Former President Barack Obama spoke out over the weekend to joke that he can’t join Joe Biden’s cabinet because his wife Michelle “would leave” him.
While being interviewed by Gayle King on “CBS This Morning,” Ojbama said that he’s “not planning to suddenly work on the White House staff” now that Biden has allegedly won. When King asked if Obama would be joining Biden’s cabinet, he had an interesting response.
“There are probably some things I would not be doing, because Michelle would leave me,'” Obama joked. “She’d be like, ‘What? You’re doing what?'”
Entertainment Tonight [1] reported that earlier in the interview, Obama talked about Michelle’s desire to be done with politics.
“I am mindful of the sacrifices she had made, but the good news is that for whatever reason, she has forgiven me — sort of,” he said. “She still reminds me, occasionally, of what she put up with.”
“When the presidency was over … 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,'” Obama continued, adding that when he left office, Michelle was finally able to exhale a breath that she’d been holding in “for close to 10 years.”
In an excerpt from his new book “Promised Land” that was obtained by CNN [2], Obama opened up about the toll his presidency took on his marriage. He admitted that he could “sense an undercurrent of tension” in his wife during their time as president and First Lady.
“Despite Michelle’s success and popularity, I continued to sense an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant, like the faint thrum of a hidden machine,” Obama wrote. “It was as if, confined as we were within the walls of the White House, all her previous sources of frustration became more concentrated, more vivid, whether it was my round the clock absorption with work, or the way politics exposed our family to scrutiny and attacks, or the tendency of even friends and family members to treat her role as secondary in importance.”
He went on to say that there were nights when “lying next to Michelle in the dark, I’d think about those days when everything between us felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered, and my heart would suddenly tighten at the thought that those days might not return.”
Though he doesn’t plan to take a role in Biden’s cabinet, Obama was all too happy to hit the campaign trail for his former vice president, frequently bashing President Donald Trump along the way.
“It wasn’t personal,” Obama said of his anti-Trump remarks. “The truth is everything I said, I was just stating facts.”
“It is not my preference to be out there,” he continued. “I think we were in a circumstance in this election in which certain norms, certain institutional values that are so extraordinarily important, had been breached — that it was important for me, as somebody who had served in that office, to simply let people know, ‘This is not normal.'”
Obama also discussed Trump’s refusal to concede the election to Biden, which he has yet to do at the time of this writing.
“Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, Kamala [Harris] will be the next vice president,” Obama said emphatically, adding there is no “legal basis” for Trump’s challenges to the election results.
The former president then expressed worries about the number of people who voted for Trump, and what that says about America right now.
“What it says is we are still deeply divided,” Obama said. “It’s very hard for our democracy to function if we’re operating on completely different facts.”
This piece was written by Daniel M on November 16, 2020. It originally appeared in Objectivist.co [3] and is used by permission.
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