In May of 2008, NEWSWEEK's Daren Briscoe interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama during a campaign flight from Oregon to Chicago. It had taken months to secure the interview—months during which Obama and his team had put off requests to interview him for a special reporting project culminating in a book entitled "A Long Time Coming," by Evan Thomas and Newsweek staff, to be published Jan. 12 by Public Affairs.
It was an opportunity to step back from the daily churn of the campaign, and talk big-picture stuff: how Obama had decided to run, what had made him think, at the outset, that he could best Hillary Clinton, how he and the campaign had weathered some rough going in the early months of the campaign. To this point, Briscoe's requests had fallen on unsympathetic ears. "We're trying to win a nomination," he was told repeatedly, and it was hard to argue with that—having witnessed firsthand what a grueling campaign schedule Obama had and how completely full his days were, from before dawn to well after midnight most days. Finally, though, the campaign relented. Just a few days before, with the number of primary contests dwindling, and Hillary needing a game-changing turn of fortune, Obama had carried the North Carolina primary by nearly 15 percentage points, and had fought Clinton to a near-draw in Indiana, where she won by a single point. "We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it," Tim Russert said that night.
Briscoe recalls the mood as he was waved to the front section of Obama's plane, at this, a pivotal juncture in what would become an historic campaign.
"Come on up," said Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman, extending an invitation that was the only real sign of the campaign's optimism. Although Obama had already started talking about the general election and recalibrating his stump speech to focus less on Clinton, more on McCain, there were no outward signs of celebration; it was business as usual within a very businesslike campaign. Gibbs escorted me to Obama's first-class row, where the senator sat at the window, reading a copy of The New Yorker. Obama looked up, said hello, and asked me to sit. On the advice of one of Obama's best friends, who thought that Obama would respond well to my somewhat unconventional path into journalism, I started to tell him a bit about my background, but I had stumbled over only a couple of awkward sentences when Obama broke in and said, "I have a suggestion. Why don't you just ask me some questions? I want to make sure you maximize your time. You don't need to make me feel comfortable with you; if I didn't trust you, you wouldn't be here." I was immediately struck by Obama's focus, so intense that it almost felt like a physical force.
By this point in the campaign, I'd seen Obama interviewed dozens of times, and heard him answer hundreds, if not thousands of questions. After some early struggles, he'd almost mastered campaign-speak, the dull art of condensing any answer to any question into a talking point. But as we began to talk, it quickly became apparent that he wasn't in campaign mode. Away from the unblinking eyes of the TV cameras that tracked him at every debate, and from the brace of microphones at every campaign stop that recorded his every utterance, later to be pored over for any gaffe or possible gaffe, Obama seemed more at ease. His speech fell into the natural pattern that his advisers had tried to drum out of him, full of pensive pauses and compound sentences. At one point, when I asked Obama what more he'd asked of himself, during a difficult stretch in the campaign where he'd asked his team to redouble their efforts, he paused for a full seventeen seconds before answering. Obama is fiercely intelligent and characteristically confident, but what I remember most was how self-aware he seemed, with a grasp of his own strengths as well as weaknesses and a keen sense of other people's reactions to him. I found the interview fascinating—a revealing glimpse into a man who I suspect even then had a quiet confidence that he would be the nation's next president.
What follows are excerpts from Briscoe's spring interview with Obama, from the forthcoming book—a snapshot of a candidate on a path to power that culminates Jan. 20, when he is sworn in as the nation's 44th president. Some of the questions have been edited for conciseness and clarity, and extraneous material omitted.
NEWSWEEK: Going back to the period where you were deciding whether to run or not, I'm very curious about what you wanted to hear when you sat around with your friends and advisers. What were you looking for in terms of what you hoped to hear from them?
Barack Obama: Well, the first question was, could I win? And I think that's something that I needed to get some very objective assessments of, because one of the things that I've always been suspicious of is the hype that surrounded my entry into the U.S. Senate. I wanted to make sure that we hadn't fallen prey to hype and believing our own press, so I wanted to test in very concrete terms and push very hard on the question of whether we could win. Since we assumed that we had a strong field, including Sen. Clinton and John Edwards.
