President Obama expressed his frustration with the US Congress for not doing more to prevent the $85 billion in spending cuts, known as the sequester, from moving passed its deadline of March 1.
The president spoke Friday afternoon in the White House briefing room, insisting that he's done everything he could to prevent the across-the-board automatic cuts and adding that congressional Republicans refused to budge or compromise.
"I can make the best possible argument. And I can offer concessions and I can offer compromise. I can negotiate. I can make sure that my party is willing to compromise and is not being ideological or thinking about these just in terms of political terms. And I think I've done that, and I will continue to do that," said the POTUS. "But what I can't do is force Congress to do the right thing."
"I am not a dictator, I'm the president," he added.
"I've put forward a plan that calls for serious spending cuts, serious entitlement reforms, goes right at the problem that is at the heart of our long-term deficit problem. I've offered negotiations around that kind of balanced approach. And so far we've gotten rebuffed because what Speaker Boehner and the Republicans have said is, we cannot do any revenue; we can't do a dime's worth of revenue," he said. "What more do you think I should do?"
The president also touched on the clear opposition and obstruction that he has received from Republicans even on common sense legislation throughout his tenure.
"I recognize that it's very hard for Republican leaders to be perceived as making concessions to me," he said. "Sometimes I reflect, you know, is there something else I could do to make these guys - I'm not talking about the leaders now, but maybe some of the House Republican caucus members - not paint horns on my head?"
He added that although the "pain" will be real, "not everybody is going to feel it. Not everybody's going to feel it all at once."
"This is not going to be an apocalypse, I think as some people have said. It's just dumb. And it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt individual people, and it's going to hurt the economy overall," he said in conclusion.