They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true,” he writes, adding: “In fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.” “In that sense, there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. Trump, who Obama said phoned the White House in 2010 to offer his assistance helping plug an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (he was turned down), had determined that saying or behaving in ways previously seen as distasteful or unacceptable now earned him constant media attention. But Obama writes he came to regard Trump’s media ubiquity and characteristic shamelessness as merely an exaggerated version of the Republican Party’s attempts to appeal to White Americans’ anxieties about the first Black president – a sentiment he said “had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center – an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. ![]() Trump’s antics were seen initially in the White House as a joke. ![]() Obama’s views of his successor come through clearest in his recounting of the period in 2011 when Trump was fanning the racist lie that Obama was not born in the United States. “Not a perfect union, but a more perfect union,” he said. “I believe he really did put his country first.”ĭuring an interview with CBS’ Scott Pelley that aired Sunday evening on “60 Minutes,” Obama said he titled the book “A Promised Land” because “even though we may not get there in our lifetimes, even if – we experience hardships and disappointments along the way – that I at least still have faith we can create a more perfect union.” “I’d like to think that given the chance to do it over again, he might have chosen differently,” Obama writes. Obama writes that he “wonder(s) sometimes” about whether 2008 Republican nominee John McCain would still have picked Palin if he had known “her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party’s center and the country’s politics overall in a direction he abhorred.” AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images US President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump to update him on transition planning in the Oval Office at the White House on Novemin Washington,DC. But that introspection also offers a window into how Obama saw the opposing party change from his 2008 campaign to when he handed over the White House to Trump in 2017. Mitch McConnell and then House Speaker John Boehner. The timeliest reflections, however, come when Obama delves into the politics of Washington, particularly the work he put into negotiations with Republicans like Republican leader Sen. “It just proved that… I’d failed to rally the nation, as FDR had once done, behind what I knew to be right. “As far as I was concerned, the election didn’t prove our agenda had been wrong,” Obama writes of 2010. Yet he also acknowledges his own shortcomings on a range of topics, like calling his failure to pass immigration reform “a bitter pill to swallow” and acknowledging that the economy “stank” as he headed into the 2010 midterms, where Republicans reclaimed the House of Representatives on the back of the Tea Party movement. Throughout, Obama casts his presidency as comprised of hard choices, sometimes made more difficult by internal disputes, mismanagement by the previous administration and obstructionism by Republicans, which he suggests was rooted in an attempt to appeal to anxieties about the first Black president. ![]() “Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party – xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks – were finding their way to center stage,” Obama writes Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Imagesīut some of his most thoughtful examination comes at the expense of the party that opposed him and how it evolved during his eight years in office, starting with the elevation of Sarah Palin to the Republican presidential ticket in 2008. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House in Washington, DC.
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