In a news conference in the East Room this afternoon, the President spoke openly about the lessons of the previous night’s elections, and his hope for working with the new Congress going forward.  He made clear that he understood the profound frustrations and anxiety around the economy felt by so many families, and pledged to redouble his efforts to work across the aisle to speed up our recovery and move the country forward:

I’m not suggesting this will be easy.  I won’t pretend that we will be able to bridge every difference or solve every disagreement.  There’s a reason we have two parties in this country, and both Democrats and Republicans have certain beliefs and certain principles that each feels cannot be compromised.  But what I think the American people are expecting, and what we owe them, is to focus on those issues that affect their jobs, their security, and their future:  reducing our deficit, promoting a clean energy economy, making sure that our children are the best educated in the world, making sure that we’re making the investments in technology that will allow us to keep our competitive edge in the global economy. 
 
Because the most important contest we face is not the contest between Democrats and Republicans.  In this century, the most important competition we face is between America and our economic competitors around the world.  To win that competition, and to continue our economic leadership, we’re going to need to be strong and we’re going to need to be united.
 
None of the challenges we face lend themselves to simple solutions or bumper-sticker slogans.  Nor are the answers found in any one particular philosophy or ideology.  As I’ve said before, no person, no party, has a monopoly on wisdom.  And that’s why I’m eager to hear good ideas wherever they come from, whoever proposes them. And that’s why I believe it’s important to have an honest and civil debate about the choices that we face.  That’s why I want to engage both Democrats and Republicans in serious conversations about where we’re going as a nation.
 
And with so much at stake, what the American people don’t want from us, especially here in Washington, is to spend the next two years refighting the political battles of the last two.  We just had a tough election.  We will have another in 2012.  I’m not so naïve as to think that everybody will put politics aside until then, but I do hope to make progress on the very serious problems facing us right now. And that’s going to require all of us, including me, to work harder at building consensus.
 
You know, a little over a month ago, we held a town hall meeting in Richmond, Virginia.  And one of the most telling questions came from a small business owner who runs a tree care firm.  He told me how hard he works and how busy he was; how he doesn’t have time to pay attention to all the back-and-forth in Washington.  And he asked, is there hope for us returning to civility in our discourse, to a healthy legislative process, so as I strap on the boots again tomorrow, I know that you guys got it under control?  It’s hard to have a faith in that right now, he said.

President Barack Obama holds a news conference in the East Room of the White House, November 3, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Asked later to discuss how other issues aside from the economy played in the election, the President looked back at the way things got done in Washington during the last two years and before:

I’m doing a whole lot of reflecting and I think that there are going to be areas in policy where we’re going to have to do a better job. I think that over the last two years, we have made a series of very tough decisions, but decisions that were right in terms of moving the country forward in an emergency situation where we had the risk of slipping into a second Great Depression.

But what is absolutely true is that with all that stuff coming at folks fast and furious -- a recovery package, what we had to do with respect to the banks, what we had to do with respect to the auto companies -- I think people started looking at all this and it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people’s lives than they were accustomed to.  

Now, the reason was it was an emergency situation.  But I think it’s understandable that folks said to themselves, you know, maybe this is the agenda, as opposed to a response to an emergency.  And that’s something that I think everybody in the White House understood was a danger.  We thought it was necessary, but I’m sympathetic to folks who looked at it and said this is looking like potential overreach.  

In addition, there were a bunch of price tags that went with that.  And so, even though these were emergency situations, people rightly said, gosh, we already have all this debt, we already have these big deficits; this is potentially going to compound it, and at what point are we going to get back to a situation where we’re doing what families all around the country do, which is make sure that if you spend something you know how to pay for it -- as opposed to racking up the credit card for the next generation.

And I think that the other thing that happened is that when I won election in 2008, one of the reasons I think that people were excited about the campaign was the prospect that we would change how business is done in Washington.  And we were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done.  And I think that frustrated people.

