Josh Owens
asked
Barack Obama:
How did you approach the challenge of describing how it feels to be the President, as well as just a narrative of your time in office? Did you feel pulled more towards one or the other approach?
Barack Obama
Well, I tried to do it concurrently, and it wasn’t as hard as you suggest, because even as I was handling the job, I’m still a human being! I looked for any opportunity to break up a narrative of my time in office with all the funny, poignant, or absurd moments that make up the presidency. What it’s like to visit a small town with all the larger-than-life trappings of the presidency, but also the ways Michelle kept me grounded. What it’s like the night before taking the oath of office, when a military aide shows you that suddenly, you have power to blow up the world, but also what it’s like when you’re weighing a heavy decision and two young girls and a dog bound into your office. There’s a pretty good story in there about how they came up with a secret alias for me so that we could go to the zoo together.
You don’t put your humanity aside when entering the White House. When making decisions, there’s an extent to which you have to be detached and analytical, sure. But I was still plenty pissed while trying to figure out how to plug a hole thousands of feet down in the Gulf of Mexico. Easy decisions don’t reach the President’s desk. If they were easy, someone else would have figured them out already. The decisions that hit the President’s desk are fifty-fifty. So you have to think about the greater good, even if it might not align one hundred percent with your own impulses. But when considering economic decisions, I’d read a lot of letters people wrote me to remind myself how they were feeling, and how my choices might affect their lives. Weighing decisions to send troops into harm’s way, at least for me, required spending time with wounded warriors at Walter Reed, and remembering that even though our troops sign up for this, they’re also somebody’s child, or spouse, or parent. The point is, cold, hard analysis has its place, but we’re also operating in the real world here.
You don’t put your humanity aside when entering the White House. When making decisions, there’s an extent to which you have to be detached and analytical, sure. But I was still plenty pissed while trying to figure out how to plug a hole thousands of feet down in the Gulf of Mexico. Easy decisions don’t reach the President’s desk. If they were easy, someone else would have figured them out already. The decisions that hit the President’s desk are fifty-fifty. So you have to think about the greater good, even if it might not align one hundred percent with your own impulses. But when considering economic decisions, I’d read a lot of letters people wrote me to remind myself how they were feeling, and how my choices might affect their lives. Weighing decisions to send troops into harm’s way, at least for me, required spending time with wounded warriors at Walter Reed, and remembering that even though our troops sign up for this, they’re also somebody’s child, or spouse, or parent. The point is, cold, hard analysis has its place, but we’re also operating in the real world here.
More Answered Questions
Jeffrey Keeten
asked
Barack Obama:
In the prologue of his book The World as It Is, which is also a chapter in your book, (Did Rhodes poach that title from you? :-) ), Ben Rhodes shares this scene where you both muse about the implications of the successful election of Donald Trump. ”’I don’t know,’ [you] said. ‘Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or twenty years too early.’” Do you still believe that to be true?
Cindy
asked
Barack Obama:
You talk about how technology and the internet helped secure your presidency, but that you could not anticipate “how one day many of the same tools that had put me in the White House would be deployed in opposition to everything I stood for.” With how often misinformation spreads on social media, do you believe, if you had run for president today, our tumultuous state of the internet would have helped or hindered you?
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