WH says ‘job not done’ after first year of Biden presidency
Ahead of the anniversary of President Biden’s first year in office on Thursday, press secretary Jen Psaki said a lot of progress has been made on the crises facing the country, but “the work is not done. The job is not done.”
Video Transcript
- And heading into the president's press conference tomorrow on the eve of his one-year anniversary, he has long said that he would talk straight from the shoulder-- I think is his words-- to give an honest assessment of things. What is your honest assessment of the last year of the Biden administration, and how can the voting rights failure not be seen as some type of a metaphor for these challenges?
JEN PSAKI: Well, I would say in terms of voting rights, his view is that it's never a good idea not to shoot for the moon with what your proposals are and what you're fighting for. And the alternative is to fight for nothing, and to fight for nothing hard. And that sometimes, oftentimes-- as you know, you've covered a couple of administrations-- you don't get everything done in the first year.
But what we feel good about-- and this is why I brought some of these charts, to show the contrast-- is that coming into an incredibly difficult circumstance-- fighting a pandemic, a massive economic downturn as a result, an administration that was prior to us that did not effectively deal with a lot of these crises-- that there's been a lot of progress made. We need to build on that. The work is not done. The job is not done, and we are certainly not conveying it is. So our objective, and I think what you'll hear the president talk about tomorrow, is how to build on the foundation we laid in the first year.