Every day, millions of Americans benefit from the advances made in the fields of life, biological, and medical science.  Breakthroughs in these fields have helped to significantly reduce mortality from many conditions that were once considered fatal.  Our support for scientific research is one of our best investments in our future—for the health of Americans and the health of the American economy. 

That’s why, today, we’re happy to announce the firms  that have been accepted into the Therapeutic Discovery Project Program, which was created by the Affordable Care Act.  This program will advance American competitiveness in the fields of life, biological, and medical science by giving tax credits and grants to small companies conducting cutting-edge biomedical research.

The program is targeted towards projects that show significant potential to produce new therapies, address unmet medical needs, reduce the long-term growth of health care costs, and advance the goal of curing cancer within the next 30 years.

So what does this mean?  It means that a firm in Oklahoma will continue its attempt to develop therapeutics to prevent the metastatic spread of cancer, and a firm in North Carolina will continue to create a gene therapy-based therapeutic for a lethal inheritable childhood disease—one that currently has no life-sustaining treatment.  It means that a firm in New York will continue working on a flu vaccine that can provide protection for a period of several years—with technology that could also be used to develop cancer vaccines.

The Therapeutic Discovery Project Program also means that these firms, and other companies who have been awarded tax credits or grants, have an incentive to keep growing and create high-paying jobs right in their local communities.

We are very excited about the possibilities of this program; it is a great example of the way the Affordable Care Act will help advance research to find life-saving treatments and diagnostics and help U.S. companies lead the way in making innovative medical discoveries.

Visit here to learn more.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak in front of leaders from a variety of fields at the 2010 TEDMED conference in San Diego.  The conference gave business leaders, journalists, entertainment figures, scientists, artists and authors the opportunity to share their diverse experiences about how their fields intersect with health and medicine.  I talked about FEMA’s vision for emergency management and how we can’t respond to disasters alone – it has to be a team effort, and that team includes the entire federal family, state and local government, faith-based and non-profit organizations, the private sector and especially the public.

At FEMA, we are working every day to strengthen that team, but we can and we must do more.  At the conference, I took the opportunity to challenge all of the leaders to come up with ideas on how we can prepare our communities before a disaster strikes. Now I’m using this blog to pose this same challenge to all of you.

Visit www.challenge.gov/fema to accept the challenge.

On Friday, President Obama will depart for a ten-day trip starting in India, followed by Indonesia, South Korea (for the G20 Summit in Seoul) and Japan (for the APEC Summit in Yokohama). Jeff Bader, Senior Director for Asian Affairs, and Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, will be answering your questions about President Obama's travel in a live video chat.

In a press briefing last week, Rhodes discussed this trip as a part of the President’s Asia strategy, "a renewed engagement of the United States in Asia that is founded upon our core alliances in the region...We see this very much in the context of the focus we put on Asia as a region of the world with the most dynamic and growing markets that are going to be fundamental to our export initiative of doubling exports in the world, but also fundamental to a number of political and security concerns that will a subject of the President’s travel."

Join us for a talk with Jeff Bader and Ben Rhodes on Tuesday, November 2nd at 1:00 p.m. EDT.

Here's how you can participate:

• Ask your questions in advance on Facebook
• Join the discussion live through the White House Facebook application
• Watch the chat through WhiteHouse.gov/live

And check out what you missed for past Tuesday Talks:

• Tuesday Talk with David Axelrod
• Tuesday Talk with Austan Goolsbee
• The President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities
• Tuesday Talk with Elizabeth Warren

Pete Souza, Chief Official White House Photographer and Director of the White House Photography Office, recently took questions from Flickr and Facebook users on what it is like to snap shots by the side of the President.  One of the best ways to see through Pete's perspective and get a glimpse inside the White House is with the Photo of the Day.  Throughout each month the Photo of the Day photographs are collected in a gallery that provides a unique look at events in and around the White House.