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President Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe scatteredpetals togetheron the waters of Pearl Harbor on Tuesday in a symbolic act aimed at laying to rest the enmity of the Japanese attack 75 years ago that drew the U.S. into World War II.

In a moment consumed with history, both leaders were fixed on the future. They expressedconcernthat the lessons of the war might be forgotten amid a shifting world order and the anti-internationalist sentiment that has swept over politics around the globe, most notably with the ascendance of President-elect Donald Trump.

Even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward, Obama said. We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.

The ceremony was conceived of as an affirmation of close U.S. relations with Japan, once a bitter wartime enemy, andObama and Abe underscored the importance of building bonds between nations and the risks of slipping into isolationism. Their remarks also appeared to bewarnings forTrump, whose divisive campaign took aim at longstanding alliances and stoked fears with harsh rhetoric about immigrants and minorities.

Ours is an alliance of hope that will lead us to the future, Abe said, speaking to World War II veterans after paying tribute at the Pearl Harbor memorial. What has bonded us together is the power of reconciliation, made possible through the spirit of tolerance.

Obama, as has been his custom in public remarks since the election, argued for the merits of his own worldviewwithout naming Trump, saying,There is more to be won in peace than in war.

During the campaign and since his election, Trump haschallenged assumptions about U.S. commitments to the security of Asia. One of the central tenets of Obamas foreign policy was a commitment of resources toward Asia with an eye toward countering the rise of China.

But Trump has obliterated long-established protocols. He spoke with Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wendespite the U.S. policy of officially acknowledging no Chinese government other than the one in Beijing. And when he met with Abe last month in New York, Trump brought not a battalion of Asia experts but rather his daughter Ivanka.

Trump also promised last week to expand Americas nuclear arsenal after decades of a deliberate shrinking of the American and Russian stockpiles.

Let it be an armsrace, he told an MSNBC host, unnerving leaders in Asia, where North Korea and China are growing more aggressive.

Though the U.S.-Japan relationship has evolved considerably in recent decades, the healing over World War II has gone more slowly, making Abes visit to Pearl Harbor, and Obamas tripin May to Hiroshima, Japan, the site of one of the two nuclear attacks that ended the war, significant gestures.

Abe became the first Japanese prime minister to make a highly publicized visit to the USS Arizona Memorial, though three of his predecessors are thought to have visited Pearl Harbor more quietly.

Under a bright, sunny sky, Abe and Obama rode a small boat to the white memorial building in the harbor that looks out over the sunken remains of the Arizona, attacked by the Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941, killing2,403 people and thrustingthe U.S. into World War II.Abe laid a wreath in honor of the dead.

Veterans of the war gathered across the harbor to hear Obama and Abe deliver their brief speeches.

Among those in the crowd was Sterling Cale, 95, a sailor at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack.

Of those killed that day, 1,177 were crew members of the Arizona. It was Cales job to pull bodies from the burning battleship.

Herecalled watching ashes rising from the deck of the ship. He and his crew were able to remove about 100 bodies.

On Tuesday, he looked across the water where the Arizona is submerged.

He did not come hoping to hear Abe apologize, he said.

Sorry is just a word, Cale said. What matters more is the action of coming here and going out there with our commander in chief. That says more than words.

Abe did not issue a formal apology, even as he detailed the horror of the sinking of the Arizona.

Each and every one of those servicemen had a mother and a father anxious about his safety, Abe said. Many had wives and girlfriends they loved, and many must have had children they would have loved watching grow up.

Rest in peace, precious souls of the fallen, he went on. I offer my sincere and everlasting condolences to the souls of those who lost their lives here.

After that somber expression of sorrow, Obama stepped to the lectern and declared the site a symbol of reconciliation.

Today, the alliance between the United States and Japan, bound not only by shared interests, but also rooted in common values, stands as the cornerstone of peace and stability in the Asia Pacific, and a force for progress around the globe, Obama said.

In what may be his final visit with a world leader before he leaves office in January, Obama expressed hope.

As nations and as people, we cannot choose the history that we inherit, he said. But we can choose what lessons to draw from it and use those lessons to chart our own futures.

christi.parsons@latimes.com

Follow @cparsons for news about the White House.