The second question, which had more to do with conversations between Michelle and myself on which we needed some feedback from the staff who had been through a presidential election, was how it would have an impact on our family. And that actually was the most important question, but unless we crossed the threshold where we could win, the second one became moot, because I had no interest in running if I didn't think we could win. I wasn't interested in setting myself up for four years from now because to some degree I was very fortunate; I already had a very high profile. I stood to lose more than gain in a presidential race if I wasn't successful. So the second question was: how it would affect our family? And then thinking about schedules and workloads and the rhythm of a campaign, the nature of the scrutiny involved, how it would alter our daily round, and how would we, how effectively could we shield our families, our girls?
And then the third question, which was the most profound question, and one where probably ... in the end I had to answer all by myself was: should I win? Just because you can win doesn't mean you're the person who's best for the country at this moment in time, and I, I, I actually believe my own rhetoric when I say I think we're in a defining moment. It's very difficult to think back to a time where we had a bigger series of choices, and obviously World War maybe, and then the immediate aftermath of WWII, the Great Depression, and before that, the Civil War . . . but the country has a lot of issues that it's got to deal with. And so I don't, I didn't think it was sufficient for me to run just because of my own ambition or because I thought this was my time. I felt as if there had to be at least the possibility that I could do something that no other candidate in the race could do, whether it was bringing the country together more effectively, [or] building a consensus, [or] reinvigorating the American people's interest in government. So that was a series of questions that had to be raised, and those questions were probably the ones that were least amenable to quantification. I mean, we can do some polling and sort of figure out, "Alright, can we win this thing or not?" It's a lot harder to gauge whether you are what the country needs at this point in time.
Were there any points, either in the conversations with your friends, or in the conversations with Michelle, or in the conversations with yourself, anything now that stands out in your mind as crossing the threshold, where you went from "Well, maybe not" to "Maybe so"?
Well, one critical moment was where Michelle said that she would be willing to do it.
And her biggest hesitation was concern about the impact on your family, or concern for your safety?
Mostly the impact on the family—the impact on her, the impact on the girls, my absence, our loss of privacy. Michelle is not somebody who defines herself by my political success or defines our family by my political success. She's much more interested in me being a good father, and her having support, our kids doing well, and so her belief that this was worth it and that our family could manage the stresses and strains was probably the most important piece to the puzzle. I think a second part, the second piece to the puzzle, was her conclusion that I could win, that I wasn't the odds on favorite, but that it was possible for me to pull this off. And I think the final piece was the sense that there were no guarantees, but I might just be able to break through the partisanship, the gridlock that had existed for the last 20 years, and offer a fresh perspective in our politics at a time when our country needed a clean break from the past.
When Michelle was processing this and grappling with this question herself, what role did you take? Did you give her space? Did she have questions for you?
She had questions, but her initial instinct was to say no. Her initial instinct was that we had just gotten off of the U.S. Senate campaign, we had finally stabilized a little bit, the girls were getting older, she knew how difficult it was for me to be away from the girls, she feels lonely when I'm not around, so her initial instinct was not to do it. And I think she also felt that the Clintons were tough and that I would be subject to a lot of attacks. She felt that eight years later I would be in a stronger position and less vulnerable to attack. She doesn't like to see her husband attacked.
Now you're a pretty persuasive guy. Did you do much in the way of trying to persuade her, or did you just leave it with her and let her find her way?
We just talked it through. It wasn't as if it was a slam-dunk for me. I think part of the reason she agreed to do it was because she knew that she had veto power, that she and the girls ultimately mattered more than my own ambitions in this process, and that if she said no, we would be ok.
The point at which she said ok, do you remember that well?
No. I'm sure, by the way, that she was influenced by other people, who might have been stronger advocates for the notion that now is the time, than even I was.
There had to have been some range of opinion amongst the people close to you about whether it was a good idea. Can you give me any sense of who was where? Do you have an institutional skeptic among your friends?
I think everybody just tried to be as objective as possible. I think we all were of the same mindset, which was, this will be a daunting and difficult task, and there is a high price to it, but it may be worth it, and so I think it was a very systematic deliberation, it wasn't as if there were two people who were saying yes, and two people who were saying no, and I was weighing it back and forth. I think everybody was a mix of yes and no. Everybody was excited about the prospect of mounting a campaign. I think everybody had an instinct that the country might be looking for something new, but everybody I think was also mindful that the odds weren't in our favor and that it would exact a significant personal toll.
Give me your own sense of the Clintons and how they factored into your own decision. You said that Michelle was worried about them and knew they were tough, and I'm sure you thought they were tough too, but in deciding that you were going to run, clearly you must have decided that you could take them.
