EFTA00684460

From: Office of Tetje Rod-Larsen <
NI=II 
Subject: January 19 update 
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 10:37:35 +0000 
19 January, 2014 
Article 1 
The Washington Post 
America is slipping to No. 2. Don't panic. 
Charles Kenny 
Art"1e
2 
The New Yorker 
On and off the road with Barack Obama. 
David Remnick 
Anoc I.
The Washington Post 
America is slipping to No. 2. Don't  panic. 
Charles Kenny 
January 18, 2014 -- Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for 
Global Development. This essay is adapted from his new book, "The 
Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Good for the West." 
America will soon cease to be the world's largest economy. You can argue 
about why, when and how bad, but the end is indeed nigh. According to the 
Penn World Tables — the best data to compare gross domestic product 
across countries — China's GDP was worth $10.4 trillion in 2011, 
compared with a U.S. GDP of $13.3 trillion . But with China's economy 
growing 7 to 10 percent a year, compared with the recent U.S. track record 
of less than 3 percent, China should take the lead by 2017 at the latest. 
Already, China is the world's tQp trading nation , edging the United States 
in total imports and exports in 2012. And Arvind Subramanian, an 
economist formerly with the International Monetary Fund, predicts that by 
2030 the world will have four major economic players: China will be the 
heavyweight, followed by the United States and European Union, with 
economies about half as large, and then India close behind. 
Time to panic? A recent Chicago Council survey found that only 9 percent 
of Americans believe that Chinese growth will mostly benefit the United 
EFTA00684460

States, while 40 percent think it will be mostly negative for us. And a 2012 
YouGov survey suggests that about half of Americans would prefer to see 
the United States stay on top, even with anemic economic growth, rather 
than grow rapidly but be overtaken by China. You only need recall 
President Obama and Mitt Romney sparring over who would be tougher on 
China to see how Washington channels this popular angst. 
Certainly, China's growth poses some challenges — but the opportunities it 
offers far outweigh them. And no matter the hand-wringing, losing the title 
of largest economy doesn't really matter much to Americans' quality of 
life. 
Regardless of its current perch atop the global economy, the United States 
is only the 19th least corrupt nation, according to Transparency 
International. It rates 67th in equality of pay between men and women 
according to the 2013 Gender Gap Report from the World Economic 
Forum. And among 31 high-income countries belonging to the 
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United 
States ranked third in GDP per capita as of 2011 — but 27th in life 
expectancy, 29th in infant mortality, 23rd in unemployment, 27th in math 
test scores (as of 2012) and 30th in income equality. 
In fact, the link between the absolute size of your economy and pretty 
much any measure that truly matters is incredibly weak. Whenever China 
takes over the top spot, it will still lag far behind the world's leading 
countries on indicators reflecting quality of life. For starters, there are a lot 
more people sharing China's GDP; even the rosiest forecasts for the 
country's economic growth suggest that per capita income will be lower 
than in the United States for decades to come. The average American lives 
five years longer than the average person in China, and civil and political 
rights in the world's soon-to-be-biggest economy are routinely abused. 
Living in an America that ranks second in GDP to China will still be far, 
far better than living in China. 
There are some real economic costs related to losing the top spot in the 
GDP rankings, but they are small and manageable. The dollar might lose 
its dominance as the currency of choice for central bank reserves and 
trading, and some predict that will increase the cost of U.S. borrowing and 
exporting. In fact, the dollar share of global reserves has already fallen 
from about 80 percent in the 1970s to about 40 percent today, with the euro 
EFTA00684461

and the renminbi gaining ground, but there isn't much sign that that has 
spooked global markets. Meanwhile, businesses in the rest of the world 
still manage to export, even though they must go through the trouble of 
exchanging currencies. 
And if you want further reassurance that you don't need to be large to be 
rich, remember that in tiny Luxembourg, average incomes are almost twice 
those in the United States. 
Of more concern to Washington might be that having the world's largest 
economy helps the United States maintain the planet's largest defense 
budget. At the moment, America accounts for about four out of every 10 
dollars in global defense spending; China, in second place, accounts for 
less than one out of 10. But one way to think about this is to ask how much 
the three-quarters increase in defense spending between 2000 and 2011 
enhanced America's well-being. It is distinctly unclear that having one of 
the world's largest defense budgets, rather than the largest, poses an 
existential threat to U.S. citizens' quality of life. 
While the downsides are limited, the upside to the United States of losing 
the top GDP spot is immense. The country's declining economic primacy is 
mainly a result of the developing economies becoming larger, healthier, 
more educated, more free and less violent. And there is little doubt the 
United States benefits from that. Just over the past few years, for example, 
U.S. export markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America have grown rapidly. 
Three-fifths of America's exports go to the developing world, and that 
suggests that about 6 million Americans are employed providing goods and 
services to emerging markets. As the developing world gets richer, it will 
import more — and create more jobs here. 
The rest of the world is also inventing more stuff, from modular building 
techniques in China to new drug therapies and low-water cement-
manufacturing processes in India to mobile banking applications in Kenya. 
We can benefit from those inventions as much as we already benefit from 
foreign innovators coming to the United States. Among the patents 
awarded in 2011 to teams at the 10 most innovative American universities, 
for example, three-quarters involved a foreign-born researcher, according 
to the Partnership for a New American Economy . As more people in 
developing countries go to college and as more firms there research and 
develop new products, there's a potential for increased innovation in both 
EFTA00684462