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UPDATES:

5:10 p.m.:This story was updated with more comments from Obama and Abe.

This story was originally published at 3:50 p.m.

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At Pearl Harbor, Obama says 'we must resist the urge to ...

President Obama suggested in an exit interview with his former top adviser that, had he been able to run, he could have won a third term in the White House.

Describing his confidence in an America that is tolerant and full of energy, Obama said: I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.

President-elect Donald Trump fired back Monday in a tweet: "He should say that but I say NO WAY!" He cited the rise of the Islamic State terror group and trouble with Obama administration agenda items including ObamaCare.

The outgoing president made the comments as part of an extensive interview with David Axelrod, for his podcast produced by CNN and the University of Chicago. Axelrod was one of Obamas top advisers during the 2008 campaign and his first term in the White House.

I know that in conversations that I've had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one, Obama told Axelrod, defending his assertion.

Obama was term-limited and could not run, clearing the way for his former primary rival and secretary of state Hillary Clinton to be the partys standard-bearer in 2016. She nevertheless ran in large part on Obamas agenda, vowing to preserve some of his signature policies as Donald Trump and his Republican allies campaigned against them.

As other top Democrats have done in the wake of President-elect Trumps victory, Obama did acknowledge that Democrats and progressives face political challenges, especially in rural areas.

If we can't find some way to break through what is a complicated history in the South and start winning races there and winning back Southern white voters without betraying our commitment to civil rights and diversity -- if we can do those things, then we can win elections, he said.

Obama also warned about an era where we are looking for simple solutions that we end up starting to shut ourselves off from different points of view, shutting down debate, becoming more dogmatic, becoming more brittle. And I don't see that being a successful strategy for us winning over the country.

He reminded listeners that his party won the popular vote on Election Day, but said: We don't have very good population distribution from a democratic perspective.

Vice President Biden offered a somewhat tougher critique of his party in a similar exit interview with the Los Angeles Times.

He said his party failed to connect with working-class, largely white voters, and warned that a bit of elitism has crept in to party thinking.

He recalled watching a Trump rally in Pennsylvania near where he grew up. Theyre all the people I grew up with, he said. Theyre their kids. And theyre not racist. Theyre not sexist. But we didnt talk to them.

Excerpt from:
Obama: I could have won third term | Fox News

"I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it," Obama told his former senior adviser David Axelrod in an interview for the "The Axe Files" podcast, produced by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN.

"I know that in conversations that I've had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one," Obama said in the interview, which aired Monday.

"In the wake of the election and Trump winning, a lot of people have suggested that somehow, it really was a fantasy," Obama said of the hope-and-change vision he heralded in 2008. "What I would argue is, is that the culture actually did shift, that the majority does buy into the notion of a one America that is tolerant and diverse and open and full of energy and dynamism."

Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton won a majority of the vote in the 2016 contest. Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by almost 2.9 million ballots, though Trump won more electoral votes and thus the presidency.

In the 50-minute session, Obama repeated his suggestion Democrats had ignored entire segments of the voting population, leading to Donald Trump's win. He implied that Hillary Clinton's campaign hadn't made a vocal enough argument directed toward Americans who haven't felt the benefits of the economic recovery.

"If you think you're winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer," he said, adding later he believed Clinton "performed wonderfully under really tough circumstances" and was mistreated by the media.

Trump on Monday afternoon responded to the President's assertion that he could have won a third term. Though the President-elect framed Obama's comments as describing a head-to-head matchup between the pair, which Obama did not say in his interview with Axelrod.

"President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! - jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.," Trump tweeted.

Trump hit Obama again on Tuesday, tweeting, "President Obama campaigned hard (and personally) in the very important swing states, and lost. The voters wanted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

Trump and Obama have largely steered clear of direct criticism of each other since the election. They met in the White House two days after Election Day and according to both parties, have talked by phone several times since.

The podcast interview was Obama's latest post-election analysis, which has focused on Democrats' failure to convince non-urban voters and a media preoccupied with negative stories about Clinton. Obama said his party this year hadn't made an emotional connection to voters in hard-hit communities, relying instead on policy points he said didn't make enough of an impact.

