Chance to see the cubs versus cards special rifle. Considering that for a good cause all the backpacks go to underserved kids in the district 186 so please consider bringing some backpacks and please put on your calendars the allamerican picnic table host on Union Square Park on saturday august 19. Saturday august 19. We will have a lot of food and activities ended the night will end with a showing of the classic movie filled with dreams so please come in on august 19 for the continuing debate a sports team. Thank you for being here it is my pleasure to introduce the speaker who serves as the New York Times chief correspondent and in that capacity im assuming his boss must give them combat pay. I hope he does. Peter is a terrific journalist having served previously for 20 years in the Washington Post where he covered the clinton and george w. Bush presidency and served in russia, afghanistan, iraq and in 2008 began his work at the New York Times serving as White House Correspondent covering president obama and as that administration is ending, the times appointed him as the bureau chief in jerusalem independent victory of donald trump they called him back to be the chief White House Correspondent. In addition to all of that because he doesnt have enough to do, he has a lot of wonderful books as well. He wrote a great book about the impeachment of clinton and if you havent read that you should. Kremlin rising, all about vladimir and bush and cheney in the white house. As you can see he doesnt shy away from difficult topics. I got to know him during my service at the george w. Bush library where we were all fans of the book days of fire. I thought that it was researched, evenhande evenhandes analysis and beautifully written, so im proud to call him a friend and a colleague and now of course the call of history about the presidency of a man from the land of lincoln who is redefining our history. I cant talk you how much we appreciate him taking time. Please welcome my friend, peter baker. [applause] this is a fabulous crowd i cannot thank you enough, my friend people you already he has done a fabulous job setting up the library if youve been interested i call my wife like a fan and was just excited. People were at the house when barack obama first announced presidency. Okay. This is a crowd. This is something. [applause] so i should be asking you questions. I dont give an audience like this very often. I cant imagine a place better to talk about barack obama kicking off a book about the presidency than here in the land of lincoln. As you know when he kicked off his presidency, he did is emulating the 16th president. He lost the White House Campaign of course in the state house where lincoln began his career and he arrived in washington on Inauguration Day on the same route linking to and he took the oath on lincolns bible and made a cabinet everyone talked about being a team of rivals much like lincolns. So there was this very heady moment of course as you remember and we thought heres another coming of abraham lincoln. But what was interesting is he wasnt the only bad we compared obama to. He was remarkable to see the analogies up especially in the beginning when we thought of him as a symbol of hope for the new generation he was cast as a jack kennedy with a beautiful Family Living in a house built in part by slaves and was an extraordinary symbolic break from the past a plus. We thought of him as fdr because he was taking over at a time to look like we might be heading into a new Great Depression and we were already in war in iraq and afghanistan. They put them with the cigarette holder and pinching his glasses. Some people called him another George Washington and the new yorker did a cover of him with a powdered wig. Remember that . Some people compared him even to Ronald Reagan even though ideologically very different but the harbinger of a new political era. When things started to go back tbad,the comparison kind of chaa little bit. He was likened to Lyndon Johnson for sending hundreds of thousands of troops. Some people compared him to Dwight Eisenhower and said he had a hidden hand presidency where he was quiet out in public avoiding military entanglements when things went really badly they compared him to Richard Nixon and said he was abusing his executive authority. On the left they said he was too much like george w. Bush because he didnt do enough to change the strategy that they didnt much like and they called him a new jimmy carter and said he was kind of an elite intellectual in the middle east. It ought to that poin got to thr interviewing one of the top aides about this and he said sometimes i think the only president we havent been compared to his Franklin Pierce which is kind of good because hes kind of a drunk. [laughter] and barack obama was not. But that tells you a little about who barack obama was. We wanted to see in him many different things. He came on stage as a bit of a cipher and we didnt know him the way that you all knew him. He was a fresh face in the National Stage as we could remember winning the presidency in our lifetime almost no other president spent more time in a statewide or National Office in the position of power than barack obama had. There were two years in the senate before he started running and you know, i think that stemmed from the fact he wasnt like the president s we had before. They kept looking for comparisons because we wanted to be able to define him. He himself said that during the 2008 campaign he didnt look like all the president s on the dollar bill. This is true. And of course that meant in some ways the reference to his role in breaking barriers. He was the first africanamerican president , but that of course was always going to be the first line but he didnt want it to be the only line in his obituary he was determined to be more of a complexion in the oval office. And you know, so beyond his status as an avatar of a new era, he managed to captivate and view the nation at the same time. They presented themselves as this champion of the