Oval Office

4:58 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it is a great pleasure to welcome these newly elected governors to the Oval Office. They represent a wide variety of states but they all have a common interest, and that is making sure that their constituents — who are also my constituents — are able to gain opportunity, work hard, prosper, feel secure. And that happens best when we work together, whether we’re talking about Democrats and Republicans and independents working together, or whether we’re talking about state, federal and local officials working together.

So I’m looking forward to having a great conversation with them on how we can build on some of the progress that’s already been made. This morning, we had a great jobs report showing over 300,000 new jobs created. We now have seen 57 straight months of private-sector job growth and the most jobs created this year since the 1990s. That’s due to a lot of factors, but the main reason is because we’ve got great businesses and great workers. But what we want to make sure is that the government is not an impediment but is instead an accelerant of that kind of job growth, and I know that all the governors here feel the same way.

So I’m looking forward to talking to them about how we can help on education, transportation, the health and safety of their people. And my main message to them is that we’re here to help. The good news about governors is they usually don’t have time to be ideological because people expect them to deliver. And that’s very much my attitude going into my last two years of office. So I look forward to having an opportunity to get to know all of them individually, but also to be able to deliver on behalf of their people.

Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you so much.

END
5:01 P.M. EST