Interview with Barrack Obama – Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy

In an exclusive interview, the former president identifies the
greatest threats to the American experiment, explains why he’s
still hopeful, and opens up about his new book. A painting of Barack Obama ©
Jordan Casteel. Photo of painting: David Schulze

Story by Jeffrey Goldberg Painting: JORDAN CASTEEL, BARACK,
2020. OIL ON CANVAS, 30 x 45”. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CASEY
KAPLAN, NEW YORK. November 16, 2020 Ideas

Barack Obama was describing to me the manner in which the Mongol
emperor and war-crimes innovator Genghis Khan would besiege a town.
“They gave you two choices,” he said. “‘If you open the gates,
we’ll just kill you quickly and take your women and enslave your
children, but we won’t slaughter them. But if you hold out, then
we’ll slowly boil you in oil and peel off your skin.’”

This was not meant to be commentary on the Trump presidency—not
directly, at least. In any case, Obama has more respect for Genghis
Khan than he has for Donald Trump. He raised the subject of Genghis
Khan in order to make a specific, extremely Obama-like point: If
you think today’s world is grim, simply cast your mind back 800
years to the steppes of Central Asia. “Compare the degree of
brutality and venality and corruption and just sheer folly that you
see across human history with how things are now,” he said. “It’s
not even close.”

We were sitting at opposite ends of a long table in his office
suite in the West End district of Washington. The offices were
empty, except for a couple of aides and a discreet Secret Service
detail. Obama was in a good mood, happy to discuss the work that
has consumed him for more than three years: the writing of A
Promised Land, his presidential memoir—or what turns out to be
(because he has much to say about many things) the first of two
volumes of his presidential memoir. The first volume’s 768 pages
carry him from childhood to the bin Laden raid of 2011. A
publication date for the next installment, which will presumably
cover such issues as the Syrian civil war, Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, and the Iran nuclear deal, has not yet been announced.

A Promised Land is an unusual presidential memoir in many ways:
unusually interior, unusually self-critical, unusually modern (this
is the first presidential memoir, I believe, to use the term
ethereal bisexual to describe an unrequited love interest), and
unusually well written. The book does suffer at times from a
general too-muchness, and it has its arid stretches, although to be
fair, no one has yet invented a way to inject poetry into extended
explanations of cap-and-trade, or Mitch McConnell’s
motivations.

We covered a lot of ground in our face-to-face
discussion, which took place on Wednesday, and in a follow-up call
on Friday. The broadest subject of our conversation was the arc of
the moral universe: Does it still bend toward justice? Does it even
exist? When Obama was elected 12 years ago, the arc seemed more
readily visible, at least to that swath of the country interested
in seeing someone other than a white male become president. But he
now recognizes that the change he represented triggered an almost
instantaneous backlash, one that culminated in the “birther”
conspiracy that catapulted its prime propagandist, Donald Trump, to
the White House.

“What I think is indisputable is that I signified a shift in
power. Just my mere presence worried folks, in some cases
explicitly, in some cases subconsciously,” Obama said. “And then
there were folks around to exploit that and tap into that. If a Fox
News talking head asks, when Michelle and I dap, give each other a
fist bump, ‘Is that a terrorist fist bump?,’ that’s not a
particularly subtle reference. If there’s a sign in opposition to
the ACA in which I’m dressed as an African witch doctor with a bone
through my nose, that’s not a hard thing to interpret.”

For Obama, though, the overarching story of America, and all
humanity, is one of fitful progress—and nothing about the past four
years has seemed to change his mind. Joe Biden’s election is proof
that America moves forward; the persistence of racial animus and
resentment-driven populism represents the difficulty of maintaining
momentum.

Obama’s you-think-you-have-it-so-bad invocation of
Genghis Khan was prompted by a passage I read aloud to him. It is a
brief peak-Obama, “Ozymandias”-inflected passage about a visit to
Egypt. Obama recalls brooding over a face of a forgotten figure
etched into an ancient wall, a face that resembled his. “All of it
was forgotten now, none of it mattered, the pharaoh, the slave, and
the vandal all long turned to dust. Just as every speech I’d
delivered, every law I passed and decision I made, would be
forgotten. Just as I and all those I loved would someday turn to
dust.”

I noted the presence in this passage of a kind of paralyzing
self-awareness (“True,” he said), but he told me he included this
rumination to make a point about the long view. “That scene of me
going through the pyramids—it’s not an empty exercise; there’s a
purpose to it. So much of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic
depends on the time frame,” he said, invoking the specter of
Genghis Khan. He went on: “What I’ve always believed is that
humanity has the capacity to be kinder, more just, more fair, more
rational, more reasonable, more tolerant. It is not inevitable.
History does not move in a straight line. But if you have enough
people of goodwill who are willing to work on behalf of those
values, then things can get better.”

Which brought him to his main point: “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. And we don’t know yet if that
can hold. There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough
to say for certain that it’s going to work,” he said.

Barack Obama: I’m not yet ready to abandon the
possibility of America

The threats to American democracy—and to the broader cause of
freedom—are many, he said. He was withering on the subject of
Donald Trump, but acknowledged that Trump himself is not the root
of the issue. “I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get
traction in our political life,” he said. “He’s a symptom as much
as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing
populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little
more appealing.”

Trump, Obama noted, is not exactly an exemplar of
traditional American manhood. “I think about the classic male hero
in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John
Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods,
for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I
grew up with that harkens back to the ’30s and ’40s and before
that. There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he
takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a
bully—in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so
even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political
correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about
everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model
wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying,
doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of
figure.”

Two issues that run deeper for Obama than Trump’s personal
deficiencies concern the changes he sees in the Republican Party
and the broader conservative movement. “I did not believe how
easily the Republican establishment, people who had been in
Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain
institutional values and norms, would just cave” to Trumpian
populism, he said.

