Another day, another nonfictional book offering interesting details about President Obama.
The New York Daily News received an advance copy of former Obama senior advisor David Axelrod’s upcoming memoir, “Believer: My 40 Years in Politics,” and in it Axelrod describes Obama as “irritated” by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s concession call after the 2012 election.
In particular, Axelrod paints Obama as “unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over.”
According to the former White House advisor, Obama paraphrased Romney’s end of the call, “‘You really did a great job of getting the vote out in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,’ in other words, black people. That’s what he thinks this was all about.”
Multiple recent books — including former defense secretary Robert Gates’ “Duty,” former defense secretary Leon Panetta’s “Worthy Fights” and journalist Edward Klein’s “Blood Feud” — have shed light on otherwise concealed nuggets about the Obama administration, many of them negative.
Axelrod’s book also contains some less-than-becoming details about the president, such as the way in which he desperately expressed his desire to get then-Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine) on board with Obamacare.
“We’ll call it the Snowe plan,” Obama said before the vote on the health care law. “Hell, she can live here in the White House! Michelle and I will get an apartment.”
Unfortunately, his persistence — which was also chronicled in Snowe’s own memoir — didn’t do the trick, and the senator ultimately voted against the Affordable Care Act.
Moreover, Axelrod also claims that Obama knocked Joe Biden for his wordiness — read: gaffe-susceptibility — way back when the two were senators from Illinois and Delaware, respectively.
“Joe Biden is a decent guy, but man, that guy can just talk and talk,” Obama commented, according to the memoir.” It’s an incredible thing to see.”
While many of the details of Axelrod’s work do not reflect particularly poorly or positively on the president, they are nevertheless interesting.
For instance, the former advisor says that Obama thought about appointing Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court after winning his party’s primary in 2008. Justice Clinton, anyone?
Obama also predicted the success of the iPhone during a private 2007 meeting with Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he previewed the device.
“If it were legal, I would buy a boatload of Apple stock,” Obama said, recalls Axelrod. “This thing is going to be really big.”
The memoir is slated for release on February 10.
