On the Road with Obama

David Remnick has a must-read profile of President Obama:

“When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. ‘Now, that’s a slam dunk,’ the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book–the most ever for a work of nonfiction–and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.)…”

“Yet no post-Presidential project–even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs or Jimmy Carter’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa–can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.”