Barack Obama reflected on a wide range of topics touched on in his upcoming memoir, including the isolation of the presidency, his attempts to reach across the aisle, and his post-presidency life in an interview with Gayle King on “CBS Sunday Morning.”
The former president, speaking from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, discussed his own experiences in the White House and brushed off President Donald Trump’s and his supporters’ fight against the election results.
“Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States and Kamala Harris will be the next vice president of the United States. There is no legal basis,” said Obama, 59, of lawsuits filed by Trump’s campaign making broad, unproven claims of widespread election fraud.
“We are still deeply divided,” he said. “The power of that alternative world view that’s presented in the media that those voters consume, it carries a lot of weight. … It’s very hard for a democracy to function if we are operating on just a completely different set of facts.”
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Obama has become increasingly vocal about the presidency in the last few months, speaking out against Trump and in support of his former vice president, now President-elect Joe Biden, and sharing memories of his own time in office while promoting his memoir, “A Promised Land,” out Tuesday.
“It wasn’t personal,” Obama said. “Everything I said, I was just stating facts. … I was not the person who, in a White House briefing room, said, ‘Is bleach the way to solve COVID?’ I wasn’t doing a routine, I was repeating words that I heard. It is not my preference to be out there.
He added: “We were in a circumstance in this election in which certain norms, certain institutional values that are so extraordinarily important, had been breached. It was important for me, as somebody who served in that office, to simply let people know this is not normal.”
But don’t expect him to take a seat in Biden’s cabinet next year.
“Michelle would leave me,” Obama joked of the former first lady. “She’d be like, ‘What? You’re doing what?’ “
Now almost four years removed from his own presidency, Obama says he and his family – particularly Michelle Obama – have finally been able to exhale.
“She was able to let go of some of the stress of feeling as if, ‘I’ve got to get everything right all the time, I’m being watched all the time,’ ” he said.
But even now, the former president is still getting re-adjusted to regular life.
“I’m driving along – I’m still not driving, but I’m in the car in the backseat and I’m looking at my iPad or something – and suddenly we stop,” Obama remembered a recent experience. ”I’m like what’s going on? It was a red light. There was a car right next to us, with kids eating a burrito in the back seat or something.
“Oh,” he recalled himself thinking, now without the luxury of a police-escorted presidential motorcade. “Back to life.”
Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2020/11/15/barack-obama-talks-biden-trump-election-fraud-claims-new-memoir/6302441002/
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