On and Off the Road with Barack Obama. Obama. Hard as it has been to pass legislation, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all- consuming. Credit Photographs by Pari Dukovic. On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy- lidded annoyance.
The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent. This had happened before.
In 2. 01. 0, after taking a self- described . He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. The pundits were declaring 2. Presidency. The Republicans had been sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years earlier, and Health. Care. gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward Snowden.
The congressional Republicans quashed nearly all legislation as a matter of principle and shut down the government for sixteen days, before relenting out of sheer tactical confusion and embarrassment. He sighed, slumping in his chair. The night before, Iran had agreed to freeze its nuclear program for six months. A final pact, if one could be arrived at, would end the prospect of a military strike on Iran. An agreement could even help normalize relations between the United States and Iran for the first time since the Islamic Revolution, in 1. Obama put the odds of a final accord at less than even, but, still, how was this not good news? The answer had arrived with breakfast.
The Saudis, the Israelis, and the Republican leadership made their opposition known on the Sunday- morning shows and through diplomatic channels. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, called the agreement a . Now he was headed for a three- day fund- raising trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, rattling the cup in one preposterous mansion after another. The prospect was dispiriting. Obama had already run his last race, and the chances that the Democratic Party will win back the House of Representatives in the 2. The Democrats could, in fact, lose the Senate.
For an important trip abroad, Air Force One is crowded with advisers, military aides, Secret Service people, support staff, the press pool. This trip was smaller, and I was along for the ride, sitting in a guest cabin with a couple of aides and a staffer who was tasked with keeping watch over a dark suit bag with a tag reading . At one point on the trip from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for a conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami Dolphins. Slender as a switch, he wore a white shirt and dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high- backed leather chair. As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game.
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Reports of multiple concussions and retired players with early- onset dementia had been in the news all year, and so, before I left, I asked if he didn. It is no longer a secret.
Mineola Historical Museum features art, music, film, and other aspects of the E. Texas town's rich history! Click through the pictures to see what's in store inside.
His carriage and the cadence of his conversation are usually so measured that I was thrown by the lingering habit, the trace of indiscipline. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, . And, after a miserable year, Obama.
On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its. Most of us grew up being told that foods like red meat, eggs and bacon raise our cholesterol levels, and few question this belief. But is it really true?
Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House, in 2. His biggest early disappointment as President was being forced to recognize that his romantic vision of a post- partisan era, in which there are no red states or blue states, only the United States, was, in practical terms, a fantasy. It was a difficult fantasy to relinquish. The spirit of national conciliation was more than the rhetorical pixie dust of Obama. It was also an elemental component of his self- conception, his sense that he was uniquely suited to transcend ideology and the grubby battles of the day. Obama is defensive about this now.
It was a description of what I saw in the American people. The debate over the proper scale and scope of the federal government dates to the Founders, but it has intensified since the Reagan revolution. Both Bill Clinton and Obama have spent as much time defending progressive advances. The Republican Party is living through the late- mannerist phase of that revolution, fuelled less by ideas than by resentments.
The moderate Republican tradition is all but gone, and the reactionaries who claim Reagan. Obama can never be opposed vehemently enough. The dream of bipartisan co. The President talked of the election breaking the . The second Inaugural Address was the most liberal since the nineteen- sixties.
Obama pledged to take ambitious action on climate change, immigration, gun control, voting rights, infrastructure, tax reform. He warned of a nation at . Then came 2. 01. 3, annus horribilis. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation.
Obama lost among white voters in 2. American history.
The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. The flip side is I think it. And yet Obama still makes every effort to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the unifying moment were still out there somewhere in the middle distance. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process.
As Obama, a fan of the . Obama and his adviser Valerie Jarrett stood for a moment on the tarmac gazing at Mt. Rainier, the snow a candied pink. They got in the car and headed for town. It is armored with ceramic, titanium, aluminum, and steel to withstand bomb blasts, and it is sealed in case of biochemical attack.
The doors are as heavy as those on a Boeing 7. The tires are gigantic . A supply of blood matching the President.
A Claes Oldenburg safety pin loomed in the dark. The Beast pulled up to Shirley. The Dow is more than twice what it was when Obama took office, in 2. Second World War; the financial crisis of 2.
Obama bruised some feelings once or twice with remarks about . In 2. 01. 1, at an annual dinner he holds at the White House with American historians, he asked the group to help him find a language in which he could address the problem of growing inequality without being accused of class warfare.
Inside Shirley. The house measures more than twenty- seven thousand square feet. There are only two bedrooms.
In the library, the President went through a familiar fund- raiser routine: a pre- event private . Near some very artistic furniture, I stood with Valerie Jarrett, Obama. To admirers, Jarrett is known as . Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, David Plouffe, and many others in the Administration have clashed with her.
While we were waiting for Obama to speak to the group, I asked Jarrett whether the health- care rollout had been the worst political fiasco Obama had confronted so far. Like all Obama advisers, she was convinced that the problems would get . That was the hope and that was the spin.
And then she said something that I. First ingratiation, then gratitude, then answers. He expressed awe at the sight of Mt.
Being in Seattle, he said, made him . Even in front of West Coast liberals, he is always careful to disavow liberalism. He tried to rally the Democrats and expressed dismay with the opposition. A few minutes later, the motorcade was snaking through the streets of suburban Seattle.
He could hear nothing. The windows of his car are five inches thick. III. Senator Lindsey Graham, who is facing a primary challenge from four Tea Party candidates in South Carolina, was saying with utter confidence that Iran had hoodwinked the Administration in Geneva. Next came a poll showing that the majority of the country now believed that the President was neither truthful nor honest.
The announcer added with a smile that GQ had put Obama at No. In college, he became interested in politics and later joined Obama. From there, he volunteered at the White House, which led to a string of staff jobs, and eventually he was doing advance work all over the world for the White House. The aides on the plane were like Tiller. Dan Pfeiffer, who has been with Obama since 2.
And sometimes the things that start small may turn out to be fairly significant. Obama was to give a speech on immigration. Out the window, you could see people waving, people hoisting their babies as if to witness history, people holding signs protesting one issue or another. Obama gets to events like these through underground hallways, industrial kitchens, holding rooms.
At the Ong Center, he met with his hosts and their children. Obama tries to put them at ease: ! Obama was delighted: ! From long experience, Obama has learned what works for him in pictures: a broad, toothy smile. A millisecond after the flash, the sash releases, the smile drops, a curtain falling.
A little later, Betty Ong. Obama drew them into a huddle. I heard him saying that Betty was a hero, though . Bill Clinton was, and is, the master, a hyper- extrovert whose freakish memory for names and faces, and whose indomitable will to enfold and charm everyone in his path, remains unmatched. Obama can be a dynamic speaker before large audiences and charming in very small groups, but, like a normal human being and unlike the near- pathological personalities who have so often held the office, he is depleted by the act of schmoozing a group of a hundred as if it were an intimate gathering.