"We're not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we're bleeding for these communities," he said. "It means caring about local races, state boards or school boards and city councils and state legislative races and not thinking that somehow, just a great set of progressive policies that we present to the New York Times editorial board will win the day."

Obama cited an unlikely model for future Democratic success: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who he said had executed an effective -- if obstructionist -- strategy.

"Mitch McConnell's insight, just from a pure tactical perspective, was pretty smart and well executed, the degree of discipline that he was able to impose on his caucus was impressive. His insight was that we just have to say no to that," Obama said.

He said part of his post-presidential strategy would be developing young Democratic leaders -- including organizers, journalists and politicians -- who could galvanize voters behind a progressive agenda. He won't hesitate to weigh in on important political debates after he leaves office, he told Axelrod.

Following a period of introspection after he departs the White House, Obama said he would feel a responsibility as a citizen to voice his opinions on major issues gripping the country during Trump's administration though he would not necessarily weigh in on day-to-day activities.

"At a certain point, you make room for new voices and fresh legs," Obama said.

"That doesn't mean that if a year from now, or a year-and-a-half from now, or two years from now, there is an issue of such moment, such import, that isn't just a debate about a particular tax bill or, you know, a particular policy, but goes to some foundational issues about our democracy that I might not weigh in," Obama went on. "You know, I'm still a citizen and that carries with it duties and obligations."

Obama's first acts out of office, however, will be lower-profile. He said he'll focus on writing a book and self-analyzing his time in office. Obama and his family plan to live in Washington while his younger daughter finishes high school.

"I have to be quiet for a while. And I don't mean politically, I mean internally. I have to still myself," he said. "You have to get back in tune with your center and process what's happened before you make a bunch of good decisions."

As he concludes his term, Obama is growing sentimental about his time at the White House. He said he grew misty in a meeting of senior aides recently thinking about the end of the Obama era.

"I got through about four minutes of the thing and then started, you know, getting the hanky out," Obama said. "It feels like the band is breaking up a little bit."

Read this article:
Obama's exit interview: I could've won again - CNNPolitics.com

President Obama said in an interview released Monday that he could have beaten Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump if I had run again. In his most pointed critique yet, Obama said Hillary Clinton's campaign acted too cautiously out of a mistaken belief that victory was all but certain.

If you think you're winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer, Obama said in the interview with former adviser and longtime friend David Axelrod, a CNN analyst, for his The Axe Files podcast. The president said Clinton understandably ... looked and said, well, given my opponent and the things he's saying and what he's doing, we should focus on that.

Trump took exception to this critique, tweeting out later in the day that President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.

Obama stressed his admiration for Clinton and said she had been the victim of unfair attacks. But, as he has in other exit interviews, Obamainsisted that her defeat was not a rejection of the eight years of his presidency. To the contrary, he argued that he had put together a winning coalition that stretched across the country but that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had failed to follow through on it.

I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I if I had run again and articulated it I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it, the president said.

See, I think the issue was less that Democrats have somehow abandoned the white working class, I think that's nonsense, Obama said. Look, the Affordable Care Act benefits a huge number of Trump voters. There are a lot of folks in places like West Virginia or Kentucky who didn't vote for Hillary, didn't vote for me, but are being helped by this ... The problem is, is that we're not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we're bleeding for these communities.

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said via email that the campaign declined to comment.

Axelrod, in an interview with The Washington Post, said he believed Obama went further than he had before in critiquing Clinton's campaign.

This was all in service of making the point that he believes that his progressive vision and the vision he ran on is still a majority view in this country, Axelrod said. He chooses to be hopeful about the future.

[Michelle Obama gave a somber exit interview to Oprah Winfrey]

Obama could not have run again; the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution states that No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice. Still, Obamas suggestion that he could have won if he ran stoked debate Monday among political observers.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican who has been an adviser to Trump, said in an interview that Obama doesnt know and neither does anyone else. Obama would have increased the turnout in the African American community, but he also might have increased the repudiation of him among those who felt they were betrayed.

All of the lies he told about Obamacare, keeping your doctor ... would have come back to haunt him. It would have been a totally different race.

