“As hard as this is for them and the entire (country), they also represent the strength and the unity and the love that exists in this community”, Obama said.
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When President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama entered the room and made their way from one table to the next, spending about 10 minutes with each family Friday evening, the grief, sadness and frustration of the last 17 days were firmly on display.
Two more of the 22 injured victims in the Southern California mass shooting have been released from the hospital, leaving just three still hospitalized.
Obama and his family have departed the White House until January, but the president will visit San Bernardino before his annual December vacation in Hawaii begins.
The San Bernardino attack has shaken the American public, and Obama has struggled to find the right tone in confronting the threat of terrorism.
Obama has drawn fire on his approach to Syria from Republican presidential candidates who say he has left a leadership vacuum that Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to fill.
Obama said meeting with the families in San Bernardino was a reminder “of what’s good in this country”.
Unlike the other visits, Obama will land in San Bernardino as local and federal authorities are still investigating the shooters, who were later killed in a gun battle with police.
The San Bernardino stop will be a short one, “long enough to spend some time with the families of those who were killed in the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino a couple of weeks ago”, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.
“Had the victims of this murderous plot been more easily able to have a (concealed weapons permit), maybe, less carnage would have happened had they been able to appropriately defend themselves in the moment of terror abruptly unleashed on them”, Stone said.
The White House announced Obama had pardoned two people and commuted sentences – ranging from cocaine to firearm possession – of 95 others in an end-of-year act of executive power.
The president’s year-end session with reporters was buoyed by what he considered solid global accomplishments on climate change, trade deals, a nuclear deal with Iran, and at home, an improving economy and a just-completed budget deal with Congress.
Obama told them he and his wife were parents too and that, “they can not imagine a loss like ours”.
The president also addressed his administration’s efforts to shut down Guantanamo Bay and again said he expected the prisoner population there to be reduced to fewer than 100 before his term ended. And that he’s going to keep working to make this better even after he’s left office.
‘For all the very real progress America has made over the past seven years, we still have some unfinished business’. “In 2016, I am going to leave it all on the field”.
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Much of the president’s focus was on outlining plans for his final year in office.