new progressive era. He would bring healthcare to the university and argue for the case with the activist government why it could be the force for good in the society and also as a nonideological. We are not a red or blue america we are all one america. And peoples fault in him very contradictory things. They didnt necessarily reconciled to each other. Its hard to be a champion of liberal values and nonpartisan builder at the same time. As he himself said and i think thats right that is a good way to put it because people saw in him what they wanted to see and he was constantly defining and redefining and crafting his own identity. One of the things you see is this constant theme whethe cons. As david remnants remnants of our david madisons book all of them talk about this idea of identity about creating an identity to some extent obamas success was creating this identity for himself, first became a bestselling book, very wellwritten, thoughtful discussion of race, society and the new generation. And then through the politics of the modern society like david axelrod, it was a constant creation and re creation of identity throughout the rides but it was kind of opaque even to those of us that covered him. He didnt come back on air force one and chit chat with reporters or for his hand around and ask where his kids were. It was the opposite of his unfiltered Vice President joe biden who would do all those things. Hes up there right now. Joe biden is a very authentic than whether you think hes good or bad, right or wrong on the policies whatever that is. Hes what you see in public and he used to have every year a barbecue at the Vice President s mansion and the reporters and staff put up these moon bounces and squirt guns and water games oveall over the place and he wod run around the background squirting guns and the super soakers of all the kids. The first year, the kids actually getting tough on him and by the second year he figured it out and made them his posse. [laughter] thats not obama. Thats not the kind of guy he was. He was a very reserved personality, intellectualized, thoughtful, thats just not his style. Hes not like george w. Bush. He didnt give out nicknames to people. He wasnt like bill clinton that charged at any crowd he could find. My favorite story about bill clinton he would go out and hit the road while the first lady waited because bush and biden and im sorry, bush provided in and clinton got a charge out of people in the crowd and talk about was an introvert, the first introvert i think we had in the white house and maybe jimmy carter. He liked people, im not saying he didnt, but she didnt get in the crow crowd of maybe at the s did. The staff told me they would have to charge me five or ten minutes after an event for him to recharge his batteries because it would drain him a little bit. Thats not unusual. Thats normal for a lot of people but for politicians, its unusual and one of the things that made him stand out as an unusual kind of president. But it doesnt mean that he was cold necessarily. Maureen dowd come in my office, famously compared him to the character from star trek. If you remember, he was also have human varian human though t isnt a bad comparison to think of. Theres the humanistic side just as. To each one of the president s. He liked to stay up watching sportscenter and was a fierce competitor on the basketball court, a real trash talker. He was jostled with these twentysomethingyearolds and then if they missed this shot, you know, he told ambassador to russia youve got to get it going. He had a side to him that we didnt see that was pretty powerful. In fact, he was a family man who made sure to leave the oval office by 6 30 every day to have dinner with his kids. He used to say one great thing about the white house is looking above the store he got to see his family more than he had on the campaign trail. He was very good about going to the Girls Basketball games on the weekends, so we did get the motorcade and go out there and wait in the car for the ambulance in the back while hes going and coaching basketball. And theres even the emotional l moments. I remember very vividly when the Newtown School massacre happened in a president obama came to the Briefing Room to talk about that and he just couldnt control himself. He couldnt. He lost his composure which i dont think we see him do very often. He started to speak and then he would pause for like eight seconds. You think about that it is a long time for a president to stand there and not Say Something and then he went on again and pause because he couldnt control his own emotional reaction to that, which again is contrary to his reputation. But he took over at an extraordinary time and with greater challenges. We were on the economic abyss, wars in the middle east and russia and at home he had ambitions to reinvent health care, energy, Climate Change climate control, government spending. And some of this he managed to accomplish, but he also found himself the target of a conservative backlash. He saw this sort of team party rise but came acros that came ah houses of congress over the two elections. In fact, barack obama won the National Elections and three others that really mattered to him. He lost all three. He lost the house in 2010, the senate in 2014 and of course whitwhitehouse in 2016. The country was in a sour mood for the presidency even before he arrived. There was an entire presidency. The gallup poll showed not once did the american public, the majority of americans say they thought the country was going in the right direction. A very sour environment to be governing. At one point, only 1 of americans were happy with the countrys direction. He had a phenomenon where they were presiding over an era of paralysis and polymerization. Think about the period that even something as undeniably positive as hunting down and finally dispatching osama bin laden, only to produce a very shortlived sense of unity and consensus in the country. I guess partly because the economic recovery pulls back on the