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"We've got to work as hard as we can," Obama said
Obama spoke at a California fundraiser Monday
A Hillary Clinton triumph in November will be made sweeter by a wide margin of victory, President Barack Obama told Democratic donors in California Monday.
Speaking to 350 supporters here who shelled out hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend, Obama said it wasn’t enough just to elect his former secretary of state. He said he wanted Clinton to bury Donald Trump as a symbolic repudiation of his views.
“We’ve got to work as hard as we can, not just to make sure that Hillary wins, but to make sure she wins big, to send a clear message about who we are as a people,” Obama said. “We want to win big. We don’t just want to eke it out, particularly when the other guy’s already started to gripe about how the game is rigged.”
Clinton leads by 5 heading in to final two weeks
Polls show Clinton with a solid edge in the presidential contest, both nationally and in key battlegrounds. Trump, meanwhile, has questioned the validity of the polling, saying the surveys are overly weighted toward Democrats.
Trump’s assertions that the election is rigged against him again gained Obama’s ire Monday, when the President said such claims were “corrosive” to American democracy.
“Even just playing on the playground when you’re like 5 or 6 – there was always the kid who, if they weren’t winning, they’d started to have a tantrum and complaining about this isn’t fair. Well, no, you just got beat,” Obama said.
And he expanded on his dismissal of a new GOP argument for electing Republican senators to act as a counterbalance on Clinton’s power.
“It is really important that we push back and defeat this argument that somehow, the duly elected president of the United States should simply be blocked from doing anything by the opposition party,” he said. “They are saying, ‘We are going to say no to everything.’ That’s what they mean by a check.”
The tumultuous 2016 campaign is in a sudden limbo
Despite the optimism, Obama warned that complacency in the campaign’s diminishing weeks could be Democrats’ death-knell.
“The good news is that, at the moment, the polls show that Hillary’s enjoying a lead,” Obama said. “But I want to make sure that everybody understands – this has been an extraordinarily volatile race and a volatile time. So we can’t take anything for granted.”
“This is one of these moments when we can’t afford to sit back and just assume that everything is going to work itself out,” he said.