President Barack Obama held a press conference Wednesday afternoon to respond to the mid-term election results in which Republicans gained the majority in the Senate and increased their seats in the House. CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta had an opportunity to ask the president how it felt to be a lame duck:
Thank you, Mr. President. I know you don’t want to read the tea leaves, but it is a fact that your party rejected you in these midterms. By and large, they did not want you out on the campaign trail in these key battleground states. How do you account for that? And your aides have said that this is the fourth quarter of your administration, but I don’t know if you saw the morning talk shows, but there were several potential candidates for 2016 who were out there already. Is the clock ticking? Are you running out of time? How much time do you have left? And what do you make of the notion that you’re now a lame duck?


President Obama responded:
Well, traditionally after the last midterm of the two-term presidency since I can’t run again, that’s the label that you guys apply. Here’s what I tell my team. I told them this last week, and I told them this this morning. We had this incredible privilege of being in charge of the most important organization on earth, the U.S. government, and our military, and everything that we do for good around the world. And there’s a lot of work to be done to make government work better, to make Americans safer, to make opportunity available to more people, for us to be able to have a positive influence in every corner of the globe the way we’re doing right now in West Africa, and I am going to squeeze every last little bit of opportunity to help make this world a better place over these last two years.
Obama went on to say to Acosta:
The one thing I’m pretty confident about, Jim, is that I’m going to be busy for the next two years.  And the one thing I want the American people to be confident about is that everyday I’m going to be filling up my time trying to make their lives better.