US: Obama Says He Would Have Defeated Trump

US: Obama Says He Would Have Defeated Trump

President Obama said in an interview released Monday that he could have beaten Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “if I had run again.” 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.

Photo Source: CNN.com

“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, tweeting out later in the day that “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.”

“If you think you’re winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer,” Mr. Obama said.

He added: “And the economy has been improving. There is a sense, obviously, that some communities have been left behind from the recovery and people feeling anxious about that.”

It was “nonsense,” Mr. Obama said, that Democrats had abandoned white working-class Americans, who rallied to Mr. Trump.

“Look, the Affordable Care Act benefits a huge number of Trump voters,” Mr. Obama said. “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, Mr. Obama said, was that Democratic politicians were not communicating to these people “that we understand why they’re frustrated.”

“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,” Mr. Obama said.