He traces the populist shift inside the Republican Party to the
election that made him president. It was Sarah Palin, John McCain’s
2008 running mate, he said, who helped unleash the populist wave:
“The power of Palin’s rallies compared with McCain’s rallies—just
contrast the excitement you would see in the Republican base. I
think this hinted at the degree to which appeals around identity
politics, around nativism, conspiracies, were gaining
traction.”

The populist wave was abetted by Fox News and other right-wing
media outlets, he said, and encouraged to spread by social-media
companies uninterested in exploring their impact on democracy. “I
don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible,” he said,
“because this predates social media. It was already there. But
social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these folks. I’ve
talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are
insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are
like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making
editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or
not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to
provide a platform for any view that is out there.”

He went on to say, “If we do not have the capacity to
distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the
marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy
doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”

We talked about much more: the Iowa caucus; Ta-Nehisi
Coates; climate change; the art and science of presidential
memoir-writing; Michelle’s views on race and optimism. It’s all
below. The Q-and-A is long but, I think, useful, if only as a
reminder of what a thoughtful president sounds like. Our
conversation has been edited for clarity and concision. 1.
The Cost of Donald Trump’s Petulance

Jeffrey Goldberg: How much of the death and destruction we’ve
seen—over the past five or six months especially, after the
beginning of the pandemic—do you blame on President Trump?

Barack Obama: This would have been a really hard thing to deal
with for any president, and we’ve seen countries that have acted
responsibly and taken the right steps and they’re still seeing an
uptick, because we haven’t seen this disease before. This is a
really well-designed virus to maximize damage. This is not as
deadly as Ebola, it doesn’t transmit as rapidly, but it is just
deadly enough that it takes a huge toll.

What I think is fair is to take a look at what’s happened in
Canada, where they still have had big problems but their death rate
per capita is about 61 percent lower than ours. There are a whole
set of explanations around that—universal health care in Canada,
and in some areas they may not have the same population densities.
But it is a comparable country on the same continent.

There is little doubt that if we had had a White House that from
the start had said, “Let’s follow the science, let’s take this
seriously”—if they had reinforced the message coming from people
like [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Director] Dr. Fauci and not politicized basic preventive measures
like wearing masks, if they had not been intent on rushing the
reopening and downplaying the severity of the pandemic across the
primary channels that a big chunk of the country gets its news
from—some lives could have been saved and we would have had better
control of this.

It’s also fair to say that had we taken better steps to
contact-trace and set up testing protocols earlier, it is likely
that we would not have seen severe outbreaks everywhere and we
might have been able to reduce the severity of the pandemic in
certain portions of the country.

The good news is that Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, was
my point person on Ebola. He knows how to work on these big
public-health issues, and they’ve already surrounded themselves
with the right people who are going to be applying the very best
science and technology and organizational measures to this problem.
The vaccine looks hopeful. It’s going to be a challenge both
distributing it and also overcoming some of the mistrust that has
developed from misinformation and bad messaging early on. We’ll get
through this. But we’re making it harder than it should be. It
would have been hard no matter what, but we’ve made it harder.

Goldberg: Talk about the transition issues.

Obama: For all the differences between myself and George W.
Bush, he and his administration could not have been more gracious
and intentional about ensuring a smooth handoff. One of the really
distressing things about the current situation is the amount of
time that is being lost because of Donald Trump’s petulance and the
unwillingness of other Republicans to call him on it.

Goldberg: Let’s get to the book. What didn’t you know
about your presidency until you started writing?

Obama: I have to say that when I came to the end of the book and
I looked back, my views on my presidency were surprisingly
consistent. When I started, I had a basic sense of trajectory of
the presidency and the narrative I wanted to write, and during the
course of it I didn’t find myself thinking, Huh, I didn’t think of
that, or Gosh, upon reflection I feel this. The thing that did
surprise me was the degree to which the undertow of resistance to
the idea of my presidency dates back to Sarah Palin during the
campaign, and emerges through the Tea Party all the way until the
end of the book, which ends with the bin Laden raid.

Goldberg: This wasn’t clear during your presidency?

Obama: During that time, we were so busy and so focused. I also
think I very much internalized and believed that presidents can
whine privately but not publicly.

Goldberg: Billionaires and presidents.

Obama: People are going through much more serious struggles than
anything you’re going through. We had all internalized that idea.
But when I wrote about the Joe Wilson incident, a congressman
yelling “You lie!” in the middle of a joint address to
Congress—

Goldberg: That was novel.

Obama: It had never happened. I remember our general attitude
was “On to the next thing.” But as you’re writing, you think, Was
that indicative of something that was building and growing? And I’m
writing in the middle of the Trump presidency, and I’m seeing that
many of the things that had happened in my presidency foreshadowed
what would happen during the Trump presidency.

Goldberg: In the book it’s very clear that for you Sarah Palin
was the first horsewoman of the apocalypse and Rick Santelli, the
CNBC reporter who helped spark the Tea Party, was the second
horseman. And then the cast grows.

Obama: At the time that it’s happening, you get a sense that
this is a strain within the Republican Party or the conservative
movement that has always been there. It dates back to the Birchers
and elements in the Goldwater campaign, but you also sort of feel
that all of this is behind us.

Goldberg: Your presidency was supposed to be proof in a kind of
way that America was moving on.

Obama: Right. But what happened is that these things unleash or
liberate some of that energy. The power of Palin’s rallies compared
with McCain’s rallies—just contrast the excitement you would see in
the Republican base. I think this hinted at the degree to which
appeals around identity politics, around nativism, conspiracies,
were gaining traction. As I was writing, the clarity of those
patterns became more obvious.

A corresponding concern as I was writing was the
realization that the structural impediments of the U.S. Senate and
the filibuster in particular were preventing big things from
happening and causing a cynicism to arise, a realization that even
after a landslide victory in 2008, or in the midst of a huge
crisis, it’s still really hard with big majorities to move a
legislative agenda forward. This is something that, by 2011, we had
overlearned, from [Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s behavior. It
was hard to anticipate just how quickly McConnell and the
Republican caucus in the Senate would shut things down and the
degree to which that kind of obstruction for the sake of
obstruction would become the norm.