Well . . . my view of the Clintons has always been generally favorable. As I've written in my book, I think that Bill Clinton was a very important figure in helping to steer the Democratic Party out of the wilderness. I think he's as smart and effective a politician as we've seen. You know, he and I sort of have roughly similar perspectives on where ... let me put it this way, I think he is instinctively a pragmatist and not an ideologue, and so I think we share some sympathies there. And with respect to Hillary, I've always viewed her as extraordinarily smart, as disciplined a person as I've ever seen ... a more effective communicator than she is given credit for. My instinct was, though, that given all of their history, they could not reset the country, they could not move us past some of the old arguments. And so ... it wasn't so much that I didn't think Senator Clinton could win, which some people have voiced. It was more of an assessment of whether she would be able to govern and move the big issues forward. My assessment was that they were going to be very tough because they had a 20-year head start in building a political operation that was as good as anything out there.
Yet, even taking that into consideration, you still gave yourself a shot.
You know, this isn't all science. Some of it is just feeling. And there was a feeling that the country was searching for something. And we could see it. I had done my book signing in October, and there was just this remarkable, visceral response, not all of it justified by me, it was more ... that I had become a symbol for the next thing. So some of it was undeserved, but what it told me was that people really were looking for something different. I joked with my team—and it wasn't entirely a joke, it's something I still think about—that the country was looking for a Barack Obama. Now, I'm not sure that I am Barack Obama, right? But they were looking for an idea like that. It was an idea that we're moving into a different phase of politics, and we're moving past the old racial divisions, and we're moving past some of the sharply ideological arguments, and we're trying to, in a very practical, concrete, common sense way, solve some problems that we can't put off any longer, and that we've got to try to be real honest with the American people about this and treat them like adults. I always felt as if I were an imperfect vessel for that idea, but I have a pretty strong instinct that that particular message might resonate with the American people right now.
Let's talk about the summer after you guys got in the race, about that period where the feeling was that you guys were kind of in the doldrums ...
Let's back up. ...Before we get there, a couple of things happened. Number one, we were stunned with our fundraising success. Keep in mind that we basically outraised [Hillary Clinton] in that first quarter, something that nobody expected, least of all, me. And so, in some ways, that created a set of outsized expectations. I think everybody was shocked, and having set the bar real high, suddenly we were no longer the underdogs we expected to be. The sense was that somehow we were this phenomenon, and the hype built around that in what I think was an unhealthy way, because I was still learning my way. The same thing happened, by the way, in our rallies. ...Just in those first couple of months after the announcement, none of us thought we'd have 17,000 people at the announcement, in seven-degree weather. In that first couple of months, it was like we defied gravity. We got 23,000 people in Austin, Texas, the month after I had announced.
And that did a couple of things. It confirmed my instinct that the country really was hungry for something fresh and new. On the other hand, it put us immediately in the spotlight at a time when we were still trying to work out the kinks of our organization, and I was certainly trying to work out the kinks of my own presentation. My stump speech back then ... people would see these huge crowds and all the reporters were writing, "Oh his stump is kind of uninspired." Well, what I had done in my U.S. Senate race was develop my stump organically. I wouldn't necessarily write it all down. I'd try different things and refine them until it really worked. The difference in the Senate race was, I had six months where I was just talking to crowds of 50 people and 100 people, or I was in somebody's living room, without a camera. Suddenly, day one [of the campaign], people are thinking, "Every time he comes out we want him to be as good as he was at the convention speech." And that was a speech I had taken three weeks or four weeks to write and had memorized. So I think that caught us off guard.
I remember that there was an SEIU health care forum, and it was before the first debate. And all the candidates were just supposed to be presenting our views on health care. And because our policy team wasn't all that well worked out, I had a pretty good sense of where I wanted to go on health care, but we hadn't unveiled our health care plan ... we went in there a little casual. I sat down and had kind of a general conversation about health care the way I would if I were on Charlie Rose or something, and you know, Hillary was standing up, and she gave a full-blown presentation. And Edwards had already come out with his plan and was very specific about what he wanted to do. We just got ripped in the press, "Oh look, Obama; he's unprepared; he's amateurish."