the West and the Rest. That could bring faster progress in a number of 
different areas here at home, from connectivity to health. 
And growth in the developing world, even if it means that some populous 
economies may eventually grow larger than the United States, also means 
that there are more places for Americans to travel in security and comfort, 
and more places to learn, work or while away our retirement years. 
Americans can get health care at Bumrungrad International Hospital in 
Bangkok — accredited by the Joint Commission International, which 
certifies health-care organizations worldwide — for a fraction of the cost 
they can in Bethesda. Or their kids can attend college at the University of 
Cape Town, rated higher than Georgetown University in international 
rankings but one-fifth as expensive. Or perhaps they can get jobs at one of 
the new breed of world-class multinational firms based in the developing 
world, such as Tata or Huawei. 
America's tenure on top is ending because much of the world is becoming 
more like America in many ways: richer, more democratic, more secure. 
The world increasingly shares aspirations, priorities and attitudes similar to 
ours. This is a success story for U.S. stewardship of the global economy. 
So celebrate with me: We're No. 2! 
Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. 
His current work covers topics including the post-2015 development 
agenda, the role of technology in quality of life improvements, and 
governance and anticorruption. 
The New Yorker 
On and off the road with Barack Obama. 
David Remnick 
January 27, 2014 -- On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack 
Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-
lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic 
achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social 
legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His 
EFTA00684463

approval rating was down to forty per cent—lower than George W Bush's 
in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq 
had been based on intelligence that "turned out to be wrong." Also, Obama 
said thickly, "I've got a fat lip." 
That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I. headquarters, Obama went 
up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of 
humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse the 
transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle Healing Yoga. This had 
happened before. In 2010, after taking a self-described "shellacking" in the 
midterm elections, Obama caught an elbow in the mouth while playing ball 
at Fort McNair. He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was 
one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus 
Institute. Decerega wasn't invited to play again, though Obama sent him a 
photograph inscribed "For Rey, the only guy that ever hit the President and 
didn't get arrested. Barack." 
This time, the injury was slighter and no assailant was named—"I think it 
was the ball," Obama said—but the President needed little assistance in 
divining the metaphor in this latest insult to his person. The pundits were 
declaring 2013 the worst year of his Presidency. The Republicans had been 
sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years earlier, and 
HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a 
gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward 
Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency; the failure to 
get anything passed on gun control or immigration reform; the unseemly 
waffling over whether the Egyptian coup was a coup; the solidifying 
wisdom in Washington that the President was "disengaged," allergic to the 
forensic and seductive arts of political persuasion. The congressional 
Republicans quashed nearly all legislation as a matter of principle and shut 
down the government for sixteen days, before relenting out of sheer 
tactical confusion and embarrassment—and yet it was the President's 
miseries that dominated the year-end summations. 
Obama worried his lip with his tongue and the tip of his index finger. He 
sighed, slumping in his chair. The night before, Iran had agreed to freeze its 
nuclear program for six months. A final pact, if one could be arrived at, 
would end the prospect of a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities and 
the hell that could follow: terror attacks, proxy battles, regional war—take 
EFTA00684464

your pick. An agreement could even help normalize relations between the 
United States and Iran for the first time since the Islamic Revolution, in 
1979. Obama put the odds of a final accord at less than even, but, still, how 
was this not good news? 
The answer had arrived with breakfast. The Saudis, the Israelis, and the 
Republican leadership made their opposition known on the Sunday-
morning shows and through diplomatic channels. Benjamin Netanyahu, the 
Israeli Prime Minister, called the agreement a "historic mistake." Even a 
putative ally like New York Senator Chuck Schumer could go on "Meet the 
Press" and, fearing no retribution from the White House, hint that he might 
help bollix up the deal. Obama hadn't tuned in. "I don't watch Sunday-
morning shows," he said. "That's been a well-established rule." Instead, he 
went out to play ball. 
Usually, Obama spends Sundays with his family. Now he was headed for a 
three-day fund-raising trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, 
rattling the cup in one preposterous mansion after another. The prospect 
was dispiriting. Obama had already run his last race, and the chances that 
the Democratic Party will win back the House of Representatives in the 
2014 midterm elections are slight. The Democrats could, in fact, lose the 
Senate. 
For an important trip abroad, Air Force One is crowded with advisers, 
military aides, Secret Service people, support staff, the press pool. This trip 
was smaller, and I was along for the ride, sitting in a guest cabin with a 
couple of aides and a staffer who was tasked with keeping watch over a 
dark suit bag with a tag reading "The President." 
Obama spent his flight time in the private quarters in the nose of the plane, 
in his office compartment, or in a conference room. At one point on the trip 
from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for a 
conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami Dolphins—
Carolina Panthers game. Slender as a switch, he wore a white shirt and 
dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high-backed leather chair. As 
we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game. 
Reports of multiple concussions and retired players with early-onset 
dementia had been in the news all year, and so, before I left, I asked if he 
didn't feel at all ambivalent about following the sport. He didn't. 
EFTA00684465