David Frum: The raw desperation of the Republican Party

Goldberg: I’m thinking about the moment when you had to
demonstrate to [then–Democratic Senator] Max Baucus that [Iowa
Republican Senator] Chuck Grassley was just not going to support
you on health care, no matter what you conceded to him.

Obama: By that time I had already figured it out. Max Baucus
hadn’t yet figured it out. This is something I had understood
before I started writing the book, but the examples kept coming as
I was writing. The combination of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh—the
entire right-wing media ecosystem—had changed the Republican base
in such a way that Republican elected officials did not feel as if
they could afford to cooperate with me or cooperate with Democrats.
They couldn’t take anything less than a hard line; they had to
tolerate conspiracy theorizing that they knew wasn’t true—obviously
that’s pertinent today.

We’re looking at the aftermath of an election now in which Joe
Biden and Kamala Harris won pretty decisively. It wasn’t a blowout,
but it was as clear a win as I ended up having in 2012.

And almost every Republican elected official knows that. There
were no howls of voting irregularities the first day or two. They
waited to get the signal from Trump.

Goldberg: In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum and others
have been writing about the issue of complicity. I’m wondering what
you think of people who are smarter than Donald Trump—Lindsey
Graham, Marco Rubio, these sorts of politicians—and their role in
all of this.

Obama: This is the thing that has surprised me the most over the
past four years. Donald Trump’s character and behavior haven’t
surprised me. This was all evident before the 2016 election. I
didn’t expect him to significantly change.

I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment,
people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed
a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just
cave. You think about John McCain: For all my differences with him,
you would not have seen John McCain excuse a president cozying up
to Vladimir Putin, or preferring Russian interpretations of events
over those of his own intelligence agencies. And to see figures in
the Republican Party do a complete 180 on everything they claimed
to believe previously is troubling.

I’ve said this before: The problem facing the Republican Party,
the conservative movement, whatever you want to call it, goes back
to the attitudes of the base—attitudes that have been shaped by
right-wing media. And so essentially what Republican elected
officials have done is to say to themselves that in order to
survive, we have to go along with conspiracy theorizing, false
assertion, fantasies that Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh and others
in that echo chamber have concocted, because people believe
them.

Goldberg: In the book, you describe what Santelli did on
CNBC—his call for a new Boston Tea Party—as “bullshit.”

Obama: You can tell if you watch it that it’s shtick. It’s no
different than Celebrity Apprentice. It’s entertainment. Except
what I noticed watching that clip at the time, and rewatching it as
I was writing the book, is that the traders—he’s doing this shtick
at the Chicago Board of Trade—the traders believe it. The sense of
grievance, the sense that “we”—and define we however you want:
white Americans, working-class white Americans, conservatives—“we”
are the aggrieved party and that “we” are being victimized, that
sense is notable. You have billionaires and CEOs starting to feel
like they’re being victimized. And it was interesting to recognize
how powerful that impulse was, how readily people would embrace
this kind of aggrievement and anger, the resentment that Palin and
Santelli were peddling.

So the Tea Party becomes a genuine manifestation of that. It’s
rooted in very real frustrations that folks are having about
stagnant wages and communities that are deindustrialized. Folks
feel like the insiders are taking advantage of them, and there’s a
sense of loss of status and identity. It was becoming apparent very
early in my presidency that you could take anger and frustration
and direct it in what I consider to be a pretty unhealthy
direction. 3. Trump Is Richie Rich, not John Wayne

Goldberg: Have you explained to yourself the Trump phenomenon in
such a way that doesn’t cause you to write off the Americans who
voted for him?

Obama: I will say that I’m not surprised that somebody like
Trump could get traction in our political life. He’s a symptom as
much as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing
populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little
more appealing.

Goldberg: Not a man-child?

Obama: Yes. If you think about populists from the past, someone
like Huey Long—he wasn’t from the right; he was a classic populist,
rooted in the earth; he knows the lives of the people he is
rallying; he genuinely understands them. I guess I would not have
expected someone who has complete disdain for ordinary people to be
able to get attention and then the following from those very same
people.

I guess I’m also surprised by, and this is not an original
thought on my part—but I think about the classic male hero in
American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes,
the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that
matter. There was a code. This is something I always emphasize. I
may be African American but I’m African and American. This is part
of me. The code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens
back to the ’30s and ’40s and before that—there’s a notion that a
man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he
doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully; in fact he defends the
vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is
annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be
men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the
patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the
complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type
of figure.

I think that indicates the power of television in the culture
that sometimes I miss because I don’t watch a lot of TV. I
certainly don’t watch reality shows. And sometimes I’d miss things
that were phenomena. But I thought there was a shift there. I write
about it to some degree. I actually have great admiration for a lot
of those traditions, what were ascribed to be masculine qualities.
When you think about the Greatest Generation, you think about
sacrifice.

Tom Nichols: Donald Trump, the most unmanly president

Goldberg: A colleague of mine says that in some ways you’re a
never-Trump conservative.

Obama: I understand that. There’s this sense of probity,
honesty, responsibility, of homespun values, that I admire. That’s
the Kansas side of me. My grandmother’s a stand-in for that. The
folks we celebrate at Normandy, including my Uncle Charlie, who was
a member of one of the units that liberated parts of Buchenwald,
those were men who, whatever their limits, whatever their
constraints in terms of their emotions because of what they were
told they could and couldn’t feel and be as men, however their
relationship with women was skewed by all this—they sacrificed for
others. And they never bragged, and certainly they would never make
cheating others or taking advantage of them a calling card. So I
guess the answer to your question is, I’m not surprised there was a
market for populism, not just in the United States but around the
world. Globalism is—

Goldberg: You’re just surprised by the horse populism rode in
on.

