Through persistent effort and faith in the American people, things get better, Obama said.

Of all the ways Republicans expected President Obama to begin his year-end news conference today, a victory lap probably wasn't one of them. But that's exactly what he did. (He also only called on women for questions, which is presumably a first in presidential history.) Obama opened the press conference with a swaggering statement saying in part we can enter the new year with "confidence." He talked up the biggest job growth in America since the 1990s. He said gas prices are down and that our bailout of the auto industry is "officially over" as of today, with "every taxpayer cent" repaid. Health insurance "enrollment is beginning to pick up again" and "the uninsured rate is at a near-record low." Obama said we're leading the fight against ISIL and Ebola and climate change. "As a country, we have a right to be proud of what we've accomplished," Obama said. "Pick any metric you want, America's resurgence is real. We are better off. Then he pointed toward "the decade-long erosion" of the middle class, saying it was the next item on his agenda. "I am energized, I am excited about the prospects for the next couple of years, and I'm certainly not going to be stopping for a minute to make life better for ordinary Americans." Obama concluded, "my presidency is entering the fourth quarter. Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter, and I'm looking forward to it."

The first question: What does a "proportional response" look like in terms of the Sony hack, and should Sony have pulled The Interview? "I think they made a mistake" by pulling the movie. "I wish they had spoken to me first" before pulling the film, Obama said. He hopes Congress will join him in the New Year on creating strong cyber-security laws to prevent this from happening again. "We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can commit censorship." He said "imagine what [dictators would do] when they see a documentary they don't like, or a news report they don't like." Obama also warned against corporations responding to the hack with self-censorship. "I've got a long list of movies I'm going to be watching" over Christmas break, President Obama said. He refused to say whether or not he'll watch The Interview. He belittled North Korea for going to this kind of effort over "a movie starring Seth Rogen," but he refused to define the "proportional response" at the press conference. He also said there was no proof that North Korea worked with another country on the hack.

In a question about human rights violations in Cuba, Obama admitted that Cuba has many problems, but he said he knows "deep in my bones" that if you do the same thing for fifty years and it doesn't work, you need to change course. He said opening up Cuba to American church groups and to the internet would help "chip away at the hermetically sealed" society that's built up there. "We have a better chance of opening up Cuba than we would otherwise." He said opening an embassy there means "we will be in a better position there to actually have some influence. And there may be carrots as well as sticks there we can apply." He said he doesn't have a visit to Cuba in mind right now.

The second-to-last question of the press conference had to do with the Keystone Pipeline, which Republican leadership has promised would be one of the first matters of business when they take charge in January. Obama rephrased the issue as not a matter of American business but of Canadian business. "At issue in Keystone is not American oil. It is Canadian oil that is drawn out of tar sands in Canada. That oil currently is being shipped out through rail or trucks and it would save Canadian oil companies and the Canadian oil industry an enormous amount of money if they could pipe it through the United States." He explained, "there's very little impact—nominal impact—on US gas prices...by having this pipeline come through." As to the Republican claim that Obama is stifling American jobs by not allowing the pipeline to be built, Obama admitted that Keystone would create "some temporary construction jobs" and some refinery jobs at the end of the pipeline, but he said if we focused on fixing our infrastructure rather than building the pipeline, we could create "hundreds of thousands of jobs, or millions of jobs."

The final question had to do with the "state of black America" and race relations in the country. "Like the rest of America, black America is better off than when I came into office," Obama responded. "The gap between income and wealth of white and black America persists, and we've got more work to do on that front. I've been consistent in saying that this is a legacy of a troubled racial past." That past is "not an excuse for black folks, and I think the overwhelming majority of black folks understand that," Obama said. He said graduation numbers for African-American and Latino students are going up. But he admitted that "there have been instances where law enforcement doesn't feel like it's being applied in a color-blind fashion." He said the panel he formed on the issue will be coming back soon with "real, concrete" answers for what can be done to fix this problem. "In the meantime, we've been moving forward on criminal justice reform more broadly." He said this year was the first time we've seen both the federal prison population and the national crime rate go down at the same time.

"The one thing I will say," Obama concluded, "is that one of the great things about this job is you get to know the American people." In his travels, Obama continued, he's learned that "what I don't think is always captured in our political debates is the vast majority of people are just trying to do the right thing. And people are basically good and have good intentions." He thinks "people want to fix these problems. It's not like people feel good seeing somebody choked and dying. I think that troubles everybody. There's an opportunity for all of us to come together and take a practical approach to these problems. That's my theme for this year. We've gone through difficult times." He says it's the press corps' job to focus on the bad things, "but through persistent effort and faith in the American people, things get better. The economy's gotten better. Our ability to create clean energy's gotten better." He cited a number of crises that happened this year—Ebola, the spike in number of children at the border—and said they were "fixed"—maybe not in time for the news cycle's satisfaction, he noted, but they were dealt with, thanks in part to the American people's propensity to solve problems.

No reporter asked a single question about the torture report.


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ORIGINAL POST 10:24 AM: Just before Christmas, the president traditionally gives an open-ended press conference with no single particular subject in mind. The media will probably ask questions about the Sony hack, Cuba, and other non-communist-related topics, too. It's scheduled to begin at 10:30 Seattle time. You can watch the press conference via the below embedded YouTube embed.