“The party plans had been months in the making and many invitees had already arrived on Martha’s Vineyard when former President Barack Obama belatedly announced he was canceling his huge 60th birthday bash scheduled for Saturday,” the New York Times reports.

Said an Obama spokeswoman: “Due to the new spread of the Delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends. He’s appreciative of others sending their birthday wishes from afar and looks forward to seeing people soon.”

“Former President Barack Obama, once a community organizer, has gotten a taste of community organizing himself as preservationists and other activists have slowed the construction of his presidential center,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library welcomed visitors just more than 1,000 days after Mr. Reagan’s last day in office. Bill Clinton’s took 1,398 days.”

“It is likely the Obama center will open more than 3,100 days after the 44th president left the White House.”

“Barack Obama once mordantly quipped that Donald Trump’s appeal to white Americans was similar to the way Black Americans showed support for O.J. Simpson during his 1990s murder trial and subsequent acquittal, according to a new book by a former aide,” People magazine reports.

Said Obama: “Trump is for a lot of white people what O.J.’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks—you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”

“Motherfuckers, I’m aloof with you because I don’t want to talk to you.”

— Barack Obama, quoted by Insider, about reporters who saw him as “aloof.”

From the new book, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere.

“I operate off the proposition that if Obama had not been, ‘We’re not going to look back, we’re only going to look forward,’ the Trumpsters would have been a lot less bold about doing the reckless damage that they did.”

— Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), quoted by the New Republic, on why the Biden administration should be doing more to investigate past actions by the Trump administration.

NBC News: “Both presidents inherited a crisis-ravaged economy, but their signature 100-day achievements look markedly different: Biden’s stimulus plan was about 2½ times the size of President Barack Obama’s. It was easy for voters to understand, centered on popular $1,400 cash payments for most people, while Obama’s stimulus program was criticized as being too small and complicated, delivering small-dollar benefits in paychecks that polls showed many people didn’t even notice.”

“While Obama pared back his stimulus to win Republican votes, Biden met with Republicans once before he opted for a special process to go it alone. While conservative deficit hawks reined in Obama, Biden has brushed them off, arguing that now is the time to spend big. While Obama was hesitant to brag about his achievements, Biden’s team regularly takes credit for the receding pandemic — and voters give him high marks.”

CNN: How Biden anchored his first 100 days on two simple principles.

“Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood took $50,000 from an associate of a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire at the center of a sprawling scheme of illegal foreign campaign contributions,” Axios reports.

“LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois and a member of President Obama’s Cabinet, agreed to repay the money, pay a $40,000 fine and cooperate with prosecutors to settle the matter.”

Philip Bump has a telling look at some of the big-name CPAC speakers from — and what happened to them in the years to come.

“Trump was followed by Rep. Mia Love (R-UT), former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and radio host Glenn Beck. Love was seen as a rising star in the GOP, a Black woman elected from Utah. But two years later she would lose her reelection bid — and be mocked by President Trump for not being sufficiently loyal to him. Bolton ran afoul of Trump even more dramatically, writing a tell-all book about his tumultuous tenure in the White House.”

“Beck, though, is probably the most instructive inclusion. Before the 2016 election, when it seemed likely that Trump would lose, Beck excoriated him as ‘an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity’ But, like so much of the conservative right, when Trump took power, Beck slipped back into the flock.”

Barack Obama told Jonathan Chait that while he didn’t keep a checklist, he did keep track of his policies Donald Trump either rolled back or tried to dismantle.

Said Obama: “I don’t have a checklist in my desk where I’m like, All right, this survived, that they tried to reverse but weren’t organized enough to do. I do pay attention. I have paid attention to those areas where what the Trump administration attempted to do did some serious damage and where it’s more of a short-term setback on what is a long-term success.”

More specifically, Obama said the Affordable Care Act “remains robust” but “when it comes to some of our climate-change regulations, there’s been some damage done.”

“I will say that I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life. But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing… I guess I would not have expected someone who has complete disdain for ordinary people to be able to get attention and then the following from those very same people.”

— Barack Obama, in an interview with The Atlantic.

“What I think is indisputable is that I signified a shift in power. Just my mere presence worried folks, in some cases explicitly, in some cases subconsciously. And then there were folks around to exploit that and tap into that.”

— Barack Obama, in an interview with The Atlantic.