Obama: ‘You Can’t Change Washington From The Inside’

Asked at a Univision forum on Thursday what he has learned in the nearly four years since his inauguration as president, Barack Obama said that he has been surprised by how resistant the American political system has been to the change he ran on in 2008. “You can’t change Washington from the inside,” Obama said. “You can only change it from the outside.”

The president was asked what his biggest failure was over the course of his first term as president. Obama replied that he will seek to put more pressure on Washington from outside the Beltway to accomplish reform:

You can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside. That’s how I got elected and how the big accomplishments like health care got done – was because we mobilized the American people to speak out. That’s how we were able to cut taxes for middle class families. So, something I’d really like to concentrate on in my second term is being in a much more constant conversation with the American people, so that they can put pressure on Congress to move some of these issues forward.

Watch the clip below via Univision:

h/t BuzzFeed

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