lead in South Carolina going into the state’s Saturday primary. Such numbers are infusing his campaign with more momentum on the heels of his decisive win last week in New Hampshire.
Asked about the president’s comments at a South Carolina forum, Trump responded with relative restraint, saying only that Obama had done a “lousy job as president” and that hewould have defeated him in 2012 had he run.
“For him to say that is actually a great compliment,” Trump argued of Obama’s criticism.
As he launches his agenda for his final year in office, aides say, Obama has been increasingly concerned about protecting his legacy, including both his health care reform and immigration policy as well as his attempts to orient U.S. foreign policy away from war and toward diplomacy.
His comments Tuesday also reflected the view of someone who’s long been critical of the hyperactive political environment — he at one point admonished not only politicians engaging in theater but reporters who cover the campaign as “entertainment” as well — and whose own outlook has also been tempered by the responsibilities of the office for seven years himself.
Or, as Obama put it, he’s someone who has “been a candidate of hope and change and a president who’s got some nicks and cuts and bruises from, you know, getting stuff done over the last seven years.”
After two days of meetings with 10 southeast Asian leaders at the presidential getaway estate of Sunnylands, Obama said he is also worried about what the campaign speeches and interviews are doing to U.S. relations abroad.
Foreign observers are troubled by some of the rhetoric, he said.
In the past, Obama has singled out Trump’s pledges to ban Muslims from entering the country and deport anyone not living in the country legally.
In a conversation with reporters at the close of the Sunnylands summit, Obama said Trump isn’t the only one he’s worried about.
“This is not just Mr. Trump,” Obama said. “There’s not a single candidate in the Republican primary that thinks we should do anything about climate change. ... The rest of the world looks at that and says, ‘Howcan that be?’ ”
Voters are venting, he said, but ultimately “reality has away of intruding.”
“I have a lot of faith in the American people. And I think they recognize that being president is a serious job,” he said. “It’s not hosting a talk show, or a reality show. It’s not promotion. It’s not marketing. It’s hard. And a lot of people count on us getting it right.”
Obama also downplayed the fight on the Democratic side between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, saying there was broad agreement in his party on principles but a different view of “tactics, trying to figure out how do you actually get things done.”
Obama said he might eventually express his personal view in the race but that, “for now, I think it’s important for Democratic voters to express themselves and for the candidates to be run through the paces.”
“The thing I can say unequivocally,” he added, “is I am not unhappy that I’m not on the ballot.”