Barack Obama’s Sanity-Affirming Press Conference

“I guess part of my over-all message here as I leave for the holidays is that, if we look for one explanation or one silver bullet or one easy fix for our politics, then we’re probably going to be disappointed,” President Obama said in a press conference on Friday. He will be in Hawaii for the next couple of weeks; that comment came in response to a question about whether, while he was gone, members of the Electoral College, which meets on Monday, should do something dramatic, and whether the whole electoral-college system needed scrambling. He demurred: “With respect to the electors, I’m not going to wade into that issue because, again, it’s the American people’s job, and now the electors’ job, to decide my successor. It is not my job to decide my successor.” It was his job, he said, to provide good information about the election, and during the campaign that came before, and he believed that he had done so. There had been “a lot of information,” above all, from the candidates: “The President-elect, I think, has been very explicit about what he cares about and what he believes in. So it’s not in my hands now; it’s up to them.”