HE MAY be the coolest president in history, but Barack Obama can display a vindictive streak, according to a new book by a reporter who covered his presidential campaign.
After Obama won a series of Democratic primary elections last year but failed to drive Hillary Clinton from the race, the candidate told former Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe he would cope if he left politics and went back to teaching law in Chicago - but Clinton might struggle.
“Of course, I really want to beat them now,” Obama said of Clinton and her husband, the former president Bill Clinton. “They’ve annoyed me. But I could do something else [other than politics]. I’m not sure she could.”
Wolffe, a British journalist now based in Washington, includes that story and others in one of the first journalistic accounts to emerge from Obama's candidacy and historic presidency, entitled Renegade: The Making of a President.
He was granted intimate access to Obama and his advisers after Obama himself proposed the project, telling the former Financial Timeswriter: "You'll get more access than anyone else."
Wolffe travelled with Obama extensively, producing a familiar portrait of a candidate occasionally frustrated by the presidential campaign and news media fixated on manufactured controversies.
The book has received a mixed reception in the US, with critics dismissing it as a eulogy penned by yet another journalist infatuated with the president. Ben Smith, a journalist at politico.com, wrote that in exchange for his close access Wolffe had served up a “heroic-light” account.
Wolffe reveals that early in the race, Obama asked his research team to review the sermons of his pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright. The overtaxed researchers never got around to it, and video of Wright denouncing America later became campaign fodder for Clinton and Republican opponent John McCain.
And, in a revelation eagerly covered in the US press, he writes that the race severely strained Obama’s marriage to Michelle.
"There was little conversation and even less romance," Wolffe writes. "She was angry at his selfishness and careerism; he thought she was cold and ungrateful." – ( Guardianservice)