Obama: Yes, and it’s this indication of parts of popular culture
that I’ve missed. It’s interesting—people are writing about the
fact that Trump increased his support among Black men [in the 2020
presidential election], and the occasional rapper who supported
Trump. I have to remind myself that if you listen to rap music,
it’s all about the bling, the women, the money. A lot of rap videos
are using the same measures of what it means to be successful as
Donald Trump is. Everything is gold-plated. That insinuates itself
and seeps into the culture.

Michelle and I were talking about the fact that although we grew
up in very different places, we were both very much working-class,
lower-middle-class, in terms of income, and we weren’t subject
day-to-day to the sense that if you don’t have this stuff then you
are somehow not worthy. America has always had a caste system—rich
and poor, not just racially but economically—but it wasn’t in your
face most of the time when I was growing up. Then you start seeing
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, that sense that either you’ve
got it or you’re a loser. And Donald Trump epitomizes that cultural
movement that is deeply ingrained now in American culture.

You mentioned earlier that I’m in some ways a never-Trump
conservative. That’s not quite right, but what is true is that
temperamentally I am sympathetic to a certain strain of
conservatism in the sense that I’m not just a materialist. I’m not
an economic determinist. I think it’s important, but I think there
are things other than stuff and money and income—the religious
critique of modern society, that we’ve lost that sense of
community.

Here’s my optimistic view. This gives me some hope that it’s
possible to make common cause with a certain strand of evangelical
or conservative who essentially wants to restore a sense of meaning
and purpose and spirituality … a person who believes in notions
like stewardship and caring for the least of these: They share this
with those on the left who have those same nonmaterialistic
impulses but express themselves through a nonreligious prism.

When you look at the younger generation, Malia and Sasha’s
generation, you see that more clearly. It’s more often articulated,
what they want out of life. They’re much less likely to have a need
to be on Wall Street by such-and-such date. That is not how they
seem to be defining themselves quite as much. That makes me more
optimistic. 4. How Power Actually Works

Goldberg: I want to talk a bit about the writing, and writing
choices. By the way, I went back and looked at Ulysses S. Grant and
he definitely did not use the expression “ethereal bisexual’ in his
memoir. I believe you’re the first president to use this
expression—

Obama: Maybe the last.

Goldberg: I’ll let the readers of the book find the reference to
an ethereal bisexual for themselves.

On writing choices, one of my questions has to do with the
tremendous amount of contextualization you do, and specifically the
way you contextualize your opponents. This book feels like a hinge
between a distant political past and the political present. You
generally represent your positions with restraint; you
contextualize everything, including the positions of your
enemies—you are actually nicer to your enemies than Trump is to his
friends. Maybe this is just characterological, or maybe this is a
choice to be “presidential” in your writing style? I’m thinking
about this scene on your first Inauguration Day when you’re in the
car with President Bush, people are jeering him, and you’re feeling
sympathy for him.

Obama: There is no doubt that one of the themes of the book is
me just wanting to hang on to who I am—my soul, my sense of right
and wrong, my character—while operating at the highest level of
politics.

Goldberg: This is the question of how any president stays human,
given the absurd nature of the job.

Obama: There is the father, the friend, the husband. The title
of the first section is “The Bet”—I’m making a bet first about the
nature of America and the power of democracy, a belief that it is
possible that a big, diverse, contentious, multiracial, multiethnic
country can make its union a little more perfect and set an example
for the world. And the second big bet is that I can participate in
this process without being hopelessly corrupted. And so some of
what you see in the book is me grappling with the inevitable
choices and compromises that come up.

Goldberg: Starting with your first campaign—

Obama: Starting with my first political race, having to decide
whether to try to knock someone off the ballot who had gone back on
her word to me but at the same time didn’t have the signatures to
run. This is a ballot-access issue. Signatures were used to help
insiders stay on the inside—how do I feel about that? And this goes
all the way to the end of the book, and to the end of my
presidency.

Part of what you’re sensing here are times when I make
decisions to be gracious, when I assume the best in people, not
because I’m naive but because this is how I choose to operate in
the world, because I think the world would be better if more people
operated that way. Sometimes I fall short and am disappointed in
myself, but at least I think it’s important to be anchored in
ethics and morality and basic human decency in how you
behave.

People during my presidency oftentimes had a misunderstanding of
what the effect of wielding power is. They thought that bluster and
being nasty somehow get more stuff done. And I remember parts of my
presidency when my own base would get frustrated, at least among
the intelligentsia. They would contrast me with Lyndon Johnson:
“Even though he was a son of a bitch he got the Voting Rights Act
passed,” and so on. “And that’s how you need to be, Obama, you’re
too nice”—

Goldberg: Hyde Park law professor—

Obama: Yes, what have you. And not publicly, but privately, I
would remind people that Lyndon Johnson got stuff done because he
had the votes. Simple. FDR got stuff done when he had the votes.
And the truth of the matter is that most of the time, what we think
of as arm-twisting and brow-beating—what it really comes down to
most of the time is: Do you have the votes? When you look at
getting the Affordable Care Act passed, not just getting it through
the Senate but then working with Nancy Pelosi to get House
Democrats to pass a Senate bill that they thought was not
progressive enough, I worked my caucus effectively, and not once
did I grab someone by the lapels in an elevator or engage in a
bunch of dirty tricks to get someone to do something.

It turns out that where I fell short in getting everything I
wanted, it really comes down to the factors we’ve already
discussed—the filibuster in place in the Senate, which meant you
had to get 60 votes on everything. That was true in my first month
in office. We had a huge and an obvious economic crisis, and we
were able to squeak out a few Republican votes to get [the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act] passed. And one of those
Republicans, Arlen Specter, was chased out of the party for having
voted for an emergency package that we know now Republicans didn’t
ideologically oppose, because they just passed a $2 trillion relief
package with a Republican as president.

Goldberg: There will be renewed Republican interest in
deficits come January 21.

