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.
As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless;.
Unlike most academics, Warren showed a gift for translating financial analysis into stories that ordinary folks could understand. In the intervening years, she had emerged as one of the financial industry’s most effective critics, prompting Harry Reid to appoint her as chair of the congressional panel overseeing TARP.
We were expecting maybe a hundred people at the park,” Jeremiah said, “but right now they’re counting at least five hundred. They asked us to slow down so they have time to deal with the overflow.
If we want other countries to support our priorities,” I told my NSC team, “we can’t just bully them into it. We’ve got to show them we’re taking their perspectives into account – or at least can find them on a map.
The day was cold, the wind cutting, the sun a dim watermark on the gray sky.
Wanting to be in politics but not of it.
The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them – those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.
Sometimes you were just screwed, and the best you could do was have a stiff drink – and light up a cigarette.
My head was crammed with too many facts and too few answers.
I’d put forward what I considered to be clear positions on all these issues during the campaign. But that had been from the cheap seats, before I had hundreds of thousands of troops and a sprawling national security infrastructure under my command. Any terrorist attack would now happen on my watch. Any American lives lost or compromised, at home or abroad, would weigh uniquely on my conscience. These were my wars now.
If I had a spare minute, the thank-you notes I wrote and the birthday calls I made would be directed not to them but to our volunteers and young staff out in the field.
There’s only one thing you can count on, Mr. President,” he said. “On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up.
As a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.
And there was the time Paul McCartney serenaded my wife with “Michelle.” She laughed, a little embarrassed, as the rest of the audience applauded, and I wondered what Michelle’s parents would have said back in 1965, the year the song came out, if someone had knocked on the door of their South Side home and told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage.
It was the America of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, making dreams take flight, and Jackie Robinson stealing home. It was Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday at the Village Vanguard and Johnny Cash at Folsom State Prison – all those misfits who took the scraps that others overlooked or discarded and made beauty no one had seen before.
I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America – not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.
Part of the argument I made to Michelle before running for president was that if I pulled it off, kids all over the world would see themselves and their possibilities differently. And that alone would be worth it.
Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama!” Keyes would proclaim, deliberately mispronouncing my name every time. I beat him by more than forty points – the biggest margin for a Senate race in the state’s history.
I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.
I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people – and this is accelerated by social media – there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.’” He added: “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.