8:04 p.m. ET update: President Obama says “this was an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people.”
Original story:
President Barack Obama is poised to deliver a rare prime-time address from the Oval Office on Sunday to reassure anxious Americans that his administration will protect them from the threat posed by ISIS.
The speech comes amid rising public concern about terrorism following last week’s shooting in San Bernardino, California, in which a Muslim couple killed 14 people and wounded 21 before dying in a gun battle with police.
His remarks also come as public distrust in his management of the U.S. anti-terrorism effort, which was once a strength that helped him re-election in 2012, is rising. Terrorism, national security and the place of Muslims in U.S. society have become a contentious 2016 campaign issue and are dominating the political conversation more than at any time since the September 11 attacks in 2001.
In a new CNN/ORC poll released on Sunday, 60% of Americans disapproved of Obama’s handling of terrorism — up nine points since May. Two thirds of those polled, meanwhile, said they disapproved of the president’s handling of ISIS.
The poll was conducted before the attacks in San Bernardino and also showed a shift in public opinion on how to tackle the group with a majority — 53% — for the first time saying the U.S. should send ground troops to fight ISIS. And 68% said the American response to the group’s rise had not been sufficiently aggressive.
Those figures reflect Obama’s struggle so far to convince critics he has a viable strategy for destroying ISIS in its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Obama has also been accused of downplaying the threat from the group for political reasons.
The gravity of the occasion was underscored by Obama’s decision to use the symbolic power of the Oval Office for a formal televised address for only the third time in his presidency, following remarks on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the end of the combat operations in the Iraq war in 2010.
He goes into the speech under intense pressure to strike a rhetorical note equal to the moment, following a string of comments about ISIS that left him vulnerable to claims by opponents that he had not taken the group’s rise seriously.
Obama has variously referred to ISIS as a “JV” team, said it was “contained” and described its fighters as “killers with good social media” despite its widening footprint in the Middle East and apparent turn to attacking soft Western targets in recent weeks.
Republicans have redoubled attacks following the California killings to fire up a hawkish party base ahead of early nominating contests and to suggest that Obama’s policy isn’t working and that the president does not understand the threat.