Without any constitutional basis, public debate, or even the knowledge of most Americans, passing legislation through Congress had come to effectively require 60 votes in the Senate, or what was often referred to as a “supermajority.” By the time I was elected president, the filibuster had become so thoroughly integrated into Senate practice – viewed as an essential and time-honored tradition – that nobody much bothered to discuss the possibility of reforming or doing away with it altogether.
What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already.
Apparently, though, not everyone was sold on my prospects. Gibbs reported that when he stopped at a kiosk on Michigan Avenue to get a copy of Time, the Indian American vendor looked down at my picture and offered a two-word response: “Fuuuuck that.
For my mother, the world was full of opportunities for moral instruction. But I never knew her to get involved in a political campaign. Like my grandparents, she was suspicious of platforms, doctrines, absolutes, preferring to express her values on a smaller canvas.
Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.
The idea that our common humanity mattered more than our differences was stitched into my DNA.
THERE IS NOT a Black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.
That feels like what happened. A collective, unspoken decision was made that for a few weeks at least, the country would take a much-needed break from cynicism.
It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.
Whatever you do won’t be enough, I heard their voices say. Try anyway.
Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks – were finding their way to center stage.
I’m getting the Nobel Peace Prize.” “That’s wonderful, honey,” she said, then rolled over to get a little more shut-eye.
I was tempted to exit my perch, make my way down the aisle, and smack the guy in the head.
I knew a time would come when I would disappoint them, falling short of the image that my campaign and I had helped to construct.
Enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies, I tell my daughters – and at least that was true for me at Harvard.
What I hadn’t anticipated was the media’s reaction to Trump’s sudden embrace of birtherism – the degree to which the line between news and entertainment had become so blurred, and the competition for ratings so fierce, that outlets eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim. It was propelled by Fox News, naturally, a network whose power and profits had been built around stoking the same racial fears and resentments that Trump now sought to exploit.
In the hands of the shrewd and the ruthless, chaos had proven a gift.
Joe looked at the name on Axe’s BlackBerry and then turned to me. “Who the hell is Sarah Palin?
Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.
McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.