Obama remembers it as the saddest day of his presidency – and one which motivated him to push harder for gun reform. In December 2012, 26 people – including 20 children – were shot and killed by 20-year-old Adam Lanza in a shocking massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He eventually stopped, however, when he noticed how his daughter Malia ‘frowned’ when his breath smelled of smoke.īy Hope Coke The Sandy Hook shooting made him see beyond the ‘politics’ Yet for all the family’s health-conscious image, Obama admits to smoking up to 10 cigarettes a day during his early time in the White House. Her husband, meanwhile, was the subject of an often-cited New York Times article which reported that he ate seven almonds every night (he later stressed that while he did enjoy the nutritious snack, he’d been joking about the precise number). Michelle Obama was known for growing fruit and vegetables in the White House garden, as well as waking up at 4.30am to fit in a workout before a busy day of duties. Obama relates that his wife refused to campaign with him for his US Senate race, then, when he approached her with his plans to transition to national politics and run for president, she responded: ‘God, Barack… When is it going to be enough?’ It wasn’t long, however, before she was won over, becoming a familiar face on the campaign trail. Yet the book reveals that she harboured reservations about his chosen path. It seems impossible to imagine Obama’s time in office without beloved former first lady Michelle Obama by his side – a passionate supporter of her husband and an accomplished attorney and author in her own right. Looking back on his younger self, he states that he adopted a somewhat misguided ‘pseudo-intellectual’ tone to try to impress women – even reading Karl Marx for extra brownie points – a strategy which, he concludes, ‘proved mostly worthless.’īarack and Michelle Obama during the Inaugural Ball, 2013 Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Michelle took some time to get on board with his political ambitions He hasn’t always been a smooth talkerĪlthough known for his inspiring and charismatic speeches, their potent messages tempered with a note of humour and unstuffy charm, Obama admits that he hasn’t always been such a master of words. Contrary to any sense of entitlement, he writes of having long felt like an outsider, relating: ‘my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in, a way to explain the different strands of my mixed-up heritage,’ and elsewhere describing himself as being ‘from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts like a platypus or some imaginary beast’. One would assume that anyone willing to run for president has a healthy – or, in some cases, unhealthy – degree of ego, but Obama reveals that the genesis of his own political ambitions came from a very different place. Obama stresses that his aim is to offer a genuine insight into his life – ‘not just a historical record of key events’, explaining: ‘I wanted to offer readers a sense of what it’s like to be the president of the United States I wanted to pull the curtain back a bit and remind people that, for all its power and pomp, the presidency is still just a job and our federal government is a human enterprise like any other, and the men and women who work in the White House experience the same daily mix of satisfaction, disappointment, office friction, screwups, and small triumphs as the rest of their fellow citizens.’ He once struggled to find a sense of belonging By Hope Coke The book is about more than just politics
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