{"id":25590,"date":"2015-09-01T18:09:18","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T16:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=25590"},"modified":"2015-08-28T07:27:34","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T05:27:34","slug":"25590","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=25590","title":{"rendered":"Obama\u2019s Big Plans Don\u2019t End With His Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Obama\u2019s Big Plans Don\u2019t End With His Presidency<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

By Matthew Continetti <\/strong>\u2014 August 22, 2015 <\/span><\/p>\n

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The closest I\u2019ve ever come to glimpsing hell was on Monday, when I read an article in the New York Times headlined, \u201cWith High-Profile Help, Obama Plots Life After Presidency.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Reporters Michael D. Shear and Gardiner Harris reveal the \u201cmethodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady, and a cadre of top aides map out a post-presidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion,\u201d or about as much as Obama fundraised for the 2012 campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n

polecil: Vlady Rozenbaum<\/em><\/p>\n

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This effort began in November 2012, shortly after his reelection, when the president hosted filmmaker Steven Spielberg at the White House for a screening of Lincoln. President Obama was \u201cspellbound,\u201d the Times reports, as Spielberg held forth \u201cabout the use of technology to tell stories.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Such technology, Spielberg went on, could also be used to tell Obama\u2019s story \u2014 to somehow convince future Americans, against all evidence to the contrary, that his presidency was an experience they would like to repeat. \u201cIdeally, one adviser said, a person in Kenya could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and be transported to Mr. Obama\u2019s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia.\u201d I\u2019m sure they\u2019ll be banging on the door to get into that exhibit.
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The president has raised, to date, \u201cjust over $5.4 million from 12 donors,\u201d which puts him $994.6 million from his goal. Those donors include \u201ctechnology entrepreneur\u201d Jim Symons, whose co-CEO Robert Mercer, a Republican, was described by the Times the very next day as a \u201chedge-fund magnate.\u201d These two billionaires are business partners \u2014 can\u2019t they both be magnates? Or are some technology entrepreneurs more equal than others?<\/span><\/p>\n

More remarkable than the Times\u2019s bias, however, is the fact that Obama\u2019s team, led by a former Washington Post reporter, has been unable to come up with a unifying idea \u2014 or even a single location \u2014 for his post-presidency. The library, for example, will be built in Chicago, and President Obama may also have an office in New York City, where he and his wife have often said they\u2019d like to live \u2014 though they might remain in Washington until Sasha finishes high school.<\/span><\/p>\n

Post-presidencies have become as competitive and grueling as presidencies themselves, requiring elaborate libraries and foundations, meaningful causes, books and speeches and appropriately timed social media indignation, all with the goal of remaining, even tangentially, in the media spotlight. Having a post-presidency that is, in the words of David Plouffe, \u201ca blend\u201d of the reticent George W. Bush and the money-grubbing Bill Clinton will still be expensive. But this money, unlike the big-dollar donations that fueled his two campaigns, Obama seems happy to fundraise.<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s happy because planning for his retirement allows Obama to corral large groups of extremely rich and powerful people for the express purpose of discussing his favorite subject: himself. People like Spielberg, with a net worth of $3.6 billion, who\u2019s \u201chelping to develop a \u2018narrative\u2019 for Mr. Obama in the years after he leaves office.\u201d And people like Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and who dined with the creator of E.T. and President Obama \u201cat a Beverly Hills hotel in California\u201d \u2014 as opposed to a Beverly Hills hotel in Latvia \u2014 \u201cin June.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For an example of what these dinners with the president are like, the Times reported extensively on a bull session at the White House held last February. The president and first lady invited 13 guests to the residence, including:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, net worth $4.7 billion<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022John Doerr, ex-boyfriend of Ellen Pao, net worth $3.4 billion<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022Vinod Khosla, green energy crony, net worth $1.7 billion<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022Marc Lasry, former player at high-stakes poker games tied to the Russian mob, net worth $1.7 billion<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022Eva Longoria, failed steakhouse entrepreneur, net worth in tens of millions<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022Toni Morrison, who dubbed Bill Clinton our \u201cfirst black president,\u201d net worth in tens of millions<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker journalist, net worth in tens of millions<\/span><\/p>\n

