Why does i could be the next obama

Bill, laying the groundwork for our great middle class and decades of prosperity. Today, a similar commitment is required, not only to prepare our kids to outcompete workers around the world, but to prepare America to outcompete nations around the world. Just as we are rising to meet our education challenge, we must rise to meet our energy challenge. Meanwhile, other nations—from China to Germany—are racing to build a clean energy future, recognizing that it holds the key to new jobs and new industries in this young century.

If we hope to continue leading the global economy, America must place first in that race. They rest on the bookshelves in the Oval Office, and I see them every day. US elections Can Barack Obama become vice-president? Imran Khan. Shah Mahmood Qureshi. China Coronavirus. Taliban News. This story is from October 19, What would have happened if former US president Barack Obama had decided to contest for the post of vice-president? Is he eligible to do so?

It was hard to decide what to make of all this. Nor, it turned out, was the Tea Party the spontaneous, grassroots movement it purported to be. Still, there was no denying that the Tea Party represented a genuine populist surge within the Republican Party. Some of that anger I understood, even if I considered it misdirected. Many of the working- and middle-class whites gravitating to the Tea Party had suffered for decades from sluggish wages, rising costs, and the loss of the steady blue-collar work that provided secure retirement.

George W. And so far, at least, the economy had grown steadily worse with me in charge, despite more than a trillion dollars channelled into stimulus spending and bailouts. For those already predisposed toward conservative ideas, the notion that my policies were designed to help others at their expense—that the game was rigged and I was part of the rigging—must have seemed entirely plausible.

I also had a grudging respect for how rapidly Tea Party leaders had mobilized a strong following and managed to dominate the news coverage, using some of the same social-media and grassroots-organizing strategies we had deployed during my own campaign. I could hardly complain, I told myself, just because it was opposition to my agenda that was now spurring such passionate citizen involvement.

As time went on, though, it became hard to ignore some of the more troubling impulses driving the movement. As had been true at Palin rallies, reporters at Tea Party events caught attendees comparing me to animals or Hitler. Signs turned up showing me dressed like an African witch doctor with a bone through my nose.

The Tea Party also resurrected an old rumor from the campaign: that I was not only Muslim but had actually been born in Kenya, and was therefore constitutionally barred from serving as President. At the White House, we made a point of not commenting on any of this—and not just because Axe had reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race.

Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social-welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who had just crossed the border? One night, I watched a news report on a charitable organization called Remote Area Medical, which provided medical services in temporary pop-up clinics around the country, operating out of trailers parked at fairgrounds and arenas.

Many had driven hundreds of miles to join crowds of people lined up before dawn to see one of the volunteer doctors, who might pull an infected tooth, diagnose debilitating abdominal pain, or examine a breast lump. The demand was so great that patients who arrived after sunup sometimes got turned away. I found the story both heartbreaking and maddening, an indictment of a wealthy nation that failed too many of its citizens.

And yet I knew that almost every one of those people waiting to see a free doctor came from a deep-red Republican district, the sort of place where opposition to our health-care bill, along with support of the Tea Party, was likely to be strongest.

There had been a time—back when I was still a state senator driving around southern Illinois or, later, travelling through rural Iowa during the earliest days of the Presidential campaign—when I could reach such voters. I wondered if any of that was still possible, now that I lived locked behind gates and guardsmen, my image filtered through Fox News and other media outlets whose entire business model depended on making their audience angry and fearful.

I wanted to believe that the ability to connect was still there. One night, Michelle caught a glimpse of a Tea Party rally on TV—with its enraged flag-waving and inflammatory slogans. She seized the remote and turned off the set, her expression hovering somewhere between rage and resignation. Scared of us. Ted Kennedy died on August 25th. The morning of his funeral, the skies over Boston darkened, and by the time our flight landed the streets were shrouded in thick sheets of rain.

But the stories told by his children mattered most that day. Patrick Kennedy recalled his father tending to him during crippling asthma attacks. He described how his father would take him out to sail, even in stormy seas. Teddy, Jr. I carried those words with me back to Washington, where a spirit of surrender increasingly prevailed—at least, when it came to getting a health-care bill passed.

A preliminary report by the Congressional Budget Office, the independent, professionally staffed operation charged with scoring the cost of all federal legislation, priced the initial House version of the health-care bill at an eye-popping one trillion dollars. Although the C. Democrats from swing districts were now running scared, convinced that pushing forward with the bill amounted to a suicide mission.

The only upside to all this was that it helped me cure Max Baucus of his obsession with trying to placate Chuck Grassley. In a last-stab Oval Office meeting with the two of them in early September, I listened patiently as Grassley ticked off five new reasons that he still had problems with the latest version of the bill.

There was an awkward silence before Grassley looked up and met my gaze. At the White House, the mood rapidly darkened. Some of my team began asking whether it was time to fold our hand. Rahm was especially dour. Some in the room agreed. Others felt it was too early to give up. Phil Schiliro said he thought there was still a path to passing a comprehensive law with only Democratic votes, but he admitted that it was no sure thing.

I smiled. Brother, I always feel lucky. I told the team that we were staying the course. On this issue, though, I saw no indication that Republican leaders would throw us a lifeline. We were wounded, their base wanted blood, and, no matter how modest the reform we proposed, they were sure to find a whole new set of reasons for not working with us. Knowing we had to try something big to reset the health-care debate, Axe suggested that I deliver a prime-time address before a special joint session of Congress.

It was a high-stakes gambit, he explained, used only twice in the past sixteen years, but it would give me a chance to speak directly to millions of viewers. I asked what the other two joint addresses had been about. The mood in the chamber felt different this time—the smiles a little forced, a murmur of tension and doubt in the air.