Steve Hildebrand, a Democrat who oversaw Obamas 2008 campaign in battleground states, said the president had an ability to communicate with lower-income workers that Clinton lacked. He said he sent the Clinton campaign 15 emails in which he said he told them you are not communicating with lower-income workers, you are not connecting with them.

In the podcast interview, Axelrod did not press Obama on many of the most controversial parts of his presidency, such as not taking action to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria. The president, who has done relatively few interviews with mainstream media organizations, repeated his long-stated complaint that the media has filtered his message and that he is subject to unfair criticism by outlets such as Fox News.

Obama also blamed some of his problems during his presidency on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a longtime adversary who famously said in 2010: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. McConnell failed in that goal, but Obama said the senator was successful in blocking many of his initiatives and setting the groundwork for Trumps victory.

McConnells strategy from a tactical perspective was pretty smart and well executed, the president said. The Republican leader found ways to just throw sand in the gears in a manner that fed into peoples beliefs that things were going badly. Obama said that, as a result, Republicans blocked action that could have helped more people recover from the Great Recession. The strategy, Obama maintained, was that if we just say no, then that will puncture the balloon, that all this talk about hope and change and no red state and blue state is is proven to be a mirage, a fantasy. And if we can if we can puncture that vision, then we have a chance to win back seats in the House.

A McConnell spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Obama stressed that he doesn't plan to get involved in day-to-day responses to a Trump presidency, just as former president George W. Bush has remained mostly on the sidelines during the Obama years. But Obama made it clear that he will be more of an activist in the long run. He said he plans to help mobilize and train a younger generation of Democratic leaders and will speak out if his core beliefs are challenged. He also said he is working on writing a book.

At a news conference at the White House, Dec. 16, President Obama shared his advice to Democrats following their defeat in the 2016 election. (Reuters)

His post-presidential long-term interest, Obama said, is to build that next generation of leadership; organizers, journalists, politicians. I see them in America, I see them around the world 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds who are just full of talent, full of idealism. And the question is how do we link them up? How do we give them the tools for them to bring about progressive change? And I want to use my presidential center as a mechanism for developing that next generation of talent. He said he didn't want to be someone who's just hanging around reliving old glories.

Obama in the interview also reflected on his years at college, particularly Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1983. He said he was rereading old journals and letters to girls that he was courting, and found them unreadable. He found himself to be wildly pretentious, recalling how he begged off going to parties so he could read the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The women on campus found him too intense, he said.

Looking back, said the president of the United States, I shouldve tried, like, you know, Wanna go to a movie?

Excerpt from:
President Obama says he could have beaten Trump Trump says ...

The Obama administration is close to announcing a series of measures to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, including economic sanctions and diplomatic censure, according to U.S. officials.

The administration is finalizing the details, which also are expected to include covert action that will probably involve cyber-operations, the officials said. An announcement on the public elements of the response could come as early as this week.

The sanctions portion of the package culminates weeks of debate in the White House on how to revise a 2015 executive order that was meant to give the president authority to respond to cyberattacks from overseas but that did not cover efforts to influence the electoral system.

The Obama administration rolled the executive order out to great fanfare as a way to punish and deter foreign hackers who harm U.S. economic or national security.

The threat to use it last year helped wring a pledge out of Chinas president that his country would cease hacking U.S. companies secrets to benefit Chinese firms.

(Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

[Treasury, Justice officials pushed for economic sanctions on China over cybertheft]

But officials concluded this fall that the order could not, as written, be used to punish the most significant cyber-provocation in recent memory against the United States Russias hacking of Democratic organizations, targeting of state election systems and meddling in the presidential election.

With the clock ticking, the White House is working on adapting the authority to punish the Russians, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. President Obama pledged this month that there would be a response to Moscows interference in the U.S. elections.

Russia had denied involvement in the hacking.

One clear way to use the order against the Russian suspects would be to declare the electoral systems part of the critical infrastructure of the United States. Or the order could be amended to clearly apply to the new threat interfering in elections.

Administration officials would also like to make it difficult for President-elect Donald Trump to roll back any action they take.

Part of the goal here is to make sure that we have as much of the record public or communicated to Congress in a form that would be difficult to simply walk back, said one senior administration official.

