President Barack Obama said in an interview released Monday that he could have beaten Republican President-elect Donald Trump if they had faced off in last month's election. In his most pointed critique yet, Obama said Hillary Clinton's campaign acted too cautiously out of a mistaken belief that victory was all but certain.
"If you think you're winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer," Obama said in the interview with former adviser and longtime friend David Axelrod, a CNN analyst, for his The Axe Files podcast. The president said Clinton "understandably ... looked and said, well, given my opponent and the things he's saying and what he's doing, we should focus on that."
Trump took exception to this critique, posting a tweet later in the day, with some of the words in capital letters, that said: "President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say no way! - jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc."
Obama stressed his admiration for Clinton and said she had been the victim of unfair attacks. He repeated his assertion that Clinton faced a double standard as a woman, which put her at a disadvantage.
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The comments were part of a wider discussion of what he called "ugly" sentiments of racism and xenophobia that resurfaced during the 2016 campaign.
But, as he has in other interviews, he insisted that her defeat was not a rejection of the eight years of his presidency. To the contrary, he argued that he had put together a winning coalition that stretched across the country but that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had failed to rally those supporters.
"I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I -- if I had run again and articulated it -- I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it," the president said.
"See, I think the issue was less that Democrats have somehow abandoned the white working class. I think that's nonsense," Obama said. "Look, the Affordable Care Act benefits a huge number of Trump voters. There are a lot of folks in places like West Virginia or Kentucky who didn't vote for Hillary, didn't vote for me, but are being helped by this. ... The problem is, is that we're not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we're bleeding for these communities."
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said via email that the campaign declined to comment.
Axelrod, in an interview with The Washington Post, said he believed that Obama went further than he had before in critiquing Clinton's campaign.
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"This was all in service of making the point that he believes that his progressive vision and the vision he ran on is still a majority view in this country," Axelrod said. "He chooses to be hopeful about the future."
Obama said he doesn't plan to get involved in day-to-day responses to Trump's presidency, just as former President George W. Bush has remained mostly on the sidelines during the Obama years. But Obama made clear that he will be more of an activist in the long run. He said he plans to help mobilize and train a younger generation of Democratic leaders and will speak out if his core beliefs are challenged. He also said he is working on writing a book.
His post-presidential "long-term interest," Obama said, is "to build that next generation of leadership: organizers, journalists, politicians. I see them in America, I see them around the world -- 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds who are just full of talent, full of idealism. And the question is how do we link them up? How do we give them the tools for them to bring about progressive change? And I want to use my presidential center as a mechanism for developing that next generation of talent."
He said he didn't want to be someone "who's just hanging around reliving old glories."
Obama said the spirit that his candidacy originally inspired, especially among young people, was "never snuffed out" despite the past eight years of turmoil.
"The idealism and the dedication stayed with the staff and got us through some really hard times," he said.
Obama blamed some of the problems during his presidency on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a longtime adversary who famously said in 2010: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." Obama won a second term, but he said McConnell was successful in blocking many of his initiatives and setting the groundwork for Trump's victory.
McConnell's strategy from a "tactical perspective was pretty smart and well-executed," Obama said, adding that the Republican leader found ways to "just throw sand in the gears" in a manner that fed into people's beliefs that things were going badly.
Obama said Republicans blocked action that could have helped more people recover from the 2008 recession. The Republicans' strategy, Obama maintained, was that "if we just say no, then that will puncture the balloon, that all this talk about hope and change and no red state and blue state is -- is proven to be a mirage, a fantasy. And if we can -- if we can puncture that vision, then we have a chance to win back seats in the House."
A McConnell spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Kranish of The Washington Post and by Tracy Wilkinson of Tribune News Service.
A Section on 12/27/2016