Obama: Absolutely. As I was writing the book, there wasn’t a
time when I was reflecting back and thought that I was too nice
here or there.

Goldberg: Should you have been caught trying more?

Obama: What do you mean?

Goldberg: Meaning, drinking with McConnell more often, working
the opposition—

Obama: Look, this comes out more in volume two, and I will be
more explicit on this, but take [former House Speaker] John Boehner
for example. He and I had a perfectly good relationship, but he had
to act a certain way for his caucus. He would badmouth many of them
to me, in private. Much as John McCain did. The issue was never
personal—Mitch McConnell is not buddy-buddy with anyone. I’m
enjoying reading now about how Joe Biden and Mitch have been
friends for a long time. They’ve known each other for a long time.
I have quotes from Biden about his interactions with Mitch
McConnell. The issue with Republicans is not that I didn’t court
them enough. We would invite them to everything: movie nights,
state dinners, Camp David, you name it. The issue was not a lack of
schmoozing. The issue was that they found it politically
advantageous to demonize me and the Democratic Party. This was
amplified by media outlets like Fox News. Their voters believed
this, and over time Republicans became so successful in their
demonization that it became very difficult for them to compromise,
or even be seen being friendly.

Goldberg: Charlie Crist in Florida is an example.

Obama: This happens very early. You asked me what surprised me
when I wrote the book. I had forgotten how fast everything takes
place here. I am sworn in, and within a month we pass the Recovery
Act. In two to three months we had bailed out the auto industry; we
had fixed the banking system so that it didn’t collapse. And I meet
Charlie Crist, at the time a very popular Republican governor known
for bipartisanship, and me shaking his hand and giving him a
modified bro hug, it destroys him in the party. 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. And
that’s the beginning of Marco Rubio’s career, going after Charlie
Crist as a RINO, a “Republican in name only.”

And John McCain giving a standard platitude, saying, after an
election, “I’m praying for President Obama’s success,” this gets an
immediate rejoinder from Rush Limbaugh, which echoes through the
conservative media-sphere. This notion that this stuff wasn’t baked
in, that if I’d just had a few more scotches with Mitch McConnell
or Paul Ryan, that that would have done it … 5. What’s the Matter
With Iowa?

Goldberg: It’s obvious from the writing that you have great
enthusiasm for Iowa. It’s the state that really launched you, but
it’s more than that. It’s a moment in time before we seem to enter
a different phase of history, and it’s also, at least to my
reading, a chapter about the last unalloyed good time you had in
the run-up to the presidency and the presidency itself.

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.
You’ve got this band of kids from every walk of life: Black kids
from Brooklyn, Asian American kids from California, farm kids from
the Midwest. We’re just dropping them off with a duffel bag or a
suitcase in a bunch of little towns in Iowa—places that would very
much be considered part of red America. And these kids set up card
tables in front of grocery stores and go to Rotary Clubs, and
they’re coaching Little League, and they just win over a town by
listening and caring and making connections. And we ended up
creating this movement that was premised on the idea of
participatory democracy. It’s this movement that catapults me into
being a credible presidential candidate.

Goldberg: Iowa subsequently went for Trump twice.

Obama: I don’t want to get cynical that fast. I won Iowa twice.
I won Iowa when unemployment was still 8.5 percent, in 2012. And
the demographics of Iowa have not changed. I won Iowa comfortably.
This notion that somehow everything in this country has flipped—I
think it’s more complicated than that.

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.
Downstate Illinois is like Kentucky or southern Ohio or Indiana or
much of Iowa. 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 reason I could is that I didn’t have a
filter between me and them.

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. That’s part of
the irony to me, the idea of me not schmoozing enough in
Washington. It probably is true that there is a certain Washington
establishment that I didn’t give enough love to compared with the
love I gave to people in Iowa. They reminded me of my grandparents
and Michelle’s parents. There is an affinity that is there.

What I discovered post-Iowa is that you’re running nationally.
It’s heady stuff, to be filling auditoriums of 20,000, 50,000
people.

Goldberg: You become this symbol.

Obama: This is what [David] Axelrod would call, dismissively,
“Obama the icon,” because he knew that this was dangerous. What
happens is that they see you through the dominant filters and news
sources, and those news sources have changed. Even as late as 2008,
typically when I went into a small town, there’s a small-town
newspaper, and the owner or editor is a conservative guy with a
crew cut, maybe, and a bow tie, and he’s been a Republican for
years. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for tax-and-spend
liberals, but he’ll take a meeting with me, and he’ll write an
editorial that says, “He’s a liberal Chicago lawyer, but he seems
like a decent enough guy, had some good ideas”; and the local TV
station will cover me straight. But you go into those communities
today and the newspapers are gone. If Fox News isn’t on every
television in every barbershop and VFW hall, then it might be a
Sinclair-owned station, and the presuppositions that exist there,
about who I am and what I believe, are so fundamentally different,
have changed so much, that it’s difficult to break through.

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. We
don’t have a Walter Cronkite describing the tragedy of Kennedy’s
assassination but also saying to supporters and detractors alike of
the Vietnam War that this is not going the way the generals and the
White House are telling us. 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. I mean, that’s an indicator of a
different media environment.

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. 6.
Tech Companies vs. Democracy

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 2008 Iowa? I’m
not sure that a person with your name and your background could
walk into Iowa today and get a 10-minute fair shake.

Obama: It’s a pretty drastic change. Part of the common
narrative was a function of the three major networks and a handful
of papers that were disproportionately influential. You can’t put
the genie back in the bottle. You’re not going to eliminate the
internet; you’re not going to eliminate the thousand stations on
the air with niche viewerships designed for every political
preference. Without this it becomes very difficult for us to tackle
big things. It becomes hard for us to say, “Hey, we have a pandemic
here; it’s deadly; it’s serious; let’s put partisanship aside;
let’s listen to Anthony Fauci because he’s been studying stuff like
this for a long time. We may not get everything exactly right,
because science works iteratively, but let’s hew as closely as we
can to the science. Let’s do what science tells us to do to save
lives.” That becomes harder to do.