So what happened was, we were very successful in fundraising, very successful in building big crowds, had a terrific rollout, but suddenly expectations were up to here [raising his left hand head-high] and we were still, we still had an off-Broadway mentality except we were on the Great White Way. So we had a lot of catching up to do. And that, that tendency to set expectations very high for us, very early on, would continue all the way into the summer, and into the debates. ...If you've never been involved in a presidential debate before, I don't care who you are, you're going to be a little guarded, a little awkward, and a little uncertain. ...When I was asked about terrorism, and I didn't immediately say I'd bomb the heck out of somebody, that was sort of jumped upon by the pundits [who said]: "Look, this is an example [of his awkwardness]." ...It wasn't even that my answer was wrong; it was that it showed that I hadn't been in the national spotlight long enough to know that you've got to signify your toughness by blowing somebody up first before you start taking care of the wounded in the event of a terrorist attack. And so it was that we got some very rapid lessons in presidential politics, very quickly.
I'm reminded of reading about you when you went to go play [basketball] with these guys at the University of North Carolina. You got out there for a while and you said, "These guys are big, and they're fast," and it took you a little while to get up to game speed. Was there some of that?
No, it was a little bit different from that, because there was no phase in the campaign where I watched the other candidates and said to myself, "Wow, look at what they're doing." ...We were still in training camp, but in terms of the press's perspective, the game had already begun. And you know, John Edwards had been campaigning for two years at that point. Hillary had essentially been planning for her campaign for a very long time. And those were the two I was being compared to because of our hype and because of the money being raised. And so for me it was more just watching and saying, "All right, the game has started. They've got a head start; we've got to catch up."
And was this the point at which it was said—I'm not sure whether you said it first or someone else said it—but where you made the point, "Hey, we've got to step our game up"?
Well ... I don't remember exactly the timetable. ...The one thing I did understand—and this was from my Senate race, where we were in third place for the entire contest until the last month—what I did understand was that in politics, six months, nine months is an eternity, and so I wasn't nervous about all this. My attitude was "let's just keep on building and learning and improving, and everybody stay steady." There wasn't a lot of shouting or hollering, it was just, "Let's each day get a little bit better and make steady progress."
But it appears as though there was a recalibration at some point, maybe an adjustment in your own organization's assessment of what it was going to take...
I think that we sort of hit a trough in September and October. Because up until that point, I think the feeling was that we were building an organization; we were raising money; we were in the hunt. ...Right after Labor Day, you started seeing this big gap where Hillary started having a twenty-point, twenty-five point lead. The press started getting in that cycle where each story feeds on itself, you know: "Why is this not working?" And people start trying to find explanations for why you're twenty-five points behind, which means you must be an idiot, and some people try to look for an explanation of all the things you've done wrong, and funders start getting nervous and supporters start getting nervous and making suggestions. And people are second-guessing themselves. So we got in one of those negative spirals. It probably reached its nadir in October.
Was this when the fundraisers were grumbling?
Yeah, around that time, this is all roughly around the same time. And the truth was that at that point, I was actually pretty, I had grown . . . in a puzzling kind of way, I was growing more confident that we could win this thing because we had kept pace on the fundraising, because of the fact that in each successive debate, my performance had improved to the point where in the final four or five debates before Iowa, I felt that I was performing on a par with Hillary, even if the press didn't. I felt comfortable with how to communicate in these sound bites, which was not my strength. And because I always had a lot of confidence in our team in Iowa, we had a great organization, wonderful people, who had worked on the ground. The polls in Iowa were not twenty points apart. We felt that we had the best organization in Iowa, so in an odd way I was actually pretty calm.
It was during that period [when] I had that meeting with the fundraisers to give them an assurance that we are going to win this thing and everybody's gotta just stay calm. It was at that point where I did ask my team to pick up the pace. ...We had gotten sluggish, and we had to push ourselves harder. It was at that point where I had to dig deeper and make sure that I was pushing hard. It was at that point where we also realized we were going to have to make our case more clearly, and more directly [explain] why I would be a better president than Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, as opposed to just talking about what I wanted to do and what my plans were for the country. [We realized that] I had to be very specific and say, "I should be president because I can bring the country together. I'm not subject to special interests. I think I will be straight with the American people, and that's what's needed."
What more did you ask of yourself at this point?
Well, you know, I think that ... [here Obama turned to look out of the window and fell silent for a full seventeen seconds]. David Axelrod said something to me very early on, this was actually in the group meeting when we were deciding to run. And he said, "What I worry about most, Barack, about you running, is you may be too normal to win a presidential campaign." And I think what he meant—you can ask him what he meant—but I think what he meant was, I'm not ... [another pause, twelve seconds this time] I'm not just ... I've never felt that my worth is dependent on me winning this presidential campaign, that I have something that I have to prove. There was a time in my life where I had that feeling, because of an absent father, or always being a little bit of an outsider—you can psychoanalyze me and say, "Here's why he's a driven person." But I love my kids and I love my wife, and I love going to the movies without a fuss or reading a good book on a beach somewhere. ...So there were from the start ... some tensions in me about throwing myself into this and being consumed by it, and losing perspective, and losing touch with what were those things I believed were most important in life. I'm not trying to suggest that I'm some sort of reluctant candidate; obviously this is a choice I made. But there was some tension there in my own mind.
