In “Barack Obama and Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Ultimate Exit Interview” four consistent strains stand out. They’re themes of the presidency Goodwin directs attention to with a would-be-biographer’s familiarity, and clear indicators of what history will remember as the Obama years crystallize into the past.
1. His sneering sarcasm—which even Goodwin can’t pretend he conceals.
OBAMA: And then I’ll crumple it up. Every once in a while, my team here will hear me go on a rant. Generally speaking, people who know me will tell you that my public persona is not that different from my private persona. I am who I am. You sort of get what you see with me. The two exceptions are that I curse more than I should, and I find myself cursing more in this office than I had in my previous life. [Laughter.] And fortunately both my chief of staff and my national-security adviser have even bigger potty mouths than me, so it’s O.K. And the second thing is that I can be much more sarcastic and, I think, sometimes withering in my assessments of things than I allow to show in my public life. GOODWIN: Well, we see it sometimes. [Laughter.] OBAMA: Yes, every once in a while you see it.
2. His failure to cooperate with Congress, in contrast to LBJ.
I’ve gone back and I’ve looked at my proposals and my speeches and the steps we took to reach out to Congress. And the notion that we weren’t engaging Congress, or that we were overly partisan, or we didn’t schmooze enough, or we didn’t reach out enough to Republicans—that whole narrative just isn’t true. GOODWIN: But that narrative took hold, right? OBAMA: What I can say is maybe if I had the genius of an Abraham Lincoln, or the charm of F.D.R. … GOODWIN: Or, like Lyndon Johnson, you had them over every night for dinner.
3. His crippling writer’s sensibility (cf. Ben Rhodes).
OBAMA: […] There is a writer’s sensibility in me sometimes, where I step back. But I do think that I am generally optimistic. I see tragedy and comedy and pain and irony and all that stuff. But in the end I think life is fascinating, and I think people are more good than bad, and I think that the possibilities of progress are real. […] OBAMA: It’s an interesting question. As I said earlier, there is a big part of me that has a writer’s sensibility. And so that’s how I think. That’s how I pursue truth. That’s how I hope to communicate truth to people. And I know that’s not how it is always received. Because it gets chopped up. Or if it’s too long, then it’s dismissed as being professorial, or abstract, or long-winded.
4. His contemplation of legacy. Case in point, Obama’s Ozymandias moment:
Early in my presidency, I went to Cairo to make a speech to the Muslim world. And in the afternoon, after the speech, we took helicopters out to the pyramids. And they had emptied the pyramids for us, and we could just wander around for a couple hours [at] the pyramids and the Sphinx. And the pyramids are one of those things that live up to the hype. They’re elemental in ways that are hard to describe. And you’re going to these tombs and looking at the hieroglyphics and imagining the civilization that built these iconic images. And I still remember it—because I hadn’t been president that long at that point—thinking to myself, There were a lot of people during the period when these pyramids were built who thought they were really important. And there was the equivalent of cable news and television and newspapers and Twitter and people anguishing over their relative popularity or position at any given time. And now it’s all just covered in dust and sand. And all that people know [today] are the pyramids.
