Obama Talks Education, Immigration at Univision Town Hall

President Obama took part in a Univision Town Hall Meeting with Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas in Florida.

Overall, Latinos make up 13.1 percent of Florida's more than 11.2 million registered voters. Among Latino registered voters, 452,619 are registered as Republicans, making up 11.1 percent of all Republican registered voters. And 564,513 Latino registered voters are registered as Democrats, representing 12.4 percent of all Democratic registered voters.

The moderators pressed Obama about a promise he made in 2008 to make immigration his top priority and Obama acknowledged that not keeping is promise was his "biggest failure."

"What I'll say is that - that I haven't gotten everything done that I wanted to get done," Obama said. "And that's why I'm running for a second term - because we've still got more work to do. The actions we took in terms of deferred action give us the basis now to get something done for the DREAMers, to get comprehensive immigration reform done."

The president blamed Republicans for not supporting immigration reform.

"Even though we controlled the House of Representatives, even though we had a majority in the Senate, the way the Senate operates was if you couldn't get 60 votes you couldn't get something moving," Obama explained. "So we initiated the meetings, had a series of meetings. And what we could not get was a single Republican, including the 20 who had previously voted for comprehensive immigration reform, to step up and say, we will work with you to make this happen."

Obama said he has never wavered in his support of comprehensive immigration reform.

"We did put forward a DREAM Act that was passed in the House, got the overwhelming majority of support from Democrats in the Senate, and was blocked by the Republican Party," Obama said. "We now are confronted with a choice between two candidates in which the candidate sitting here with you today is committed to comprehensive immigration reform, is committed to the DREAM Act, has taken administrative actions to prevent young people from being deported. And that stands in contrast with the other candidate who has said he would veto the DREAM Act, that he is uncertain about what his plan for immigration reform would be, and who considers the Arizona law a model for the nation and has suggested that the main solution for immigration is self-deportation."

The president has made the largest number of deportations in history - more than 1.5 million so far.

Obama also used the time to talk about education. Only one out of 10 Hispanic graduates from college and the dropout rate among Hispanics is 15 percent.

"Some of the work that we've done over the last four years to make sure that the student loan interest rate stays low, expanding Pell grants for millions of students, including millions of Latino students, so that we are seeing the highest college enrollment rate among Latino students in history," Obama said. "All that is going to help to contribute to us being able to deal with the problem of secondary and high school educations because you're going to be inspiring a whole lot of students to say, I can do that, too; I can achieve that dream."

Obama took some heat about what he said about the political heat on Capitol Hill.

"You can't change Washington from the inside, you can only change Washington from the outside," he said. "That's how the big accomplishments like health care got done, because we mobilized the American people to speak out."

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney jumped on that comment, saying it was an admission of failure by Obama.

"The president today threw the white flag of surrender again," the former Massachusetts governor said in Sarasota. "His slogan was 'Yes we can,' his slogan is now, 'No, I can't.'"

Obama urged Latinos "get out there and you've got to make sure that you express that with your ballot."

"I would say that the work that we've done on education, on immigration, on housing, on putting people back to work, on making sure that small businesses have access to financing - those are all issues that are representative of what you care about, your values," Obama said.