Goldberg: Do you hold the companies responsible?

Obama: I don’t hold the tech companies entirely
responsible, because this predates social media. It was already
there. But social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these
folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these
companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company
than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They
are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in
algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private
companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At
the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of
government regulations and corporate practices that address this,
because it’s going to get worse. 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.
We’re pretty close to that now.

Goldberg: It’s that famous Steve Bannon strategy: flood the zone
with shit.

Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true
from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas
doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are
entering into an epistemological crisis.

I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate
change. I can even accept somebody making an argument that, based
on what I know about human nature, it’s too late to do anything
serious about this—the Chinese aren’t going to do it, the Indians
aren’t going to do it—and that the best we can do is adapt. I
disagree with that, but I accept that it’s a coherent argument. I
don’t know what to say if you simply say, “This is a hoax that the
liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books.
And that footage of glaciers dropping off the shelves of Antarctica
and Greenland are all phony.” Where do I start trying to figure out
where to do something? 7. What Genghis Khan Teaches Us About Life
Today

Goldberg: Let’s stay on the subject of the
optimism-pessimism continuum. I’m just trying to figure out where
you are. Sometimes it’s confusing. You have this “Ozymandias”
moment at one point. You’re visiting Egypt, you’re staring at this
ancient etching of a face that looks something like you, and you
write about the ephemerality of everything: “All of it was
forgotten now, none of it mattered, the pharaoh, the slave, and the
vandal all long turned to dust. Just as every speech I’d delivered,
every law I passed and decision I made, would be forgotten. Just as
I and all those I loved would someday turn to dust.”

I mean, putting aside the fact that this level of self-awareness
can be paralyzing—

Obama: True.

Goldberg: —You’re also still what could be called a
realistic optimist. You make it clear at the beginning of the book
that you haven’t swerved from the belief that America is imperfect
but perfectible, that there’s more good than bad in the American
story, and that tomorrow can be better than today. But even with
Biden’s win, how does Trump as a phenomenon change your view of
what America is?

Obama: That scene of me going through the pyramids—it’s
not an empty exercise; there’s a purpose to it. So much of whether
you’re optimistic or pessimistic depends on the time frame. If you
were looking across millennia, then humans have advanced. Read a
biography of Genghis Khan, who led a superpower for a long
time—they were a superpower for longer than America’s been around.
You know, when they raided a town, they gave you two choices: If
you open the gates, we’ll just kill you quickly and take your women
and enslave your children, but we won’t slaughter them. But if you
hold out, we’ll slowly boil you in oil and peel off your skin.
Compare the degree of brutality and venality and corruption and
just sheer folly that you see across human history with how things
are now. It’s not even close.

Let’s take this particular golden age right after World War II,
when America was unified but the rest of the world was in rubble.
Every economic indicator was on an upward trajectory. Everyone’s
life was improving constantly. But maybe things didn’t look as good
if you were Black or a woman or a gay person. Things definitely
look better now than they did in that golden era. A lot of what
looks optimistic or pessimistic depends on what we’re measuring
against.

What I’ve always believed is that humanity has the capacity to
be kinder, more just, more fair, more rational, more reasonable,
more tolerant. It is not inevitable. History does not move in a
straight line. But if you have enough people of goodwill who are
willing to work on behalf of those values, then things can get
better. 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. And we don’t know yet if that can hold.

There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough
to say for certain that it’s going to work, but if it can work,
that’s a good thing, because we’ve got almost 8 billion people on
the planet, and because of all this technology, and because of the
stresses and pressures of climate change, we’re going to be all up
on one another. 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. We’re
past the time in which some peasant in a feudal system is starving
and looks up on the palace and there’s a king somewhere, and the
peasant thinks, Yeah, that’s okay. Now all those peasants have
phones and they can see how the lord of the manor is eating, and
some of them are going to say, “Why him instead of me?” The
willingness to accept one’s fate or lot in life because of your
skin color or gender or religion or sexual orientation—that you are
going to accept being less than someone else—that’s
over.

Goldberg: There’s a small irony here. You write about the first
year of your presidency, of keeping the pitchfork brigade at bay
when they’re coming for the Jamie Dimons, for the leaders of the
financial industry.

Obama: Yeah, and they weren’t that grateful.

I think it is possible to be optimistic as a choice without
being naive, and that is how I’m built temperamentally. And
Michelle, as I write in the book, tends to be a little bit more
pessimistic about human nature—

Goldberg: Hawaii versus Chicago?

Obama: It might be. It might just be the way we’re wired.

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. I didn’t come into office as a knee-jerk
anti-trade guy, but if you looked at the facts, China consistently
ran mercantilist policies that violated international trade rules
to help build up their economy from the late ’80s through today.
And if we hadn’t been going through a financial crisis, my posture
toward China would have been more explicitly contentious around
trade issues. But I couldn’t have a trade war in 2009 or 2010. 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. 8. Is There a Moral Arc to the Universe,
and Does It Bend Toward Justice?

Goldberg: I’ve been witness for a long time to your intermittent
argument with our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, the argument about
whether the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, or
whether there is even a discernible moral arc. Ta-Nehisi’s view, I
think, is that if there is an arc at all, maybe it just bends
toward chaos.

I’m still trying to place you on this optimism-pessimism
continuum. When you were in the White House, it was easy for you to
win the argument. We’re in the Roosevelt Room and you can say, “By
the way, Ta-Nehisi, there’s a Black president.” But now, in the
Trump era, it seems as if maybe Ta-Nehisi had more of a point.

Obama: First of all, I love Ta-Nehisi. I love his writing; I
love him personally. He’s such a gracious, thoughtful, humble
person. He’s a good-hearted person, very open-minded, trying to
figure this stuff out. I think the world of him.

