Obama: I'm as productive as any president since Lyndon Johnson

President makes statement in candid interview with news site Vox, among other revealing answers running to hundreds of words on domestic and foreign policy

In perhaps his most revealing interview as president, Barack Obama spoke at unusual length and with flashes of seeming frankness in a double conversation published on Monday

The president gave answers running to hundreds of words on topics ranging from the government’s role in wealth redistribution to his policies in the Middle East to political polarization in the US to the state of today’s media.
Some of his remarks, imparted to interviewers who have been largely supportive of his presidency, seemed likely to raise the eyebrows of skeptics – as when he claimed to be the most productive president in 50 years.
“My first two years in office when I had a Democratic majority and Democratic House and Democratic Senate, we were as productive as any time since Lyndon Johnson,” Obama told interviewer Ezra Klein. “And when the [congressional] majority went away, stuff got blocked.”
The cozy interviews yielded moments of Obama seemingly at his most casual, as when he expressed optimism about racism in the US because with every year “this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks”. He joked with one interviewer, Klein, that his website appealed to “brainiac-nerd types” and even used the word “sexy”, in relation to media coverage of foreign policy.
Klein previously ran Wonkblog at the Washington Post. The second Vox journalist to interview the president, Matt Yglesias, a former writer for Slate, made up with Klein part of a group of young progressive policy guns deemed the “Juicebox Mafia” by their conservative elders.
The interviews, split between domestic and foreign policy, were published with video snippets in which animated graphics of supporting data – it was always supporting – floated around the president’s head like benevolent gnats. The effect was a sort of real-time, visually based fact checking – or seamless propaganda effort, depending on your perspective.

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The longform but casual interview format demonstrated how playing to the president’s wonky side allowed discussions that would not be possible in the usual political conversation. One question actually used the word “redistribution” – not a polite word in American politics – to ask whether the role of government, post-recession, had shifted from driving economic growth to “ensuring that enough of the gains and prosperity is shared”.
“That’s always been the case. I don’t think that’s entirely new,” Obama’s lengthy reply began. He said fixing the tax policy and reinforcing labor laws were the government’s responsibility.
Asked about criticism that his foreign policy had not been guided by a coherent vision, Obama said the policy stemmed from “very clear theories about what my goals were going to be”, including ending the Iraq war and engaging Iran. He went on to describe turmoil in the Middle East as an externality to US policy, rejecting criticism from the right, repeated last week in a speech by prospective Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, that a lack of “engagement” in the region had produced the failed Arab spring.
“I think the real challenge for the country not just during my presidency but in future presidencies is recognizing that leading does not always mean occupying,” Obama said. “That the temptation to think that there’s a quick fix to these problems is usually a temptation to be resisted.”
Other questions allowed Obama to indulge a penchant for historical analysis, such as when Klein asked about long-term wage stagnation. “Well, this has been at least a three-decade-long trend,” Obama began. His answer ran to an analysis of post-second world war structural economic advantages and infrastructure spending to changes in labor laws to the rise with technology of mobility of capital.
At moments the interview bordered on too cozy, such as when Klein posed what might be seen as extremely sympathetic questions and even adopted the president’s diction to drop a “folks”.
Obama was asked: why do you think Americans pay so much higher healthcare prices than folks in other countries?
“Well, you know, there are a lot of theories about this,” said Obama, going on to speak uninterrupted for 500 words.
Addressing racial tensions following unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere last year, Obama said he was inclined to “worry very much about the immediate consequences of mistrust between police and minority communities”.
“I think there are things we can do to train our police force and make sure that everybody is being treated fairly,” he said. “And the taskforce that I assigned after the Ferguson and New York cases is intended to produce very specific tools for us to deal with it.
“But over the long term, I’m pretty optimistic, and the reason is because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks.”
Perhaps the answers most inviting controversy the president gave were on foreign policy. Seemingly eliding a discussion of warmaking in Ukraine, Obama said “the biggest challenge we have right now is disorder. Failed states. Asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations.” He allowed that Russia had nuclear arsenal, “but generally speaking they can’t project the way we can around the world”.
In his analysis of both foreign policy and domestic US politics, Obama opined, unfavorably, on the state of the US media. On the foreign front, he said viewers would rather watch “plane crashes and a few other things” than read stories about increased yields for poor farmers.
“It’s not a sexy story,” Obama said. “And climate change is one that is happening at such a broad scale and at such a complex system, it’s a hard story for the media to tell on a day-to-day basis.”
In reply to a question about how politics had become more polarizing, Obama blamed gerrymandering and the “the balkanization of the media”.
“And I’m not the first to observe this,” Obama said, “but you’ve got the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh folks and then you’ve got the MSNBC folks and the … I don’t know where Vox falls into that, but you guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types.”