"I would not let my son play pro football," he conceded. "But, I mean, you 
wrote a lot about boxing, right? We're sort of in the same realm." 
The Miami defense was taking on a Keystone Kops quality, and Obama, 
who had lost hope on a Bears contest, was starting to lose interest in the 
Dolphins. "At this point, there's a little bit of caveat emptor," he went on. 
"These guys, they know what they're doing. They know what they're 
buying into. It is no longer a secret. It's sort of the feeling I have about 
smokers, you know?" 
Obama chewed furtively on a piece of Nicorette. His carriage and the 
cadence of his conversation are usually so measured that I was thrown by 
the lingering habit, the trace of indiscipline. "I'm not a purist," he said. 
I—ON THE CLOCK 
When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a 
memoir. "Now, that's a slam dunk," the former Obama adviser David 
Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought 
that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars 
for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve 
million for Michelle Obama's memoirs. (The First Lady has already started 
work on hers.) Obama's best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago 
businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama's 
legacy and to his finances, "I don't see him locked up in a room writing all 
the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing 
his second book, he would say, 'I'm gonna get up at seven and write this 
chapter—and at nine we'll play golf.' I would think no, it's going to be a 
lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, `Let's go.'" 
Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as human rights, 
education, and "health and wellness." "He was a local community 
organizer when he was young," he said. "At the back end of his career, I 
see him as an international and national community organizer." 
Yet no post-Presidential project—even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant's 
memoirs or Jimmy Carter's efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa 
—can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the 
stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama's 
Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the 
Republicans took the House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final 
interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming. 
EFTA00684466

"The conventional wisdom is that a President's second term is a matter of 
minimizing the damage and playing defense rather than playing offense," 
Obama said in one of our conversations on the trip and at the White House. 
"But, as I've reminded my team, the day after I was inaugurated for a 
second term, we're in charge of the largest organization on earth, and our 
capacity to do some good, both domestically and around the world, is 
unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention." 
In 2007, at the start of Obama's Presidential campaign, the historian Doris 
Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard Goodwin, who worked in the 
Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, visited him in his Senate office. "I 
have no desire to be one of those Presidents who are just on the list—you 
see their pictures lined up on the wall," Obama told them. "I really want to 
be a President who makes a difference." As she put it to me then, "There 
was the sense that he wanted to be big. He didn't want to be Millard 
Fillmore or Franklin Pierce." 
The question is whether Obama will satisfy the standard he set for himself. 
His biggest early disappointment as President was being forced to 
recognize that his romantic vision of a post-partisan era, in which there are 
no red states or blue states, only the United States, was, in practical terms, 
a fantasy. It was a difficult fantasy to relinquish. The spirit of national 
conciliation was more than the rhetorical pixie dust of Obama's 2004 
speech to the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which had 
brought him to delirious national attention. It was also an elemental 
component of his self-conception, his sense that he was uniquely suited to 
transcend ideology and the grubby battles of the day. Obama is defensive 
about this now. "My speech in Boston was an aspirational speech," he said. 
"It was not a description of our politics. It was a description of what I saw 
in the American people." 
The structures of American division came into high relief once he was in 
office. The debate over the proper scale and scope of the federal 
government dates to the Founders, but it has intensified since the Reagan 
revolution. Both Bill Clinton and Obama have spent as much time 
defending progressive advances—from Social Security and Medicare to 
voting rights and abortion rights—as they have trying to extend them. The 
Republican Party is living through the late-mannerist phase of that 
revolution, fuelled less by ideas than by resentments. The moderate 
EFTA00684467