abyss, and it produced millions of jobs. Cut unemployment in half. But it also left many people feeling behind and resentful. It clearly was this sense that he had represented a significant portion of the population as they saw the need in government. He became instead a change agent to Many Americans part of washington. I think in a lot of ways he is not the first president to come into the office promising unity only to become a polarizer. All three president s are covered before trump basically shared aspiration. President clinton in his second inaugural was used the phrase the repair of the breach. Wanted to be repaired or. By that he meant the partisan breach in washington and within two years hed been impeached and weaver in a very partisan argument over his conduct and what was the proper response to that. President bush came to office promising to the a uniter and not a divider and he wanted to be the case, yet the iraq war and other decisions he made the country was as divided as ever. And i think president obama was surprised to discover he couldnt fix that. One thing he said publicly that he regrets in one of the state of the unions, that is one thing that i underestimated how divided we are and my ability to bring people together. But then that leads us to his successor, and who did not come into office promising to be a uniter and who has not governed as somebody that wants to unite clearly and therefore in some ways represents the country and the times as we see them today. We blame our politicians for our paralysis but in fact we ought to think about ourselves a little bit because they are representing us. These days we are more and more living, working, talking and existing in a bubble with people who agree with us. If you are liberal you watch msnba liberal you watchmsnbc coe conservative you watch fox. But it extends beyond our viewing habits. Theres actually a breaking point. 800 people per square mile. If you live in a place with fewer than 800 people per square mile you are twice as likely to be republican. If you live in a place with more than 800 people per square mile you are twice as likely to be a democrademocrats living with pee that agree with you that. The polls showe show in the eary 60s asked people what it bother you with your son or daughter married somebody from the other party. Only about 4 or 5 said yes. And among democrats it was Something Like 35 said. And 50 of republicans dont want a democrat hanging out at thanksgiving. So we ca come ourselves are increasingly divided and i think that is the politics that has come to washington and president obama struggles with and has challenged i think the last three president s weve had. President obama regularly issues dont come to his desk, only the hard ones and i think its not just true for him, thats for everybody. Imagine that your whole time in office is dealing with the hardest questions possible. It got to the point where he was so beaten down by the hard choices in front of him that he and his first chief of staff rahm emanuel now the mayor of chicago used to joke they should move to hawaii and open up a tshirt shack and they would have just one kind of shirt, one size, medium. It became a running joke every time they were in the situation room oval office with a terrible choice, they allow the auto industry, did he authorize this drone strike, rahm emanuel would turn and just say white and obama would look back and say medium. If it took a toll on him it didnt show very much if you take a look at these pictures i think that he carried himself through the presidency with a lot of calm and plays. Very differently than other politicians who are more expressive lets say. He rarely rushed into decisions. He sat alone in the white house late at night reading briefing papers were playing words with friends after his wife and daughters went to bed. The only indulgence he permitted himself as a handful of all mens. In fact his chest joked to my colleague and friend that he only allowed himself seven all mens, not six or eight, seven all mens and became a sort of running joke. The president denied that. Sometimes hed have six. After i think it taught us something. That was the joke is on shaft and wife used to make. What started off as combatants seemed as many to be humorous. He started off promising that his election would be the moment the rise of the oceans begin to flow into the planet would begin to heal and by the second term he had radically revived his expectations and is staff i remember telling me maybe there arent any more. Anymore. Theres only president s trying to get through difficult times. But i thought it reminded us link and wasnt lincoln a procedure. If you look through the very active display of political cartoons in his time and newspaper coverage it was pretty tough. He was called all sorts of terrible things. People didnt necessarily love lincoln in all parts of the country and revere him the way we do today. So that is just the trial of being the president. You find yourself constantly secondguessed into scrutinized and criticized. Often for good reason. But its no question a very difficult job and i think that for president obama, there were things he can feel proud of in his legacy for bringing the economy back from the abyss, lowering unemployment, getting bin laden, and then theres parts of the legacy i think he wishes he could have done differently. Serious being an obvious example laying out a red line he didnt exactly enforce on the use of chemical weapons, his inability to stop that civil war and find a formula that would keep america from becoming entangled in another iraq is what he wanted to avoid that somehow stopping the situation with hundreds of thousands of people killed. And i think these are the lessons he learned and he got to the point where he sort of what lowered his own expectations and realized president s cant singlehandedly changcansingled themselves but they can do the best they could and pass off to the future generation. He said to my friend David Remnick essential