I think the dialogue he and I had is one I have with myself.
Being optimistic doesn’t mean that five times a day I don’t say,
“We’re doomed.” You would not be paying attention if you weren’t
concerned about how in the heck we are going to get our act
together in order to avert a climate disaster. 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? You can’t just blithely say, “Oh, we’ll figure
this out” without taking a look at all the institutional, economic,
structural, and psychological barriers to us solving those
problems. You’re operating in fantasyland if you do that.

The point I’ve always made to Ta-Nehisi, the point I sometimes
make to Michelle, the point I sometimes make to my own kids—the
question is, for me, “Can we make things better?”

I used to explain to my staff after we had a long policy
debate about anything, and we had to make a decision about X or Y,
“Well, if we do this I understand we’re not getting everything
we’re hoping for, but is this better?” And they say yes, and I say,
“Well, better is good. Nothing wrong with better.”

The discussion I had with Ta-Nehisi typically revolved around
the basic belief that, in fact, things had gotten better. This is
not a cause for complacency but rather a spur to action. It doesn’t
mean that things can’t get worse, either.

Let’s take it out of the American context. When I came into
office in 2008, even in the midst of a global financial crisis and
recession, the continent of Europe was probably enjoying a level of
peace and prosperity unmatched by any group of people in human
history. So you cannot argue that Europe is not better than it was
in the 1800s or in 1920. That’s not subject to debate. This doesn’t
negate the fact that the continent went through unimaginable
tragedy and anguish and human folly before things got better. Both
things can be true. And so the issue is not whether things can get
better; the question is how much pain do we have to go through to
get there? How much more racism, how much more callousness, how
much more disappointment, how many more wasted lives, how much more
backlash? How much of that do we have to endure before things get
better?

This goes back to the issue of time frames. If you’re an African
American in 1866, maybe you’re feeling optimistic. If you’re an
African American 15 years later, you’re not feeling so optimistic.
That’s the issue. Within the time we’re here on this Earth, can we
keep things getting better?

Goldberg: So there’s nothing that would cause you to give up
hope?

Obama: I mean, anyone who reads this book will recognize
the stress and discouragement I sometimes feel. I’m fighting this
with gallows humor. My staff in the White House, we all had a
little bit of that—using laughter to fight off despair. This will
come in the second volume, but after Sandy Hook, when Congress
would not do anything—that was one of those moments when I thought,
You know what? There’s something here I don’t understand. Maybe I’m
just barking up the wrong tree.

I could not comprehend a society not responding at all to mass
shootings generally. It’s bad enough, the daily toll this takes on
Black male teenagers in the inner city, or just the cumulative
anguish it’s causing families across the country. But to have
6-year-olds in the classroom gunned down mercilessly? The police
and first responders had to take time off and get counseling, just
having witnessed the aftermath. And we literally did nothing. My
administration tried through executive orders to do something, but
legislatively we did nothing.

There are moments like that where you think, I’m not sure
whether the basic premises I’ve been operating under still hold.
But then something happens where you make things a little better
and someone comes up to you and says, “My kid had a job that didn’t
have insurance, and the ACA passes and I nag him and he gets a
checkup and he’s got a tumor, and it’s removed and now my grandkid
is being born next week.”

9.The Role Racism Plays in Politics

Goldberg: There’s an amazing moment in this book when Michelle
turns to you and says, “It’s a trip, isn’t it? That they’re scared
of you. Scared of us.”

By the way, there’s a move you have where you always give the
best lines to Michelle or Reggie Love, your body man.

Obama: Michelle always has the best lines because she has great
lines. Reggie has the best lines even though he’s unaware he has
the best lines. That’s the difference.

Goldberg: Your wife has always had a slightly different
view on the salience of race here, and you don’t dwell on race in
this volume, but how much of the opposition to you had to do with
the fact that you’re a liberal Democrat, versus you being a Black
president?

Obama: I actually write about how hard it is to allocate
percentages here, because American history and culture are so
shaped by our racial history. If someone is in favor of “states’
rights,” it’s very hard to disentangle this statement from race.
Maybe they just believe in local government and local control. On
the other hand, this debate started as far back as debates between
northern and southern states and the maintenance of slavery, and
Jim Crow and opposition to busing, you name it. It’s difficult to
clearly say how much of this was race, as opposed to opposition to
liberalism. The Clintons, for example, generated similar venomous
attacks. A lot of that had to do with the culture wars that dated
back to the ’60s—Vietnam, pot, sex, rock and roll, the debate
between Phyllis Schlafly and Bella Abzug.

What I think is indisputable is that I signified a shift
in power. Just my mere presence worried folks—in some cases
explicitly, in some cases subconsciously. And then there were folks
around to exploit that and tap into that. If a Fox News talking
head asks, when Michelle and I dap, give each other a fist bump,
“Is that a terrorist fist bump?,” that’s not a particularly subtle
reference. If there’s a sign in opposition to the ACA in which I’m
dressed as an African witch doctor with a bone through my nose,
that’s not a hard thing to interpret. And look: Well into my
presidency, you would have sitting Republican officials caught
trafficking emails in which they’re comparing Michelle to animals
or suggesting that I was the product of my mother’s
bestiality—these were Republican officials, not just random folks.
So that undercurrent is there.

Do I think that it was determinative? No. I think these issues
have been at the heart of this country’s debate for a very long
time, around not just race but class—although we don’t like talking
about class—around gender, around the sense that some people are
more American than others, more worthy of citizenship than others.
Who do we include under the label “We the People”? This has always
been contested, even when you don’t have a Black president. Those
themes have a lot of power. 10. Why This Book Took So Long to
Write

Goldberg: Did this book take longer to write because
you’re self-consciously a writer?

Obama: There was a time when I was writing when I was scolding
myself because I was obsessing over a paragraph for a day. I
realized, I do not have time to do this; I have to stop.