Republican tradition is all but gone, and the reactionaries who claim 
Reagan's banner display none of his ideological finesse. Rejection is all. 
Obama can never be opposed vehemently enough. 
The dream of bipartisan cooperation glimmered again after Obama won 
reelection against Mitt Romney with fifty-one per cent of the popular vote. 
The President talked of the election breaking the "fever" in Washington. 
"We didn't expect the floodgates would open and Boehner would be Tip 
O'Neill to our Reagan," Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to the President, 
said. But reelection, he thought, had "liberated" Obama. The second 
Inaugural Address was the most liberal since the nineteen-sixties. Obama 
pledged to take ambitious action on climate change, immigration, gun 
control, voting rights, infrastructure, tax reform. He warned of a nation at 
"perpetual war." He celebrated the Seneca Falls Convention, the Selma-to-
Montgomery marches, and the Stonewall riots as events in a narrative of 
righteous struggle. He pledged "collective action" on economic fairness, 
and declared that the legacy of Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid 
does "not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that 
make this country great." Pfeiffer said, "His point was that Congress won't 
set the limits of what I will do. I won't trim my vision. And, even if I can't 
get it done, I will set the stage so it does get done" in the years ahead. Then 
came 2013, annus horribilis. 
Obama's election was one of the great markers in the black freedom 
struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more 
racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white 
voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The 
popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites 
who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a 
globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama's drop 
in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. "There's no 
doubt that there's some folks who just really dislike me because they don't 
like the idea of a black President," Obama said. "Now, the flip side of it is 
there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me 
and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I'm a black 
President." The latter group has been less in evidence of late. 
"There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we 
have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it's 
EFTA00684468

hard to disentangle those issues," he went on. "You can be somebody who, 
for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal 
government—that it's distant, that it's bureaucratic, that it's not 
accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should 
reside in the hands of state governments. But what's also true, obviously, is 
that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states' rights in the context 
of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There's a 
pretty long history there. And so I think it's important for progressives not 
to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic 
Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there's some overlap between 
those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against 
those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-
Americans. The flip side is I think it's important for conservatives to 
recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, 
so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to 
expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry 
guy in Washington who wants to crush states' rights but, rather, because we 
are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country 
to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are 
healthy." 
Obama's advisers are convinced that if the Republicans don't find a way to 
attract non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Asians, they may lose 
the White House for two or three more election cycles. And yet Obama still 
makes every effort to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the 
unifying moment were still out there somewhere in the middle distance. 
"There were times in our history where Democrats didn't seem to be 
paying enough attention to the concerns of middle-class folks or working-
class folks, black or white," he said. "And this was one of the great gifts of 
Bill Clinton to the Party—to say, you know what, it's entirely legitimate 
for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can't just talk 
about police abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? 
It's all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if 
the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already 
feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I 
think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And 
I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process." 
EFTA00684469

For the moment, though, the opposition party is content to define itself, 
precisely, by its opposition. As Obama, a fan of the "Godfather" movies, 
has put it, "It turns out Marlon Brando had it easy, because, when it comes 
to Congress, there is no such thing as an offer they can't refuse." 
II-THE LONG VIEW 
At dusk, Air Force One touched down at the Seattle-Tacoma International 
Airport. Obama and his adviser Valerie Jarrett stood for a moment on the 
tarmac gazing at Mt. Rainier, the snow a candied pink. Then Obama 
nodded. Moment over. They got in the car and headed for town. Obama's 
limousine, a Cadillac said to weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds, is 
known as the Beast. It is armored with ceramic, titanium, aluminum, and 
steel to withstand bomb blasts, and it is sealed in case of biochemical 
attack. The doors are as heavy as those on a Boeing 757. The tires are 
gigantic "run-flats," reinforced with Kevlar. A supply of blood matching 
the President's type is kept in the trunk. 
The Beast ascended the driveway of Jon Shirley, in the Seattle suburb of 
Medina, on Lake Washington. (Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates live in town, too.) 
Shirley earned his pile during the early days of high tech, first at Tandy and 
then, in the eighties, at Microsoft, where he served as president. Shirley's 
lawn is littered with gargantuan modern sculptures. A Claes Oldenburg 
safety pin loomed in the dark. The Beast pulled up to Shirley's front door. 
One of the enduring mysteries of the Obama years is that so many 
members of the hyper-deluxe economy—corporate C.E.O.s and Wall Street 
bankers—have abandoned him. The Dow is more than twice what it was 
when Obama took office, in 2009; corporate profits are higher than they 
have been since the end of the Second World War; the financial crisis of 
2008-09 vaporized more than nine trillion dollars in real-estate value, and 
no major purveyor of bogus mortgages or dodgy derivatives went to jail. 
Obama bruised some feelings once or twice with remarks about "fat-cat 
bankers" and "reckless behavior and unchecked excess," but, in general, he 
dares not offend. In 2011, at an annual dinner he holds at the White House 
with American historians, he asked the group to help him find a language 
in which he could address the problem of growing inequality without being 
accused of class warfare. 
Inside Shirley's house, blue-chip works of modern art—paintings, 
sculpture, installations—were on every wall, in every corner: Katz, Kline, 
EFTA00684470

