W.H.: Obama Is Putting Forth More Ideas than Anyone Else; Forcing GOP to Respond

HEMMER: “White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. And Josh, good morning. Welcome back here to ‘America’s Newsroom.’”
EARNEST: “Good morning, Bill. How are you?”
HEMMER: “I’m fine, I hope the same for you. It’s going to be a long day for you —“
EARNEST: “Good. It will.”
HEMMER: “— go ahead and make your case. What is new tonight?”
EARNEST: “Well look, what the president is hoping to do is to actually look beyond the next election and focus on the next generation of Americans, both to talk about what we can do to keep the country safe. But also how we can build on the kind of economic strength and prosperity that we’re seeing after — after we’ve dugout of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”
HEMMER: “And I know — I know a lot of Americans want to hear about that — to a political rights [indecipherable] though that — it’s tough for the White House to get attention for this speech. And if that is the case, do you find that Americans are already looking past this presidency?”
EARNEST: “I don’t think so. I mean, I think we’re actually going to have a healthy audience and I — look if you take a look at the — even if you look at the presidential debates that frankly are getting a lot of attention, you actually see that the president of the United States is the person that is actually driving those debates. That the discussions that we’ve had about trying to reform our immigration system, about how to keep our —  keep guns out of the wrong hands, about what we can do to keep our country safe, about how we can build on the economic progress that we’ve shown so far. It’s actually the president who’s putting forward more ideas than anybody else. And it actually putting Republicans in a situation in which they’re actually responding to the president that they like to refer to as the lame duck.”