Did you have to reconcile yourself with saying, "I'm going to have to spend more time away from my family?" Was that the crux of it?
Well, yeah, not only that, but I have to embrace this path that I've chosen, and not keep on thinking about the path that wasn't chosen. And, and, it was throwing yourself into it and not holding anything back, so I think it was more of a mindset than it was any particular [thing].
Let me change tacks here a little bit. The law of inertia is a law for a reason and in a political campaign or I guess in any endeavor, particularly if things are going well, changing from the course that you're on is not the easy or natural thing to do. Given that you have defied everyone's expectations except maybe your own, as you move into the general ... in terms of figuring out what you need to do better, about where you need to tighten things up, is that made more difficult by the fact that you all have done so well? Do you think you have a clear sense as a campaign...
No, no ... I think that one thing I'm pretty good at is being my own best critic. Nobody's harder on me than me. I think that there are a lot of things that we need to do better, not just to win in November, but also to govern. I'm a firm believer that the habits you establish now carry over. If you're undisciplined now, you'll be undisciplined later. If there are areas of weakness in our organization now, that will reflect itself in my presence, and so ... assuming we're successful in winning the nomination, we're going to have to do a lot of work to retool.
Can you give me one or two examples of things you can do better?
... I think one of the things I said at the beginning of this campaign was that I wanted to block out a lot of time, especially early in the first two or three months of the campaign, to think about issues, because what I didn't want to do was just sort of paint by the numbers when it came to the policy side. I wanted to have conversations with the sharpest minds and the people who are pushing the envelope on health care or energy or education, to really drill down deep and figure out what is going to be ... the menu of options that we have and what are those steps that are most likely to lead us, lead the country, in a better direction. And ... not all that work was done, because the amount of time consumed just with politics, raising money, doing eight town hall meetings a day in Iowa, it just left very little time to devote to that kind of systematic, hard policy work. Now I think that our products, the policies we've offered are ones that I have great confidence in. And I think that our policy team has done a really good job, but my own involvement in us maybe stretching a little further and asking even tougher questions about what policies can really solve our energy crisis, for example, I'm not sure we've done that as well as we should have. ... That was one of the tradeoffs of having to go from zero to sixty—we couldn't do everything exactly as well as we wanted to do. Now, potentially, we have a little more time to do it.
Have you talked to Reverend Wright?
No.
I understand that you were reluctant to even watch the video of him at the National Press Club, and I wonder if you can just take your mind back to when they handed you the transcript.
... My relationship with Reverend Wright and the church ... and the fact that it became such an enormous issue, took me somewhat by surprise. Not entirely, but somewhat, first of all because it's a very conventional black church in a lot of ways. This whole thing about black liberation theology and black value system etc., etc., that's an overlay of some names that are given to very traditional aspects of the black church—preaching the social gospel, emphasizing your obligations to the community. Nine out of ten of Rev. Wright's sermons would stir no controversy whatsoever. He was not a public figure in Chicago beyond the church; he was not somebody like Jesse or Farrakhan who sought the public eye. He wasn't considered a firebrand. The church ministries are similar to church ministries all across the country. The membership is indistinguishable from the membership of most black churches.
I think that the first time that I got an inkling that this could be a problem was the day of the announcement, which has already been reported, where there was this article in Rolling Stone that my team showed to me that had some pretty incendiary language in it by Rev. Wright. The truth is that, like most busy people, I wasn't going to church every week, and he preaches three sermons a week. So particularly in the last two or three years, we hadn't been going that often, in part because I was campaigning and would be at other people's churches all the time. And what I understand from friends who are also members of the church was, after 9/11, Rev. Wright really ratcheted up some of the rhetoric, was a fierce critic of Bush, so some of his sermons became much more fiery. So I ... that's when ... when I [saw] that on the page, I thought to myself, "This doesn't sound real good." But my concern was not just the political ramifications; my concern was to figure out a way to protect the church from becoming a political issue. So that's the point where I called Rev. Wright, and I said, "You know what, you probably shouldn't introduce me, there's going to be 500 press credentials there, you don't want a whole bunch of mikes suddenly stuck in your face without any preparation or expectation." I know that that disappointed him, and I think he may have felt some anger about that.
