To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent actors - if that's the storyline that's being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they're going to believe it.
Barack ObamaAs opposed to getting into arguments about, well, these folks have been treated fairly so now we're going to be doing things that, very easily in the minds of a lot Americans feel like, "Now I'm being treated unfairly."
Barack ObamaBut I also want to give them a pathway so that they can earn citizenship, earn a legal status, start learning English, pay a significant fine, go to the back of the line, but they can then stay here and they can have the ability to enforce a minimum wage that they're paid, make sure the worker safety laws are available, make sure that they can join a union.
Barack ObamaAs long as I'm president of the United States Iran will not get a nuclear weapon. I made that clear when I came into office.
Barack ObamaI can't really characterize any country, except to say that we work well with a number of our foreign counterparts.
Barack ObamaI believe we can seize this future together, because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. [...] We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions. [...] We are and forever will be the United States of America. [...] We will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.
Barack Obama