“Democratic presidential front-runner and former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden mounted a fierce defense of Barack Obama’s legacy on Saturday after several of his White House rivals attacked that record in debates this week,” Reuters reports.
Said Biden: “I’m against any Democrat who wants to get rid of Obamacare.”
A source familiar with Barack Obama’s thinking wouldn’t tell CBS News whether the former president watched this week’s Democratic debates, but said Obama believes “his legacy is going to be fine, that there’s a staying power to it and the things under attack by this president are high water marks for the country.”
Former White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said that Barack Obama would have been impeached in “a nanosecond” if he behaved like President Trump, The Hill reports.
Said Jarrett: “I think that the standards have slipped dramatically and there’s no earthly way President Obama could have gotten away with any of this. Not just the words and the content, but just the policy reversals and what we’re doing to the fabric of our country.”
The Atlantic: “Barack Obama is literally more popular than Jesus among Democrats. Unfortunately, neither the former president nor any of the party’s 23 candidates currently seeking the 2020 nomination know quite what to do with that information.”
“For anyone who had any problems with Barack Obama, let’s just think about what we were troubled by – there were never any indictments.”
— Michelle Obama, quoted by The Independent.
Washington attorney Gregory Craig, who served as White House counsel for President Barack Obama, was charged Thursday with lying to federal officials who were examining whether he should have registered as a foreign lobbyist for legal work he did for the Ukrainian government in 2012, the Washington Post reports.
“Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig expects to be indicted in the coming days on charges stemming from work he performed for Ukraine in 2012,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Craig has refused to accept a plea deal, and the matter could be presented to a grand jury for indictment as soon as Thursday.”
New York Times: “Craig would become the first person who made his name in Democratic Party politics to be charged in a case linked to the special counsel’s investigation.”
New York Times: “The four-building, 19-acre ‘working center for citizenship,’ set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.”
“But the center, which will cost an estimated $500 million, will also differ from the complexes built by Barack Obama’s predecessors in another way: It won’t actually be a presidential library.”
“In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.”
A new Gallup poll finds Michelle Obama has unseated Hillary Clinton as the most admired woman in the U.S., claiming the title alongside her husband, former President Barack Obama, who has remained the most admired man for 11 straight years.
Michelle Obama is continuing her book tour and adding new cities to the lineup, People magazine reports.
Said Obama: “I’ve been so humbled by the response to the tour thus far and the overwhelming interest we’ve received from so many communities we weren’t able to visit this year. That’s why I’m thrilled that we’re able to expand our conversations to these new settings and wider audiences. I can’t wait to continue the discussions that have been so meaningful for me and, I hope, for so many others.”
Michelle Obama repeated that she has no intention of running for president, the New York Post reports.
Said Obama: “My path has never been politics. I just happened to marry somebody whose passion was politics. Just because he likes it doesn’t mean that I like it!”
Jenna Bush interviewed Michelle Obama on the Today Show and asked about the former First Lady’s relationship with her father, former President George W. Bush:
BUSH: He said, ‘Send her my love.’ And I thought, you know, it’s so interesting how people are so interested in y’all’s friendship. I mean that hug was, like, the hug that went around the world. I do love that picture.
OBAMA: That’s your dad. That’s, you — you know your dad. You know?
BUSH: Why do you think people are so hungry for that, though?
OBAMA: Because I think the political discourse, the way it’s shown in the media, is– it’s all the nasty parts of it. You know? Because I guess we’ve become a culture where the nasty sells. So people are just gonna keep feeding that. But the truth is much more complicated and complex than that. And I’d love if we as a country could get back to the place where we didn’t demonize people who disagreed with us. Because that’s essentially the difference between Republicans and Democrats. We’re all Americans. We all care about our family and our kids, and we’re trying to get ahead. We have different ideas about what’s the best way to get there. You know? But that doesn’t make me evil. And that doesn’t make him, you know, stupid.
BUSH: Yeah.
OBAMA: It’s just a disagreement and that’s how I feel about your father. You know? He’s a beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man and I don’t know that I agree with him on everything.
Former first lady Michelle Obama said her her new book, Becoming, that she will “never forgive” Donald Trump for stoking far-right “birtherism” theories about then-President Obama during his campaign, the Washington Post reports.
Said Obama: “The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”
New York Times: “For most of the last two years, he stewed about it in private, only occasionally speaking out. But as he hit the campaign trail this fall, Mr. Obama has vented his exasperation loud and often, assailing his successor in a sharper, more systematic way arguably than any former president has done in three-quarters of a century.”
“Although some admirers believe he remains too restrained in an era of Trumpian bombast, Mr. Obama has excoriated the incumbent for ‘lying’ and ‘fear-mongering’ and pulling ‘a political stunt’ by sending troops to the border. As he opened a final weekend of campaigning before Tuesday’s midterm elections, Mr. Obama has re-emerged as the Democrats’ most prominent face, pitting president versus president over the future of the country.”
Amy Walter: “While it’s true that Obama was a focal point of GOP anger and angst for the last eight years, he is no longer the most important act in politics. No one can or will overshadow Donald Trump. And, Donald Trump is going to make sure that’s the case.”
“The best thing that could happen for Republicans is not for Obama to become more vocal and active; it’s for Trump to become less vocal and less active. Ask any Republican in a tough campaign what they’d like most from Trump; it’d be to put down his phone, stop threatening to fire Jeff Sessions, and don’t say nice things about Putin. In just the last few weeks, he’s done all three.”
“For the last eight years, Republicans have had effective foils in Obama and Hillary Clinton. This year, however, their biggest impediment to keeping control of the Congress is their own party leader. There’s only so much traction that Obama-bashing will get Republicans if Trump remains as unpopular and polarizing as he is right now.”
“What is this damn fool doing coming out of retirement to break with the tradition of not attacking sitting presidents? That was my first thought.”
— Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R), quoted by The Hill, on Barack Obama’s return to the campaign trail.
Vice President Pence told Fox News that it was “very disappointing” to see former President Obama return to the campaign trail and “become so political.”
Said Pence: “It was very disappointing to see President Obama break with the tradition of former presidents, and become so political and roll out the same tired argument that he and liberals have made over the last eight years.”
Out next month: To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope by Jeanne Marie Laskas.
“Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given ten handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens—the unfiltered voice of a nation—from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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