“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.
Out next week: A Promised Land by Barack Obama.
Obama will be interviewed on 60 Minutes this weekend.
“Barack Obama had always intended to sit out the first presidential election of his post-presidency, taking heed of the private guidance given to him from Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush,” CNN reports.
“Obama vastly preferred governing to campaigning, his friends have long known, so they believed him when he said he looked forward to watching from the sidelines. But those plans were tossed aside by the election of President Trump and his first term in office.”
“Obama is poised to return to the campaign trail here on Wednesday, making his first in-person appearance in his effort to help Joe Biden in the waning days of his bid for the White House. If the election of Trump was a reaction to the Obama presidency, the November race offers another opportunity to take the country’s measure of the men.”
Former President Barack Obama’s memoir will be published in two volumes — with a 768-page Volume 1, A Promised Land, out November 17 in 25 languages.
There is not yet a release date for the second volume.
New York Times: “Demand for the book is expected to be extraordinary, and Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, has ordered a first printing for the U.S. edition of 3 million copies. To accommodate such an enormous order, Crown plans to print about 1 million of those books in Germany and has arranged for three ships, outfitted with 112 shipping containers, to bring those copies to the United States.”
Barack Obama posted a video conversation with Sen. Kamala Harris “to share a few tips about serving alongside our friend Joe Biden.”
Daily Show: “Sure, 180,000 Americans have died from coronavirus on Trump’s watch, but six years ago today, President Obama wore a tan suit.”
President Trump on Twitter: “Looking back into history, the response by the ObamaBiden team to the H1N1 Swine Flu was considered a weak and pathetic one. Check out the polling, it’s really bad.”
Here’s Gallup from April 2009: “Americans give the Obama administration high marks for its handling so far of the continuing spread of swine flu, or H1N1 virus, in the United States… 66% of Americans say they approve of how the administration is handling the situation, while 16% disapprove and 17% have no opinion.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) tore into his fellow Republicans on Fox News for considering a coronavirus relief package that could cost more than $1 trillion.
Said Paul: “I am very upset with my colleagues. They went 8 years. They should apologize now to President Obama for complaining he was spending and borrowing too much. He was a piker compared to their borrowing and what they’re doing now.”
Axios: “Paul’s comments, while tongue-in-cheek, underscore the divisions within the Senate Republican conference, where as many as 20 GOP senators are likely to vote against any coronavirus relief bill — even if a deal is reached between Democrats and Trump administration.”
Michelle Obama said in a new episode of her podcast that she is “dealing with some form of low-grade depression” this year.
Said Obama: “Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting.”
She added: “I have to say that waking up to the news, waking up to how this administration has or has not responded, waking up to yet another story of a Black man or a Black person somehow being dehumanized, or hurt or killed, or falsely accused of something, it is exhausting. And it has led to a weight that I haven’t felt in my life, in a while.”
President Trump accused his predecessor, Barack Obama, of treason, without offering any evidence or details to back up his claim, the Washington Post reports.
The president has frequently accused others of “treason,” but Monday marked the first time that he has leveled that claim against the man who preceded him in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama, writing on Medium:
“Ultimately, it’s going to be up to a new generation of activists to shape strategies that best fit the times. But I believe there are some basic lessons to draw from past efforts that are worth remembering. First, the waves of protests across the country represent a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system in the United States…”
“Second, I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more…”
“So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both.”
“I think it’s fine. It’s the flu. It’s the flu… It’s going to be handled. It’s going to come. It’s going to be bad. And maybe it will be worse than the normal flu seasons. And it’s going to go away. I think it is being handled fine. I think the words are right.”
— Donald Trump, on Fox News, on April 24, 2009, commenting on the Obama administration’s response to H1N1 Swine Flu.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) walked back comments made earlier this week that the Obama administration didn’t leave behind a “game plan” for a pandemic, The Hill reports.
Said McConnell: “I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan. I clearly made a mistake in that regard.”
President Trump called former national security adviser Michael Flynn “an even greater warrior” and “an innocent man” after the Justice Department dropped charges against him, the Daily Beast reports.
Said Trump: “Now in my book he’s an even greater warrior. What happened to him should never happen again.”
He then insisted that Flynn was “targeted” by the Obama administration, saying that “they are dishonest people” and then accused them of “treason.”
Former White House photographer Pete Souza posts an old photo of Barack Obama in a grocery store with the caption: “POTUS with a peach as opposed to an impeached POTUS.”
CNN: “Trump has been lambasting Obama for years, even before he ran for the top job. Recently, though he’s been doing it more often. A November analysis from CNN’s Daniel Dale shows Trump has mentioned Obama and the Obama administration by name more frequently in the past 18 months than he had in the first 18 months of his presidency.”
Writes Dale: “Through October, Trump had mentioned Obama by name 537 times during 2019 as a whole — an average of 1.8 times per day.”
“As President Trump’s allies rushed to defend his decision to authorize a drone strike that killed Iran’s top military commander, many have focused less on Qasem Soleimani than another once-prominent actor in Middle East affairs: former president Barack Obama,” the Washington Post reports.
“For Trump, the true measure of the dramatic and risky military operation will become clear over time, as the United States braces for a potential retaliatory strike from Iran that could embroil his administration in the kind of complex and intractable Middle East conflict he had pledged to avoid. But amid the immediate fallout from Soleimani’s death, the president and his defenders rushed to declare that Trump had bested his predecessor in standing up to a malign foreign power.”
“Trump, former aides said, has burned with a desire to erase Obama’s foreign policy legacy and prove himself a superior commander in chief.”
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.