A May interview with Obama.
Newsweek: Gibbs escorted me to Obama's first-class row, where the senator sat at the window, reading a copy of The New Yorker. Obama looked up, said hello, and asked me to sit. On the advice of one of Obama's best friends, who thought that Obama would respond well to my somewhat unconventional path into journalism, I started to tell him a bit about my background, but I had stumbled over only a couple of awkward sentences when Obama broke in and said, "I have a suggestion. Why don't you just ask me some questions? I want to make sure you maximize your time. You don't need to make me feel comfortable with you; if I didn't trust you, you wouldn't be here." I was immediately struck by Obama's focus, so intense that it almost felt like a physical force.
An excerpt from
A Long Time Coming, by Evan Thomas and Newsweek staff:
You take a lot of pride in your roots as a community organizer, in being not far removed from the sort of everyday American experience. And I'm sure you know as well as anyone that there's no bubble quite like the presidency; there's nothing that insulates you from the rest of us like the presidency. Do you think much about this? Do you worry at all about this?
Absolutely. I worry about it all the time. I benefit from the fact that Michelle and her family are very rooted, and almost prototypical Americans, and [from] my friends—like Marty Nesbitt and Eric Whitaker and Valerie [Jarrett], or my friend who I just saw in Oregon, Greg Orme, who was traveling with me, my friend from high school who now works as a contractor—[from the fact that] most of my good friends are not in politics and are not in the political world. I feel that they help me stay tuned in to what's going on with people. But I do worry about it. More than anything what I worry about is the fact that I now change the atmosphere in any room that I walk into, or any conversation that I enter into. That people are going to speak to me differently now than they might have five years ago, even people whom I'm close to. That is something I worry about. And how to prevent that is going to be one of the most important challenges of the presidency.