Klein, Pollock, Zhang Huan, Richter, Arp, Rothko, Close, Calder. The 
house measures more than twenty-seven thousand square feet. There are 
only two bedrooms. In the library, the President went through a familiar 
fund-raiser routine: a pre-event private "clutch," where he shakes hands, 
makes small talk, and poses for pictures with an inner group—the host, the 
governor, the chosen. 
Down the hall, in a room scaled like an airplane hangar, about seventy 
guests, having paid sixteen thousand dollars each to the Democratic 
Congressional Campaign Committee kitty, ate dinner and waited. Near 
some very artistic furniture, I stood with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's most 
intimate consigliere. To admirers, Jarrett is known as "the third Obama"; to 
wary aides, who envy her long history with the Obamas and her easy 
access to the living quarters of the White House, she is the Night Stalker. 
Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, David Plouffe, and many 
others in the Administration have clashed with her. They are gone. She 
remains—a constant presence, at meetings, at meals, in the Beast. While 
we were waiting for Obama to speak to the group, I asked Jarrett whether 
the health-care rollout had been the worst political fiasco Obama had 
confronted so far. 
"I really don't think so," she said. Like all Obama advisers, she was 
convinced that the problems would get "fixed"—just as Social Security 
was fixed after a balky start, in 1937—and the memory of the botched 
rollout would recede. That was the hope and that was the spin. And then 
she said something that I've come to think of as the Administration's 
mantra: "The President always takes the long view." 
That appeal to patience and historical reckoning, an appeal that risks a 
maddening high-mindedness, is something that everyone around Obama 
trots out to combat the hysterias of any given moment. "He has learned 
through those vicissitudes that every day is Election Day in Washington 
and everyone is writing history in ten-minute intervals," Axelrod told me. 
"But the truth is that history is written over a long period of time—and he 
will be judged in the long term." 
Obama stepped up to a platform and went to work. First ingratiation, then 
gratitude, then answers. He expressed awe at the sight of Mt. Rainier. 
Being in Seattle, he said, made him "feel the spirit of my mom," the late 
Ann Dunham, who went to high school nearby, on Mercer Island. He 
EFTA00684471

praised his host's hospitality. ("The only problem when I come to Jon's 
house is I want to just kind of roam around and check stuff out, and instead 
I've got to talk.") Then came a version of the long-game riff: "One thing 
that I always try to emphasize is that, if you look at American history, there 
have been frequent occasions in which it looked like we had insoluble 
problems—either economic, political, security—and, as long as there were 
those who stayed steady and clear-eyed and persistent, eventually we came 
up with an answer." 
As Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements—the economic 
rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon 
emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology—he seemed efficient but 
contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a 
midseason road game of modest consequence; he was performing just hard 
enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury. Even in 
front of West Coast liberals, he is always careful to disavow liberalism—
the word, anyway. "I'm not a particularly ideological person," Obama told 
Jon Shirley and his guests. "There's things, some values I feel passionately 
about." He said that these included making sure that everybody is "being 
treated with dignity or respect regardless of what they look like or what 
their last name is or who they love," providing a strong defense, and 
"leaving a planet that is as spectacular as the one we inherited from our 
parents and our grandparents." He continued, "So there are values I'm 
passionate about, but I'm pretty pragmatic when it comes to how we get 
there." 
Obama said he'd take some questions—in "boy, girl, boy, girl" order. He 
tried to rally the Democrats and expressed dismay with the opposition. 
("There are reasonable conservatives and there are those who just want to 
burn down the house.") He played both sides of the environment issues, 
rehearsing the arguments for and against the Keystone pipeline and 
sympathizing with the desire of China and India to lift millions out of 
poverty—but if they consume energy the way the United States has "we'll 
be four feet under water." This is the archetypal Obama habit of mind and 
politics, the calm, professorial immersion in complexity played out in front 
of ardent supporters who crave a rallying cry. It's what compelled him to 
declare himself a non-pacifist as he was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, 
in Oslo, and praise Ronald Reagan in a Democratic primary debate. 
EFTA00684472

