Obama stressed in a White House news conference that he was open to make compromise and open to new ideas.

"Our economy is still recovering from a very deep and damaging crisis, so our top priority has to be jobs and growth," noted Obama.

After the elections, Washington is still much the same as it was before, with the White House and Senate under the Democrats' control, leaving the House of Representatives at the GOP's hand. If both parties cannot reach agreement on issues like tax increases and spending cuts, a corresponding reduction as steep as a cliff in the federal budget will take place at the very beginning of 2013.

If "Congress fails to act by the end of this year, everybody's taxes will automatically go up," warned Obama. "We cannot afford to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. What we can do is make sure that middle-class taxes don't go up... If we get that in place, we are actually removing half of the fiscal cliff."

Obama admitted it was not possible for the Republicans simply to adopt his plan and said that "not everybody gets 100 percent of what they want, and not everybody is going to be perfectly happy.