Obama Says He'd Rather Be "Really Good" For One Term

Obama sat down with Diane Sawyer for an interview that aired last night, and he said might not mind being a one-term president, if it means being a better president. "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president, and I believe that," he told Sawyer.

"There's a tendency in Washington to think that our job description of elected officials is to get reelected. That's not our job description. Our job description is to solve problems and to help people, and, you know, that's not just the view of elected officials themselves, that's also the filter through which the media reads things," Obama said.


With so much discussion of his domestic agenda having potentially fallen apart at the hands of Scott Brown and Democratic missteps in Massachusetts, Obama sought to project cool-headedness and perspective. And speaking of that, he did a bit of analysis on how his own calm is interpreted:

"If my poll numbers are low, then I'm cool and cerebral and cold and detached. If my poll numbers are high, boy, he's calm and reasoned, so that's the filter through which a lot of this stuff is interpreted," the president said.