it's not surprising that Obama believes the thing about difficult choices because that's been liberal ideology since at least Clinton was president. Probably got more severe when West Wing was airing. That's their entire thing, when a Democrat president does something bad, it's because they had to make a hard choice between something bad and something worse, and so we should be thankful the good serene wise Democrat had the foresight to prevent as much harm as possible. Liberals don't believe in doing good things, they only believe it's possible to mitigate worse things.