And that was the end of the performance. A few minutes later, the 
motorcade was snaking through the streets of suburban Seattle—kids in 
pajamas holding signs and sparklers, the occasional protester, Obama 
secured in the back seat of the Beast. He could hear nothing. The windows 
of his car are five inches thick. 
III-PRESIDENTIAL M&M'S 
The next morning, a Monday, I woke early and turned on CNN. Senator 
Lindsey Graham, who is facing a primary challenge from four Tea Party 
candidates in South Carolina, was saying with utter confidence that Iran 
had hoodwinked the Administration in Geneva. Next came a poll showing 
that the majority of the country now believed that the President was neither 
truthful nor honest. The announcer added with a smile that GQ had put 
Obama at No. 17 on its "least influential" list—right up there with Pope 
Benedict XVI in his retirement, the cicadas that never showed up last 
summer, and Manti Te'o's fake dead girlfriend. 
In the hotel lobby, I met Jeff Tiller, who works for the White House press 
operation. In college, he became interested in politics and later joined 
Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign. From there, he volunteered at the 
White House, which led to a string of staff jobs, and eventually he was 
doing advance work all over the world for the White House. The aides on 
the plane were like Tiller—committed members of a cheerful, overworked 
microculture who could barely conceal their pleasure in Presidential 
propinquity. I'm twenty-seven and this is my thirty-second time on Air 
Force One. "I pinch myself sometimes," Tiller said. Dan Pfeiffer, who has 
been with Obama since 2007, was so overworked last year that he suffered 
a series of mini-strokes. "But no worries," he told me. "I'm good!" 
We arrived in San Francisco, and the motorcade raced along, free of traffic 
and red lights, from the airport to a community center in Chinatown named 
after Betty Ong, a flight attendant who perished when American Airlines 
Flight 11 was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center. Obama 
was to give a speech on immigration. Out the window, you could see 
people waving, people hoisting their babies as if to witness history, people 
holding signs protesting one issue or another—the Keystone pipeline, 
especially—and, everywhere, the iPhone clickers, the Samsung snappers. 
EFTA00684473

The Beast pulled under a makeshift security tent. Obama gets to events like 
these through underground hallways, industrial kitchens, holding rooms—
all of which have been checked for bombs. At the Ong Center, he met with 
his hosts and their children. ("I think I have some Presidential M&M's for 
you!") People get goggle-eyed when it's their turn for a picture. Obama 
tries to put them at ease: "C'mon in here! Let's do this!" Sometimes there 
is teasing of the mildest sort: "Chuck Taylor All-Stars! Old style, baby!" A 
woman told the President that she was six months pregnant. She didn't 
look it. "Whoa! Don't tell that to Michelle. She'll be all. . ." The woman 
said she was having a girl. Obama was delighted: "Daughters! You can't 
beat 'em!" He pulled her in for the photo. From long experience, Obama 
has learned what works for him in pictures: a broad, toothy smile. A 
millisecond after the flash, the sash releases, the smile drops, a curtain 
falling. 
A little later, Betty Ong's mother and siblings arrived. Obama drew them 
into a huddle. I heard him saying that Betty was a hero, though "obviously, 
the heartache never goes away." Obama really is skilled at this kind of 
thing, the kibbitzing and the expressions of sympathy, the hugging and the 
eulogizing and the celebrating, the sheer animal activity of human politics 
—but he suffers an anxiety of comparison. Bill Clinton was, and is, the 
master, a hyper-extrovert whose freakish memory for names and faces, and 
whose indomitable will to enfold and charm everyone in his path, remains 
unmatched. Obama can be a dynamic speaker before large audiences and 
charming in very small groups, but, like a normal human being and unlike 
the near-pathological personalities who have so often held the office, he is 
depleted by the act of schmoozing a group of a hundred as if it were an 
intimate gathering. At fund-raisers, he would rather eat privately with a 
couple of aides before going out to perform. According to the Wall Street 
Journal, when Jeffrey Katzenberg threw a multi-million-dollar fund-raiser 
in Los Angeles two years ago, he told the President's staff that he expected 
Obama to stop at each of the fourteen tables and talk for a while. No one 
would have had to ask Clinton. Obama's staffers were alarmed. When you 
talk about this with people in Obamaland, they let on that Clinton borders 
on the obsessive—as if the appetite for connection were related to what got 
him in such deep trouble. 
EFTA00684474

"Obama is a genuinely respectful person, but he doesn't try to seduce 
everyone," Axelrod said. "It's never going to be who he'll be." Obama 
doesn't love fund-raising, he went on, "and, if you don't love it in the first 
place, you're not likely to grow fonder of it over time." 
Obama has other talents that serve him well in public. Like a seasoned 
standup comedian, he has learned that a well-timed heckler can be his ally. 
It allows him to dramatize his open-mindedness, even his own 
philosophical ambivalences about a particularly difficult political or moral 
question. Last May, at the National Defense University, where he was 
giving a speech on counter-terrorism, a woman named Medea Benjamin, 
the co-founder of the group Code Pink, interrupted him, loudly and at 
length, to talk about drone strikes and about closing the American prison at 
Guantanamo Bay. While some in the audience tried to drown her out with 
applause, and security people proceeded to drag her away, Obama asserted 
Benjamin's right to "free speech," and declared, "The voice of that woman 
is worth paying attention to." 
At the Ong Center, an undocumented immigrant from South Korea named 
Ju Hong was in the crowd lined up behind the President. Toward the end of 
Obama's speech, Ju Hong, a Berkeley graduate, broke in, demanding that 
the President use his executive powers to stop deportations. 
Obama wheeled around. "If, in fact, I could solve all these problems 
without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so, but we're also a 
nation of laws," he said, making his case to a wash of applause. 
At the next event, a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee at 
a music venue, the SFJAZZ Center, Obama met the host's family ("Hold 
on, we got some White House M&M's") and then made his way to the 
backstage holding area. You could hear the murmur of security 
communications: "Renegade with greeters"—Renegade being Obama's 
Secret Service handle. 
Obama worked with more enthusiasm than at the midday event. He did the 
polite handshake; the full pull-in; the hug and double backslap; the slap-
shake; the solicitous arm-around-the-older woman. ("And you stand 
here. . . . Perfect!") 
The clutch over, the crowd cleared away, Obama turned to his aides and 
said, "How many we got out there?" 
"Five hundred. Five-fifty." 
EFTA00684475

