Question from Ed Henry: “Thank you, Mr. President.  I wanted to follow up on Israel and Iran because you have said repeatedly you have Israel’s back.  And so I wonder why, three years in office, you have not visited Israel as President.  And related to Iran and Israel, you have expressed concern about this loose talk of war, as you call it, driving up gas prices further.  Your critics will say on Capitol Hill that you want gas prices to go higher because you have said before, that will wean the American people off fossil fuels, onto renewable fuels.  How do you respond to that?”

President Obama: “Ed, just from a political perspective, do you think the President of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher?  Is that — is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense?

“Look, here’s the bottom line with respect to gas prices.  I want gas prices lower because they hurt families; because I meet folks every day who have to drive a long way to get to work and them filling up this gas tank gets more and more painful, and it’s a tax out of their pocketbooks, out of their paychecks, and a lot of folks are already operating on the margins right now.

“And it’s not good for the overall economy, because when gas prices go up, consumer spending oftentimes pulls back.  And we’re in the midst right now of a recovery that is starting to build up steam, and we don’t want to reverse it.

“What I have also said about gas prices is that there is no silver bullet and the only way we’re going to solve this problem over the medium and long term is with an all-of-the-above strategy that says we’re going to increase production — which has happened; we are going to make sure that we are conserving energy — that’s why we doubled fuel efficiency standards on cars, which will save consumers about $1.7 trillion and take about 12 billion barrels of oil offline, which will help to reduce prices — and we’re going develop clean energy technologies that allow us to continue to use less oil.

“And we’ve made progress."

Watch it below:

Below is a video of the entire press conference:

Click here for a transcript of the entire press conference.