President Obama is “quite comfortable” with being a one-term president if that’s the price he has to pay to get “important things done,” including health care reform, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said today.
I have heard the president say that, if making tough decisions in getting important things done that Washington has failed to deal with for decades means he only lives in this house and makes these decisions for four years, he’s quite comfortable with that.
Gibbs said he hadn’t heard him say that “specifically on health care,” but said it applied to issues including reform, the economy, Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The way he approaches [these issues] is not in a mode of self preservation, but in a mode of how best, given all the information out there, how best he can make decisions in the best interest of the American people,” he said, “not what’s in the best interest of his polling numbers.”
Last week, Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA) told a town hall that he’d heard Obama say he was willing to lose his chances at re-election over health care reform.
