At the Univision event, President Obama unleashed this gobsmacker that “you can’t change Washington from the inside.” Politico:
A surprising comment from President Obama, at the Univision forum in Florida earlier, on things he has learned after four years: “You can’t change Washington from the inside.”
It’s a tricky thing to claim outsider status after serving in the White House for four years (and in the Senate before that), after running on a hope and change message, and it is not an especially helpful comment for a president running for re-election with a plea to voters to let him finish the work he began but hasn’t closed out.
The rest of his statement was about doing more to involve the public to bring change from the “outside,” which is more in line with what he said before. But if the small pool of persuadable voters see Obama as saying Washington is irretrievably broken, even for him, they could be open to a fresh case from his opponent.
Ezra Klein tweeted in response that it’s not even true: