President Barack Obama says he hasn't succeeded in bringing the country together, acknowledging an atmosphere of divisiveness that has washed away the lofty national feeling surrounding his inauguration a year ago.
"That's what's been lost this year ... that whole sense of changing how Washington works," Obama said in an interview with People magazine.
The president said his second-year agenda will be refocused on uniting the country around common values, "whether we're Democrats or Republicans."
"We all want work that's satisfying, pays the bills and gives children a better future and security," Obama said in the interview, which the magazine conducted with the president and his wife, Michelle Obama, at the White House on Jan. 8.
The president's comments came as Republican leaders rallied against the core items of his agenda, from his economic stimulus plan to health care. The mood of the country has remained in a sustained slump, too, as double-digit unemployment followed a campaign built upon "hope" and "change."
Obama said people have "every right to feel deflated, because the economy was far worse than any of us expected." But he insisted that his government's economic steps in 2009 are paying off and that people should have confidence in this new year.
The president opted not to lower the grade he had given himself for his own performance in 2009 - a B-plus - in light of the intelligence and security failures that allowed a suspected terrorist to board a Detroit-bound plane with explosives in an effort to blow it up.
"When you look at what we've done this year on national security, we performed at a very high level in as difficult an environment as you can imagine," he said.
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