“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.
Gregory Craig Indicted for Making False Statements
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.
Ex-Obama White House Counsel Expects to Be Indicted
“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.”
The Obama Library Won’t Actually Be a Library
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.”
Obamas Are Most Admired
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 Adds Cities to Her Tour
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 Says No to White House Bid Again
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!”
Exchange of the Day
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.
Michelle Obama Won’t Forgive Trump for ‘Birther’ Claims
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.”
An Energized Obama Now Calls Out Trump
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.”
This Election Is About Trump, Not Obama
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.”
Extra Bonus Quote of the Day
“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.
Pence ‘Disappointed’ Obama Broke Tradition
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.”
Dear Mr. President
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.”
West Wingers
Out next month: West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House by Gautam Raghavan.
“The Obama White House staff invites us behind-the-scenes of history for a deeply personal and moving look at the presidency and how a president’s staff can change the nation.”
Shade
This looks really great: Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents by Pete Souza.
“Shade is a portrait in Presidential contrasts, telling the tale of the Obama and Trump administrations through a series of visual juxtapositions. Here, more than one hundred of Souza’s unforgettable images of President Obama deliver new power and meaning when framed by the tweets, news headlines, and quotes that defined the first 500 days of the Trump White House.”
Trump Quietly Erases Obama’s Legacy
Axios: “The administration is allowing the sale of health insurance plans that undermine some of the main rules of the Affordable Care Act. And today, it will freeze federal fuel efficiency standards, undermining Obama’s goal of making them progressively tougher.”
“This is being done through rulemaking, which gets the attention of health care and environmental reporters, yet flies under the radar of the cable news networks. These moves have huge, long-term consequences — and they show how easily Trump can achieve his policy goals while the TV cameras are focused on the outrage of the day.”
‘How I Miss Obama’
Max Boot: “I say that as someone who worked to defeat him: I was a foreign policy adviser to John McCain in 2008 and to Mitt Romney in 2012. I criticized Obama’s ‘lead from behind’ foreign policy that resulted in a premature pullout from Iraq and a failure to stop the slaughter in Syria. I thought he was too weak on Iran and too tough on Israel. I feared that Obamacare would be too costly. I fumed that he was too professorial and too indecisive. I was left cold by his arrogance and his cult of personality.”
“Now I would take Obama back in a nanosecond. His presidency appears to be a lost golden age when reason and morality reigned. All of his faults, real as they were, fade into insignificance compared with the crippling defects of his successor. And his strengths — seriousness, dignity, intellect, probity, dedication to ideals larger than self — shine all the more clearly in retrospect.”
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