Goldberg: When you’re writing about cap-and-trade, did you just
say to yourself, Okay, this is just going to be prose, no poetry
here? Not that poetry about cap-and-trade might even be
possible.

Obama: What I’m trying to accomplish in this book is
both history and a story. There are certain things that, had I been
just writing a narrative, I would have left out. If I was just
writing a story, I wouldn’t get into the weeds of cap-and-trade. I
wouldn’t need to venture into the weeds of Dodd-Frank. But as a
historian I do need to provide those details. This is my best shot
at giving future writers and historians and scholars at least some
sense of how I was thinking. It’s my version of events, and I want
to make sure people understand this.

Conversely, if I were just trying to provide a chronicle of
events, then I wouldn’t be as concerned about whether this chapter
ends on a cliffhanger so that people will turn the page, or did I
accurately capture that particular tic of a world leader that makes
the person seem more vivid and real. I think what ended up taking a
long time was trying to do both. There are parts of the book where
I’m explicitly sacrificing some narrative flow because I just need
to explain this as clearly as possible. And then there are parts of
the book where I just had a really nice description I wanted to
leave in and the editor was like, “Do we really need this, like, do
we really?” and I said, “Eh, I like it, sorry. That’s just a pretty
description and I want to leave it.”

Goldberg: The crappy pens at the G20.

Obama: You’re at the G20 and you’re doing your thing, but you’re
also thinking, How does this work? There’s a commemorative pad and
pencil, and there are mints, and then there are these disappointing
pens. I made the point because you’re at the G20 and there’s all
this pomp—and, really, a lot of the conventions are not that
different than the trade show at the convention center in Dubuque.
There’s the tchotchkes and the cheesiness. I put all that in there
to make things recognizable to people. I don’t want people to think
of all this as foreign. It’s discernible and understandable.

Goldberg: I’m saving most of the foreign-policy talk for the
next book, which is a way of noting that we’ve gone almost two
hours without talking about Bibi Netanyahu. But I wanted to ask you
a writing question about him, and other people you don’t like. I
thought you were calibrating in your writing about Bibi, and
McConnell, and some others, and doing so much extra
contextualization.

Obama: It’s not a secret that Netanyahu and I did not share
worldviews. The same with McConnell. But I think Bibi is a
fascinating character the same way that Putin is a fascinating
character. I think you can’t understand them, or Russia or Israel,
without looking at the history out of which they arose, what shaped
them. Providing that sense of context is not actually a matter of
me trying to engage in political calculation. The nice thing about
being an ex-president is that stuff doesn’t really matter. I want
the reader not to just simply say that this guy and Obama are
antagonistic, and since I’m reading Obama’s book I’m siding with
him and the other guy must be a complete jerk. I want someone to
read this and say, I understand how it is that the Israelis, given
the world they are in, given the history they have experienced, and
given the genuine threats that surround them, can turn to a figure
who represents strength of a very particular kind and why that
might clash with Obama’s views about certain things. My hope is
that there is going to be some young future politician in Israel
who is reading this book and is reading for this context and sees
that I’m paying attention to this context.

Goldberg: Do you think you captured the cosmic weirdness
of being president? Did you ever feel constrained by the fact that
this is a presidential memoir?

Obama: The essential strangeness of the presidency is the
isolation, both because of security issues and the nature of the
job—suddenly you can’t go take a walk, or sit in a park and eat a
sandwich, or go to a concert. I talk about a recurring dream I had
during my presidency that simply involved me walking down a street
and nobody knowing who I am. And you don’t fully appreciate some of
the value of anonymity until you’ve lost it, just not being the
object of attention. And look, this is a high-class problem to
have; I’m not complaining about it. It’s an unusual experience.

Having said that, there is a gift given to a president, or
someone running for president, in that you see a bigger cross
section of the country, you meet more people and gain a better
sense of the variety of our people and our commonality as a people.
And that fills you up. All of those voices become a part of you, if
you’re listening. And that is a profound gift, and it’s part of the
basis for the optimism I continue to feel. 11. The Entire World Is
High School

Goldberg: Actually there is one category of person you seem to
have real contempt for: some of the Wall Street people in the
financial crisis who are rich and just want to be richer, in your
view.

Obama: If you read those sections over again, I am sympathetic
to them. But they’re being oblivious. I do explain that they worked
hard, they played by the rules as they understood them, but there
is that sense of not understanding how the rest of us live, and not
being interested. There’s a lack of curiosity there that is
frustrating and dangerous. An example of that is the former head of
BP during the oil spill, who explicitly says that all he wants to
do is get back his life. He says this as fishermen’s livelihoods
are being destroyed, the coastline is being destroyed. There is a
cluelessness there.

But more than anything, I wanted this book to be a way in which
people could better understand the world of politics and foreign
policy, worlds that feel opaque and inaccessible. Part of my goal
is describing quirks and people’s family backgrounds, just to
remind people that these are humans and you can understand them and
make judgments.

It’s interesting. You’re in high school and you see all the
cliques and bullying and unfairness and superficiality, and you
think, Once I’m grown up I won’t have to deal with that anymore.
And then you get to the state legislature and you see all the
nonsense and stupidity and pettiness. And then you get to Congress
and then you get to the G20, and at each level you have this
expectation that things are going to be more refined, more
sophisticated, more thoughtful, rigorous, selfless, and it turns
out it’s all still like high school. Human dynamics are
surprisingly constant. They take different forms. It turns out that
the same strengths people have—flaws and foibles that people
have—run across cultures and are part of politics. This should be
empowering for people. My ideal reader is some 25-year-old kid who
is starting to be curious about the world and wants to do something
that has some meaning. I want them to read this and say, “Okay,
this is not all rocket science; this is something I could
contribute to and make a difference in.”

*Painting by Jordan Casteel based on the Official White
House Photo by Pete Souza Jeffrey Goldberg is the
editor in chief of The Atlantic and a recipient of the National
Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the author of Prisoners: A
Story of Friendship and Terror.