(CNN) — President Joe Biden described his first year in the White House as one of setbacks and achievements at the beginning of a press conference.
“Tomorrow will be a year since I took office. It has been a year of challenges, but it has also been a year of tremendous progress,” he told reporters gathered in the East Room.
Biden cited Covid-19 vaccines, record job growth, poverty reduction, more affordable health insurance and a massive infrastructure bill as examples of his administration’s successes.
But he acknowledged that the country was still in an uneasy place.
“I know there is a lot of frustration and fatigue in this country,” he said, citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“While it is a cause for concern, it is not a cause for panic,” he said of the omicron variant.
He admitted that his team should have done more to increase testing: “should we have done more?” he wondered: “Yes.” But he listed the steps he took to make the kits more widely available.
“We are in a better place than we have been so far, clearly better than a year ago,” he said.
“I will not give up and accept things as they are now. Some people may call what is happening now the new normal. I call it a job that is not done yet. It will get better. We are moving towards a time when covid-19 it will not disrupt our daily lives,” Biden said.
In his opening remarks, the president also addressed the economic complications of the pandemic, including rising prices for consumers.
Biden says he didn’t ‘over-promise’
Biden said he didn’t over-promise what he would do for Americans when he took office, and blamed Republicans, asking, “What are Republicans for? What are they for? Tell me one thing they’re for.”
“I didn’t promise too much. But I probably got over what anybody thought would happen,” Biden said when asked about the stalled legislation and election promises he made before taking office.
“The fact is that we are in a situation where we have made enormous progress: you mentioned the number of deaths from covid, well, it was three times that not too long ago. It’s falling, everything is changing. It’s getting better,” Biden told reporters.
Biden said “one thing” he hasn’t been able to do is “get my Republican friends in the game to make things better for this country.”
Biden said his change of tack should be to make sure the American people know what his administration is for and what it has accomplished, pointing to the Affordable Care Act and other laws.
“I think if you take a look at what we’ve been able to do. You have to recognize that we made enormous progress,” Biden said.
We need to control inflation
The president acknowledged that Americans are struggling with the high cost of living and supported the Federal Reserve’s efforts to combat inflation.
“We need to control inflation,” Biden said during his opening remarks.
Biden noted that price stability is the Fed’s responsibility.
“The critical job of making sure high prices don’t take hold falls to the Federal Reserve, which has a dual mandate: full employment and stable prices,” Biden said.
Biden noted that Americans are seeing rapid price increases in grocery stores, at gas stations and elsewhere.
“Given the strength of our economy and the pace of recent price increases, it is appropriate … as Fed Chairman Powell indicated, to recalibrate the support that is now needed.”
Biden added that he respects the Fed’s independence.
He also detailed his administration’s efforts to combat inflation, including unclogging supply chains and cracking down on unfair competition in the marketplace.
The Build Back Better plan
President Joe Biden said that for his Build Back Better agenda to pass, he will have to “split it up” and get as many as possible and “come back and fight for the rest later.”
“It’s clear to me that we’re probably going to have to split it up,” Biden acknowledged for the first time since the bill was halted in December.
“I think we can split the pack, get as much as we can now, come back and fight for the rest later,” Biden added.
Biden said it’s “clear” he could win support on several issues in the bill, including the $500 billion for energy and environmental issues.
He also said he knew there are things in the bill that Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema support, including early education and “strong support for how much to pay for this proposition.”
What did he say about the situation in Ukraine
Biden predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine, citing existential concerns of Vladimir Putin, even as he warned of significant economic consequences when such an incursion occurs.
But he suggested that a “minor incursion” would provoke less of a response than a full-scale invasion of the country.
“I’m not so sure that he’s sure what he’s going to do. I guess it will move. He has to do something,” Biden said, describing a leader seeking relevance in a post-Soviet world: “He is trying to find his place in the world between China and the West.”
Biden’s prediction of an invasion is the strongest acknowledgment to date that the United States expects Putin to make a move after amassing 100,000 troops along the Ukraine border.
This is how his second year in office begins.
The president is entering his second year in office, a midterm election year, after facing a series of recent setbacks. The centerpiece of his economic agenda hit a roadblock in Congress, it’s unclear if the Democrats’ push for voting rights legislation will go anywhere, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s vaccine mandates for big business and recent key economic indicators show record inflation.
The president regularly answers questions from reporters after delivering remarks and during departures and arrivals at the White House, but he has not held as many formal news conferences as his recent predecessors.
In his first year in office, Biden held nine press conferences in total, six solo and three jointly, according to data tracked by The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Saint Barbara. The last time he held a formal press conference was at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.
By comparison, President Donald Trump held 21 news conferences in his first year in office, but only one of them was solo and the rest were joint appearances, usually with foreign leaders. (In his last year in office, when the pandemic hit, Trump held a staggering 35 solo news conferences.)
Informe de Kevin Liptak, Kate Sullivan, Jeff Zeleny, Maegan Vazquez, Allie Malloy, Matt Egan