Did he express any?
I know it, and also [it's] what I heard from others ... Shortly thereafter, there was an article by Jodi Kantor in The New York Times in which this was reported, and where [Wright] characterized our conversations. That put a further strain on the relationship because I didn't particularly appreciate him talking about a conversation that he and I had together, and suddenly it appearing in the Times. But my view at that point was that he was retiring, I had a strong commitment to the church community, he had gone through some very difficult times over the last several years, a number of his close friends had passed away, and the fact that he was retiring, [that] this is what he had built ... his life of preaching, and now he was about to leave. So my instinct was to simply let him stay out of the limelight and to not make a bigger deal out of it. I was, that was, though, the first time I learned about the quote surrounding 9/11, it was in that Times article. And at that point I think both myself and my team anticipated that this will be a big problem at some point.
Fast forward, after Iowa, I don't know exactly when ...[Sean] Hannity had played this up initially, his perspective on it was so ignorant, of black history, black traditions, black culture, black church. ... His attempt to make this innocuous statement of the black value system [into] some statement of black separatism was so ludicrous that it didn't get a lot of traction, and we didn't expect it would. But, I'll be honest with you, this is an example of a failing, a shortcoming in our campaign. Immediately after that New York Times article came out, I, and a number of our senior folks, said to our research team, "Let's pull every single sermon that Rev. Wright's made, because it could be an issue, and it could be attributed to me, and let's at least know exactly what we're dealing with." That never got done. So that when the loop came, that did take us by surprise, packaged in that fashion, how offensive it was, I think [it] caught all of us off guard. I had just come back from Washington, [and] I had to immediately draft a statement. I had to appear that night on the cable shows to denounce the words but try to place them in some context, and it was that weekend that I prepared to write the race speech and was able then to deliver it in Philadelphia. And at that point, I don't think there was any question that this was going to be very damaging politically. On the other hand, I felt it was important to not disown somebody who I've known for a long time, who'd always treated me with great courtesy and kindness, and had treated my family very well, who was at the center of the church community that I valued, and who, for all his flaws, had done very good work. And that's what I tried to express in the speech, was this sense that people are complicated. They're a mixture of good and bad.
... I was shocked by a number of the things [Wright said]. I think the thing about AIDS was probably the most shocking, because that's classic sort of conspiracy theorizing in the African-American community. It's not uncommon, but for somebody of Rev. Wright's education, it's not something that I would have expected. So I was very surprised by that. I did have a conversation with him after I delivered the speech in Philadelphia, and I told him in no uncertain terms how profoundly I disagreed with what he had to say, how offensive it was both to me and the American people, and I suggested to him that he needed to internalize and understand why people would be offended. And so, to see him then not process any of that, or engage in any self reflection, but to go out three consecutive days in an escalating fashion, culminating in a performance at the National Press Club that showed very little regard for the sensibilities of the American people, very little regard for my own sensibilities, that defended [the] indefensible statement, and that did so in a way that was often rude and mocking of people in the audience and in the viewing audience, was something very painful.
You take a lot of pride in your roots as a community organizer, in being not far removed from the sort of everyday American experience. And I'm sure you know as well as anyone that there's no bubble quite like the presidency; there's nothing that insulates you from the rest of us like the presidency. Do you think much about this? Do you worry at all about this?
Absolutely. I worry about it all the time. I benefit from the fact that Michelle and her family are very rooted, and almost prototypical Americans, and [from] my friends—like Marty Nesbitt and Eric Whitaker and Valerie [Jarrett], or my friend who I just saw in Oregon, Greg Orme, who was traveling with me, my friend from high school who now works as a contractor—[from the fact that] most of my good friends are not in politics and are not in the political world. I feel that they help me stay tuned in to what's going on with people. But I do worry about it. More than anything what I worry about is the fact that I now change the atmosphere in any room that I walk into, or any conversation that I enter into. That people are going to speak to me differently now than they might have five years ago, even people whom I'm close to. That is something I worry about. And how to prevent that is going to be one of the most important challenges of the presidency.
From "A Long Time Coming" by Evan Thomas and the staff of Newsweek. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs (
www.publicaffairsbooks.com
), a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2009.