The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

So just about every aspect of American power and its role in people’s lives since World War II lurks somewhere in Obama’s background—our capacity to keep the peace abroad and to disrupt it; our capacity to transform individual lives through both our generosity and our callousness; the allure of our democratic values and our imperfection in realizing them. Yet the strangeness of this background to many Americans left plenty of space for people to misunderstand or misrepresent how it impacted his view of American foreign policy.

“Because it’s my job to calm folks down, not to scare them. I expect it from Trump. But someone like Jeb Bush should know better. He does know better.

“I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.”