WASHINGTON — Closing out a tumultuous year, President Barack Obama laid the groundwork Friday for his last year in office, vowing not to fade into the background but instead use his remaining months to push long-standing goals to fruition.
“In 2016, I’m going to leave it all out on the field,” he said. “Wherever there’s an opportunity, I’m going to take it.”
In his annual year-end news conference, Obama portrayed 2015 as one of significant progress for his agenda, pointing to diplomacy with Iran and Cuba and an Asia-Pacific trade agreement as big wins for his administration. He also praised a Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage and a congressional rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law as further victories for causes he has made central to his presidency.
Still, he said, he plans to do much more in 2016.
“I said at the beginning of this year that interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter — and we are only halfway through,” Obama said.
After the news conference, Obama was to depart for San Bernardino, Calif., where he planned to meet with families of the 14 victims of the recent mass shooting. He then will fly to Hawaii where he’ll spend two weeks on vacation with his wife and daughters in what has become a family Christmas tradition.
Obama took questions as he closed out a turbulent year marked by successes on restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, clinching a nuclear deal with Iran and finalizing an unprecedented global climate treaty. Those successes have been tempered by a lack of progress on the president’s other priorities, including closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
Obama said he’d present a long-delayed plan to close the prison to Congress early next year, then wait for lawmakers’ reaction before determining whether to take action on his own to shut it. He predicted the prison population would dwindle by early next year to less than 100, a threshold his administration has been pushing for to bolster its argument that keeping the facility open isn’t cost effective.
Amid widespread fears about terrorism and extremists, Obama pushed back against critics questioning his strategy for overcoming the Islamic State terrorist group in Iraq and Syria. “There’s only so much bombing you can do,” he said, although he insisted anew, “We’re going to defeat ISIS.”
He also affirmed his long-standing position that Syrian President Bashar Assad must leave power for Syria to resolve its civil war, even though his administration has recently said it could accept an unspecified transition period during which Assad stayed.