Or maybe it was just that my mood was different. I detailed how the plan would help seniors pay for lifesaving drugs and require insurers to cover routine checkups and preventive care at no extra charge. According to poll data, my address to Congress boosted public support for the health-care bill, at least temporarily. Even more important for our purposes, it seemed to stiffen the spine of wavering congressional Democrats. It did not, however, change the mind of a single Republican in the chamber.

For the briefest moment, a stunned silence fell over the chamber. I was tempted to exit my perch, make my way down the aisle, and smack the guy in the head. As far as anyone could remember, nothing like that had ever happened before a joint-session address—at least, not in modern times. Congressional criticism was swift and bipartisan, and, by the next morning, Wilson had apologized publicly for the breach of decorum, calling Rahm and asking that his regrets get passed on to me as well.

I downplayed the matter, telling a reporter that I appreciated the apology and was a big believer that we all make mistakes. Apparently, for many Republican voters out there, he was a hero, speaking truth to power. It was an indication that the Tea Party and its media allies had accomplished more than just their goal of demonizing the health-care bill. They had demonized me and, in doing so, had delivered a message to all Republican office-holders: when it came to opposing my Administration, the old rules no longer applied.

Still, for the next three and a half months, I felt the way I imagine sailors feel on the open seas after a brutal storm has passed. The work remained arduous and sometimes monotonous, made tougher by the need to patch leaks and bail water.

But, for a span of time, we had in us the thankfulness of survivors, propelled in our daily tasks by a renewed belief that we might make it to port after all. For starters, after months of delay, Baucus finally opened debate on a health-care bill in the Senate Finance Committee. That was within a month of me being sworn in, at a time when my approval ratings were still around 63, 65 percent. I am, at that point, a very popular president in the midst of his honeymoon, and congratulating somebody, and just being polite and courteous to them.

This is a person whose state is hemorrhaging, and he chooses to support an economic-bailout package that will save jobs and homes in his own state. He is immediately vilified and driven out of the party. Obama: Iowa is this golden moment, when it feels the way you want politics, and the way you want America, to feel. I really enjoyed writing that chapter. It moved me. And Iowa still moves me. And we ended up creating this movement that was premised on the idea of participatory democracy.

Read: Why the Iowa senate race is suddenly competitive. Goldberg: Iowa subsequently went for Trump twice. I won Iowa twice. I won Iowa when unemployment was still 8. And the demographics of Iowa have not changed. I won Iowa comfortably. Iowa was the last time I was able to interact directly with voters who might not immediately be predisposed to vote for me.

The first time I did that was when I was running for the Senate. And what I discovered in that Senate race—and this was repeated twice in Iowa—is that I could go into culturally conservative, rural or small-town, disproportionately white working-class communities and I could make a connection, and I could win those votes. The notion of me just being a decent person and courteous, and telling people my story and me listening to theirs—that was still possible in Iowa because it was all retail politics.

There is an affinity that is there. What happens is that they see you through the dominant filters and news sources, and those news sources have changed. But you go into those communities today and the newspapers are gone. I come out of this book very worried about the degree to which we do not have a common baseline of fact and a common story. Without this common narrative, democracy becomes very tough. Remember, after Iowa my candidacy survives Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright, and two minutes of videotape in which my pastor is in kente cloth cursing out America.

And the fact is that I was able to provide context for that, and I ended up winning over a huge swath of the country that has never set foot on the South Side of Chicago and was troubled by what he said. Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring.

This stuff takes root. I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories. The fact is that there is still a large portion of the country that was taken in by a carnival barker. Goldberg: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice? Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy.

I think Donald Trump is a creature of this, but he did not create it. He may be an accelerant of it, but it preceded him and will outlast him. I am deeply troubled by how we address it, because back in those Walter Cronkite days—.

Goldberg: Forget Walter Cronkite days; how about Iowa? Part of the common narrative was a function of the three major networks and a handful of papers that were disproportionately influential.

Without this it becomes very difficult for us to tackle big things. Goldberg: Do you hold the companies responsible? If you can perpetrate crazy lies and conspiracy theories just with texts, imagine what you can do when you can make it look like you or me saying anything on video. I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change. And that footage of glaciers dropping off the shelves of Antarctica and Greenland are all phony.

I mean, putting aside the fact that this level of self-awareness can be paralyzing—. If you were looking across millennia, then humans have advanced. Compare the degree of brutality and venality and corruption and just sheer folly that you see across human history with how things are now.

Every economic indicator was on an upward trajectory. Things definitely look better now than they did in that golden era. America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy.

We have to figure out how to live together, and we have to figure out if we can do this free of caste systems and the inevitable conflict that the kind of social stratification that has existed for most of human history creates.

That genie is out. And Michelle, as I write in the book, tends to be a little bit more pessimistic about human nature—. Obama: It might be. You do raise something that connects to this question about whether we should feel pessimistic or optimistic, or how our system can function or not function in a global economy. One of the things I was reminded of in writing the book was just how many of my earliest choices were premised on the very specific circumstances of being in a global financial meltdown and trying to avert a depression and the political costs I paid.

I would probably make those same choices again, because averting a depression is a good thing. But it did hamstring me.

For example, I actually think that it is entirely legitimate to push China much harder on trade issues. At that point I needed the cooperation of China as well as Europe as well as every other potential engine, just to restart the global economy. When you were in the White House, it was easy for you to win the argument. Obama: First of all, I love Ta-Nehisi. I love his writing; I love him personally. I think the world of him.

I think the dialogue he and I had is one I have with myself. How are we ever going to figure out how to do a true accounting of the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, and truly provide equal opportunity to the tens of millions of kids trapped in poverty across this country? Nothing wrong with better.