"Five-fifty?" Obama said, walking toward the wings of the stage. "What 
are we talking about? Politics? Can't we talk about something else? 
Sports?" 
The aides were, as ever, staring down at their iPhones, scrolling, tapping, 
mentally occupying a psychic space somewhere between where they were 
and the unspooling news cycle back in Washington. 
"We're off the cuff," Pfeiffer said. No prepared speech. 
"Off the cuff? Sounds good. Let's go do it." 
Obama walked toward the stage and, as he was announced, he mouthed the 
words: "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States." 
Then it happened again: another heckler broke into Obama's speech. A 
man in the balcony repeatedly shouted out, "Executive order!," demanding 
that the President bypass Congress with more unilateral actions. Obama 
listened with odd indulgence. Finally, he said, "I'm going to actually pause 
on this issue, because a lot of people have been saying this lately on every 
problem, which is just, `Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do 
anything and basically nullify Congress.'" 
Many in the crowd applauded their approval. Yes! Nullify it! Although 
Obama has infuriated the right with relatively modest executive orders on 
gun control and some stronger ones on climate change, he has issued the 
fewest of any modern President, except George H. W. Bush. 
"Wait, wait, wait," Obama said. "Before everybody starts clapping, that's 
not how it works. We've got this Constitution, we've got this whole thing 
about separation of powers. So there is no shortcut to politics, and there's 
no shortcut to democracy." The applause was hardly ecstatic. Everyone 
knew what he meant. The promises in the second inaugural could be a long 
time coming. 
IV-THE WELCOME TABLE 
For every flight aboard Air Force One, there is a new name card at each 
seat; a catalogue of the Presidential Entertainment Library, with its hiply 
curated choices of movies and music; baskets of fruit and candy; a menu. 
Obama is generally a spare eater; the Air Force One menu seems designed 
for William Howard Taft. Breakfast one morning was "pumpkin spiced 
French toast drizzled with caramel syrup and a dollop of fresh whipped 
cream. Served with scrambled eggs and maple sausage links." Plus juice, 
EFTA00684476

coffee, and, on the side, a "creamy vanilla yogurt layered with blackberries 
and cinnamon graham crackers." 
The most curious character on the plane was Marvin Nicholson, a tall, 
rangy man in his early forties who works as the President's trip director 
and ubiquitous factotum. He is six feet eight. Nicholson is the guy who is 
always around, who carries the bag and the jacket, who squeezes Purell 
onto the Presidential palms after a rope line or a clutch; he is the one who 
has the pens, the briefing books, the Nicorette, the Sharpies, the Advil, the 
throat lozenges, the iPad, the iPod, the protein bars, the bottle of Black 
Forest Berry Honest Tea. He and the President toss a football around, they 
shoot baskets, they shoot the shit. In his twenties, Nicholson was living in 
Boston and working as a bartender and as a clerk in a windsurfing-
equipment shop, where he met John Kerry. He moved to Nantucket and 
worked as a caddie. He carried the Senator's clubs and Kerry invited him 
to come to D.C. Since taking the job with Obama, in 2009, Nicholson has 
played golf with the President well over a hundred times. The Speaker of 
the House has played with him once. 
A fact like this can seem to chime with the sort of complaints you hear all 
the time about Obama, particularly along the Acela Corridor. He is said to 
be a reluctant politician: aloof, insular, diffident, arrogant, inert, unwilling 
to jolly his allies along the fairway and take a 9-iron to his enemies. He 
doesn't know anyone in Congress. No one in the House or in the Senate, 
no one in foreign capitals fears him. He gives a great speech, but he doesn't 
understand power. He is a poor executive. Doesn't it seem as if he hates the 
job? And so on. This is the knowing talk on Wall Street, on K Street, on 
Capitol Hill, in green rooms—the "Morning Joe" consensus. 
There are other ways to assess the political skills of a President who won 
two terms, as only seventeen of forty-four Presidents have, and did so as a 
black man, with an African father and a peculiar name, one consonant 
away from that of the world's most notorious terrorist. From the start, 
however, the political operatives who opposed him did what they are paid 
to do—they drew a cartoon of him. "Even if you never met him, you know 
this guy," Karl Rove said, in 2008. "He's the guy at the country club with 
the beautiful date, holding a Martini and a cigarette, that stands against the 
wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by." The less 
malign version is of a President who is bafflingly serene, as committed to 
EFTA00684477

