“So for me, this day is not just about what has happened. It’s also about what could happen. Because a girl like me, she was never supposed to be up there next to Jacqueline Kennedy and Dolley Madison. She was never supposed to live in this house, and she definitely wasn’t supposed to serve as first lady.”
— Michelle Obama, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, at the unveiling of her White House portrait.
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden welcomed back Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for the formal unveiling of their White House portraits.
Barack Obama says the artist who painted Michelle captured her “grace, her intelligence — and the fact that she’s fine.”
He then joked that the artist who painted his portrait “talked me out of wearing a tan suit.”
Barack Obama won the best narrator Emmy for his work on the Netflix documentary series, “Our Great National Parks,” the AP reports.
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“President Joe Biden will host former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at the White House in early September for the unveiling of their official White House portraits,” NBC News reports.
“The traditional East Room ceremony unveiling the Obamas’ portraits, usually a moment where the sitting president and first lady fête their immediate predecessors, was put off while then-President Donald Trump was in office given the bitter, estranged relationship between the two men.”
Barack Obama congratulated Jacob Philadelphia, the young boy who famously touched Obama’s head in an iconic photo, on his high school graduation.
Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) suggested that former President Barack Obama is behind the effort to establish a Disinformation Governance Board, which she likened to George Orwell’s famed “Ministry of Truth,” Yahoo News reports.
She added: “Biden is just a front man.”
Former President Barack Obama railed against disinformation in a speech at Stanford University saying he regrets not combating its spread during his presidency.
Said Obama: “What does still nag at me though was my failure to fully appreciate at the time just how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of disinformation myself.”
He added: “You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing, that citizens no longer know what to believe.”
Former President Barack Obama will return to the White House on Tuesday for the first time since leaving office to promote the Affordable Care Act in an event alongside President Joe Biden, NBC News reports.
Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) falsely claimed that Donald Trump “caught” Osama bin Laden while he was president, USA Today reports.
“Trump was a private citizen in 2011, when President Barack Obama authorized the mission that killed bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader and architect of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.”
“The former diplomats and defense officials who visited the U.S. Naval Observatory in early 2015 were seeking a receptive audience — and they found one in Vice President Joe Biden. Russia had taken over the Ukrainian territory of Crimea the previous year and fueled a bloody separatist uprising in the country’s east, and the officials urgently wanted President Barack Obama to send Ukraine advanced antitank missiles, called Javelins,” the Washington Post reports.
“Sure enough, Obama rejected the request, fearing that providing lethal aid to Ukraine would escalate tensions with Russia.”
“Now Biden, as president, is finally doing what he could not do then. He has provided Ukraine with more than $2 billion in security assistance since the start of his administration, including small arms, body armor and other munitions — including, of course, Javelins.”
After Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) tweeted that President Biden was “not all mentally there” and “brain dead,” former White House photographer Pete Souza responded:
“Hey Ronny, I didn’t know you were a liar when you sat next to me in the spare limousine, but I could tell you were often hung over on foreign trips. I have photos in the archive to prove it (since we preserved all Presidential records).”
Former President Barack Obama will speak to the House Democratic caucus on Thursday, NBC News reports.
The private meeting is organized by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the caucus chair, and is expected to take place virtually.
Former President Barack Obama said in a statement that he wouldn’t be president were it not for the late Sen. Harry Reid’s “encouragement and support.”
He added in a letter to Reid shortly before his death: “I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”
Jeff Bezos has given $100 million to the Obama Foundation, Puck reports.
“The gift, the largest single donation ever made to the Foundation, has no restrictions on its use. But it is very common, and increasingly controversial, for major donors to be granted some naming honor in return for a donation of that size, be it a Sackler wing of The Louvre or a Koch theater at Lincoln Center. In this instance, though, Bezos asked for the public plaza near the center to be named the John Lewis Plaza, after the late congressman and civil rights icon — part of an intentional strategy, the foundation said, to ‘change the paradigm around naming.'”
Former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama officially break ground on their Obama Presidential Center on Tuesday with construction in Chicago’s historic Jackson Park actually kicking off in August, the Chicago Sun Times reports.
“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.”
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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