Obama issued the executive order in April 2015, creating the sanctions tool as a way to hold accountable people who harm computer systems related to critical functions such as electricity generation or transportation, or who gain a competitive advantage through the cybertheft of commercial secrets.

The order allows the government to freeze the assets in the United States of people overseas who have engaged in cyber-acts that have threatened U.S. national security or financial stability. The sanctions would also block commercial transactions with the designated individuals and bar their entry into the country.

But just a year later, a Russian military spy agency would hack into the Democratic National Committee and steal a trove of emails that were released a few months later on WikiLeaks, U.S. officials said. Other releases followed, including the hacked emails of Hillary Clintons campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Fundamentally, it was a low-tech, high-impact event, said Zachary Goldman, a sanctions and national security expert at New York University School of Law. And the 2015 executive order was not crafted to target hackers who steal emails and dump them on WikiLeaks or seek to disrupt an election. It was an authority published at a particular time to address a particular set of problems, he said.

So officials need to engage in some legal acrobatics to fit the DNC hack into an existing authority, or they need to write a new authority, Goldman said.

Administration officials would like Obama to use the power before leaving office to demonstrate its utility.

When the president came into office, he didnt have that many tools out there to use as a response to malicious cyber-acts, said Ari Schwartz, a former senior director for cybersecurity on the National Security Council. Having the sanctions tool is really a big one. It can make a very strong statement in a way that is less drastic than bombing a country and more impactful than sending out a cable from the State Department.

The National Security Council concluded that it would not be able to use the authority against Russian hackers because their malicious activity did not clearly fit under its terms, which require harm to critical infrastructure or the theft of commercial secrets.

You would (a) have to be able to say that the actual electoral infrastructure, such as state databases, was critical infrastructure, and (b) that what the Russians did actually harmed it, said the administration official. Those are two high bars.

Although Russian government hackers are believed to have penetrated at least one state voter-registration database, they did not tamper with the data, officials said.

Some analysts believe that state election systems would fit under government facilities, which is one of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors designated by the Department of Homeland Security.

Another option is to use the executive order against other Russian targets say, hackers who stole commercial secrets and then, in either a public message or a private one, make clear that the United States considers its electoral systems to be critical infrastructure.

The idea is not only to punish but also to deter.

As much as I am concerned about what happened to us in the election, I am also concerned about what will happen to us in the future, a second administration official said. I am firmly convinced that the Russians and others will say, That worked pretty well in 2016, so lets keep going. We have elections every two years in this country.

Even the threat of sanctions can have deterrent value. Officials and experts point to Chinese President Xi Jinpings agreement with Obama last year that his country would stop commercial cyberspying. Xi came to the table after news reports that summer that the administration was preparing to sanction Chinese companies.

Complicating matters, the Trump transition team has not yet had extensive briefings with the White House on cybersecurity issues, including the potential use of the cyber sanctions order. The slow pace has caused consternation among officials, who fear that the administrations accomplishments in cybersecurity could languish if the next administration fails to understand their value.

[Trump turning away intelligence briefers since election win]

Sanctions are not a silver bullet. Obama noted that we already have enormous numbers of sanctions against the Russians for their activities in Ukraine. So it is questionable, some experts say, whether adding new ones would have a meaningful effect in changing the Kremlins behavior. But in combination with other measures, they could be effective.

Criminal indictments of Russians might become an option, officials said, but the FBI has so far not gathered enough evidence that could be introduced in a criminal case. At one point, federal prosecutors and FBI agents in San Francisco considered indicting Guccifer 2.0, a nickname for a person or people believed to be affiliated with the Russian influence operation and whose true identity was unknown.

Before the election, the administration used diplomatic channels to warn Russia. Obama spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a Group of 20 summit in China in September. About a week before the election, the United States sent a hotline-style message to Moscow using a special channel for crisis communication created in 2013 as part of the State Departments Nuclear Risk Reduction Center. As part of that message, the officials said, the administration asked Russia to stop targeting state voter registration and election systems. It was the first use of that system. The Russians, officials said, appeared to comply.

Read more:

Heres what you need to know about Russias election hacking

Obama says we will retaliate against Russia for election hacking

Moscow has the worlds attention. For Putin, thats a win.

Excerpt from:
Obama administration is close to announcing measures to ...