his duties as a husband and father—six-thirty family dinner upstairs in the 
private residence is considered "sacrosanct," aides say—as he is to his 
duties as Cajoler-in-Chief. 
Still, Obama's reluctance to break bread on a regular basis with his 
congressional allies is real, and a source of tribal mystification in 
Washington. "Politics was a strange career choice for Obama," David 
Frum, a conservative columnist, told me. "Most politicians are not the kind 
of people you would choose to have as friends. Or they are the kind who, 
like John Edwards, seem to be one thing but then turn out to have a 
monster in the attic; the friendship is contingent on something you can't 
see. Obama is exactly like all my friends. He would rather read a book than 
spend time with people he doesn't know or like." Joe Manchin, a Democrat 
from West Virginia who was elected to the Senate three years ago, said 
recently that Obama's distance from members of Congress has hurt his 
ability to pass legislation. "When you don't build those personal 
relationships," Manchin told CNN, "it's pretty easy for a person to say, 
`Well, let me think about it.' " 
Harry Truman once called the White House "the great white jail," but few 
Presidents seem to have felt as oppressed by Washington as Obama does. 
At one stop on the West Coast trip, Marta Kauffinan, a Democratic bundler 
who was one of the creators of "Friends," told me that she asked him what 
had surprised him most when he first became President. "The bubble," 
Obama said. He said he hoped that one day he might be able to take a walk 
in the park, drop by a bookstore, chat with people in a coffee shop. "After 
all this is done," he said, "how can I find that again?" 
"Have you considered a wig?" she asked. 
"Maybe fake dreads," her son added. 
The President smiled. "I never thought of that," he said. 
Obama's circle of intimates is limited; it has been since his days at 
Columbia and Harvard Law. In 2008, Obama called on John Podesta, who 
had worked extensively for Bill Clinton, to run his transition process. 
When Clinton took office, there was a huge list of people who needed to be 
taken care of with jobs; the "friends of Bill" is a wide network. After 
Podesta talked to Obama and realized how few favors had to be distributed, 
he told a colleague, "He travels light." 
EFTA00684478

Obama's favorite company is a small ensemble of Chicago friends—
Valerie Jarrett, Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Anita Blanchard, an 
obstetrician, and Eric and Cheryl Whitaker, prominent doctors on the South 
Side. During the first Presidential campaign, the Obamas took a vow of 
"no new friends." 
"There have been times where I've been constrained by the fact that I had 
two young daughters who I wanted to spend time with—and that I wasn't 
in a position to work the social scene in Washington," Obama told me. But, 
as Malia and Sasha have grown older, the Obamas have taken to hosting 
occasional off-the-record dinners in the residence upstairs at the White 
House. The guests ordinarily include a friendly political figure, a business 
leader, a journalist. Obama drinks a Martini or two (Rove was right about 
that), and he and the First Lady are welcoming, funny, and warm. The 
dinners start at six. At around ten-thirty at one dinner last spring, the guests 
assumed the evening was winding down. But when Obama was asked 
whether they should leave, he laughed and said, "Hey, don't go! I'm a 
night owl! Have another drink." The party went on past 1 A.M. 
At the dinners with historians, Obama sometimes asks his guests to talk 
about their latest work. On one occasion, Doris Kearns Goodwin talked 
about what became "The Bully Pulpit," which is a study, in part, of the way 
that Theodore Roosevelt deployed his relentlessly gregarious personality 
and his close relations with crusading journalists to political advantage. 
The portrait of T.R. muscling obstreperous foes on the issue of inequality 
—particularly the laissez-faire dinosaurs in his own party, the G.O.P.—
couldn't fail to summon a contrasting portrait. 
The biographer Robert Caro has also been a guest. Caro's ongoing volumes 
about Lyndon Johnson portray a President who used everything from the 
promise of appointment to bald-faced political threats to win passage of the 
legislative agenda that had languished under John Kennedy, including 
Medicare, a tax cut, and a civil-rights bill. Publicly, Johnson said of 
Kennedy, "I had to take the dead man's program and turn it into a martyr's 
cause." Privately, he disdained Kennedy's inability to get his program 
through Congress, cracking, according to Caro, that Kennedy's men knew 
less about politics on the Hill "than an old maid does about nicking." 
Senator Richard Russell, Jr., of Georgia, admitted that he and his Dixiecrat 
EFTA00684479