President Barack Obama delivered a veiled rebuke to Hillary Clinton today for spending the summer and much of the fall taking it easy as Donald Trump barnstormed the nation.
The two-time winner Electoral College winner said he was victorious in Iowa, a mostly white state, 'not because the demographics dictated' it, but because he spent 87 days going to 'every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall.'
Some counties he may have lost by fewer votes because he dropped in, the president said. Others he may have won unexpectedly because he spent so much time there.
'And the challenge for a national party is how do you dig in there and create those kinds of structures so that people have a sense of what it is that you stand for.'
That's 'increasingly difficult to do' through a national press strategy, he said.
Conversations in the party about grassroots efforts and building a bottom up party will 'contribute to stronger outcomes in the future,' he assessed. 'And I'm optimistic that will happen.'
Democrats who are 'feeling completely discouraged' by last Tuesday's election, Obama said, should remember that 'things change pretty rapidly.'
'But they don't change inevitably. They change because you work for it,' he said.
Clinton spent considerable time in Iowa as she prepared to competed in the Democratic caucuses there against Bernie Sanders.
She visited Des Moines three times and Cedar Rapids once in the general election. She also made a stop in 'Quad Cities' area, though her rally was technically in Illinois.
Clinton's campaign wrote off the swing state that Obama won in 2008 and 2012 and spent her time trying to win over North Carolina, a state he lost in 2012, and Pennsylvania instead.
Not only did she lose all three of those states, Clinton held one or no rallies a day while Trump conquered the country and lost most of the Midwest, never even visiting Wisconsin which turned red as a result.
'We have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grassroots level,' Obama said today.
The president was taking questions for the first time since his former secretary of state lost her electoral battle against Donald Trump this afternoon.
'When your team loses, everybody gets deflated. And it's hard, and it's challenging,' he acknowledged.
But he said, 'I think its a healthy thing for the Democratic Party to go through some reflection.'
His party is looking for a new election chief to manage the Democratic National Committee.
'I think it's important for me not to be big footing that conversation,' Obama said of the intra-party debate. But he also said the party would benefit from 'new voices.'
Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, an African-American representative who comes from the progressive wing of the party and is Muslim, put forward his name today.
Ex-DNC chair Howard Dean was the first candidate to formally put himself in the running. Dean ran the party when Obama was elected. Democrats also won the House and the Senate under his oversight.
'How we organize politically, I think is something that we should spend some time thinking about,' he said. 'I believe that we have better ideas. But I also believes that good ideas don't matter if people don't hear them.'
Clinton earned the most voters overall. But she fell behind in the Electoral College count that legally determines the outcome.
Obama suggested during his news conference on Monday afternoon that Clinton didn't excite her supporters the way Trump did as he complimented his successor.
Recalling their conversation in the Oval Office last week, Obama said he told the president elect that he was impressed by Trump's ability to generate enthusiasm.
'I think that to the extent that there were a lot of folks who missed the Trump phenomenon, I think that connection that he was able to make with his supporters,' Obama said, 'that was impervious to events that might have sunk another candidate, that's powerful stuff.'
Obama is leaving the country tonight for a seven-day trip to Greece, Germany and Peru.
He'll speak to White House reporters who travel with him overseas again. 'I figured why wait,' Obama said at the top of his remarks.
'I know that there's a lot of domestic issues that people are thinking about,' Obama said, indicating his desire to 'clear out some of the under bush' so that journalists will stick to foreign policy questions at his upcoming news conferences and 'don't feel obliged to tack on three other questions, too.'
A reporter told him that's likely to happen anyway, leading to laughter in the White House briefing room. Obama said he's 'aware' - and is 'trying out something new.'
The lame duck president is using the week-long excursion to drag his policy agenda over the finish line and convince America's allies that President-elect Trump is unlikely to tear up binding, international agreements.
Obama cast Trump as 'uniquely unqualified' to lead the country on the campaign trail and urged voters not to give him access to the county's nuclear arsenal.
He told the nation on Wednesday that it must give the president-elect a chance.
'We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy,' he said. 'And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world.'
The president said his party must learn from its 'mistakes' in this election and 'do some reflection.'
'We lick our wounds, we brush ourselves off, we get back in the arena. We go at it. We try even harder the next time,' he said. 'The point, though, is, is that we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens.'
He said Monday that Democrats 'should not waiver' in their 'core beliefs and principles.'
'There are gonna be a core set of values that shouldn't be up for debate,' he said, calling them the party's 'North Star.'