OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Biographer David Garrow opened up about former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama and revealed some details that not many may have known about.
Garrow wrote the long biography “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama” in 2017 and talked to the former president several times in private before 2016. He took many by surprise with a long interview with Tablet magazine, in which he made some shocking claims about Obama based on his work documenting his formative years.
Garrow is different from other people who have written about Obama because, while many journalists have been amazed by the 44th president, Garrow said that his memoir “Dreams From My Father” was mostly made up, that he was too lazy to be a good Supreme Court justice, and that his presidency will be seen as a failure in the long run because of its mistakes in foreign policy.
Garrow, for the record, is not conservative. He says he’s on the left of Obama on issues like health care, is adamantly pro-choice, and said he wished Obama had modeled his post-presidency after Jimmy Carter, whose humanitarian work has often been praised more than his one-term presidency.
He also said that Michelle Obama has changed over the years based on conversations he had with close friends and family.
Numerous famous people have become friends with the Obamas, who have become very wealthy through lucrative book deals and speaking engagements.
“There’s no resemblance between their lives today and who they were 20 years ago. And when I was doing most of my interviewing across Black Chicago in like 2010, 2011, 2012, even then, folks could see this sort of ‘desire to hang with celebrities’ theme building in the White House,” Garrow said.
“Some of the folks weren’t surprised that Barack was going that way, but they were really painfully upset that Michelle had seemingly lost her grounding because they viewed her as just the epitome of a hardworking, working-class South Side Chicago black family,” he continued. “But they couldn’t fathom that Michelle, you know, was no longer who she was.”
A former staffer and advisor for Barack Obama recently sounded the alarm on President Joe Biden’s possible election rematch against former President Donald Trump.
Jim Messina gave a 22-slide presentation to fellow Democrats to reassure them that the president was on the correct path to be elected again in 2024, but what he said to Politico should leave them anything but reassured.
“I thought it was important to say to my friends, clients, and other people, Let’s just take a step back and try to be really number-specific and really sort of who has what cards in their poker hand,” he said.
“And you would just rather be Joe Biden than Donald Trump,” the former advisor said.
When Politico asked him if there was reason for valid concerns among Democrats about Biden’s chances, he hit them with some reality.
“Every day, it seems, there’s new fodder for Democrats looking to freak out about President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects: sagging public views of the economy, persistent voter concerns about Biden’s age, and erosion in the president’s standing among key minority groups, to name a few,” he said. “Historically, we’re f***ing bedwetters.”
“We grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, when Republicans won elections all the time. Democrats had their hearts deeply broken when Hillary [Clinton] lost, and people didn’t see that coming. And so, you know, we continually believe every bad thing people say,” he said.
That is why his group presented Democrats with 22 slides to reassure them before giving them a warning.
He said that “(1) no matter who the Republican is, it’ll be a close election, and (2) the most likely GOP nominee, Donald Trump, has a strong base and can absolutely win.”
“The ‘misery index,’ a bellwether economic measure that combines unemployment and inflation, is now lower than it was ahead of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Obama’s successful reelections,” Politico said.
“Messina also gives credit to Biden and his team for consistently selling ‘Bidenomics’ to voters, even as voter views remain stuck, likening it to the challenges Obama faced in 2012 as the economy slowly emerged from the Great Recession: ‘People thought we were crazy to go as early as we did with economic messaging,’” he said.