Just your run-of-the-mill collection of everyday Americans. The combined net worth of the feted and privileged guests easily surpasses $10 billion. And this is to say nothing of the size of the accumulated egos, which when combined with those of the president and his wife becomes impossible to measure.<\/span><\/p>\n

I tried to imagine the scene as President Obama sat back in his chair, sipped his first extra-dry Grey Goose martini of the night, and asked this hand-selected group of bold-faced names, seemingly plucked at random from Time magazine\u2019s \u201c100 Most Influential\u201d issue, what he should do with his life. The pomposity, the self-importance, the snide remarks, the raised eyebrows, the sidelong glances, the oblique references to Taos and Nantucket and St. Tropez and Telluride, the mutual self-regard, the flattering small-talk, the knowing head-nods and chin-pulls, the pretentious lips-pursing \u2014 all of this combustible vanity squeezed into the pressure-cooker of the residential dining room. It\u2019s a wonder the house didn\u2019t explode.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because it\u2019s a trick question: conversations about Obama\u2019s future are really cues to celebrate his past. To cheer his accomplishments, list the ways he has changed this country, explain his historical and geopolitical importance, lament the obstacles he\u2019s encountered from recalcitrant conservatives, obstructionist Republicans, nativist, racist, sexist, backward elements of the population, recount how he overcame them, joke about how he deserves a vacation, mention the best courses he has yet to play, ponder the work of social justice and transformation that must still be done, affirm that history is, indeed, on the side of progress.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this conversation goes on \u2014 on and on and on \u2014 with digressions into the latest fads in Silicon Valley and the nuttiest invention Khosla can come up with after two Manhattans, with genuflections at the altar of Elon Musk, explications of the markets from Doerr, Lasry, and Hoffman, mysterious oracular pronouncements from Toni Morrison, bird-like regurgitations of the latest Paul Krugman and Fareed Zakaria columns (how envious Fareed must be that he wasn\u2019t invited!), tedious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other lectures from the president on the lead story in the Times, the most recent editorials in the Washington Post, late night comedy he found unfair, clever \u201cThis is Sportscenter\u201d commercials, episodes of Game of Thrones and Homeland, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Jordan\u2019s handicap \u2014 and with caustic put-downs from Michele, partisan bromides from Longoria, witticisms spiced with anecdotes from academic studies no one besides Gladwell has read, and bottle after bottle of wine, course after course after course of chewy overcooked hard to swallow smugness.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then, when you\u2019ve grown tired, when the Grenache is making you sleepy, when all you want to do is retire to the Oprah suite at the Ritz Carlton for a dirty movie and shuteye, the president forbids you to leave. You can be one of the most powerful people in the world, manage thousands of employees, but he won\u2019t let you go. You\u2019re stuck! Around midnight, we learn, Reed Hoffman said kindly to President Obama, \u201cFeel free to kick us out.\u201d And the president replied, snidely, \u201cI\u2019ll kick you out when it\u2019s time.\u201d And Hoffman sat down, like a disciplined child, because what could he do \u2014 even the co-founder of LinkedIn can\u2019t walk out on the president of the United States. So the conversation went on, according to the Times, \u201cwell past 2 a.m.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Trapped in a room with a collection of pompous and entitled people utterly convinced of their brilliance and moral purity, whose conversation ranges from what\u2019s in this month\u2019s Atlantic to what\u2019s in this week\u2019s Economist, who haven\u2019t been told \u201cNo\u201d in years \u2014 and then being informed that there is no escape? This, friends, is the vision of hell that greeted me in Monday\u2019s paper: not of other people, but of self-important ones, in a well-appointed house with no exit, eating an organic gluten-free farm-to-table meal and endlessly repeating the conventional wisdom as if they were coming to it for the first time. To look at the plans for Obama\u2019s retirement is not just to see that big-dollar fundraising never stops. It is to peek inside the Bobo abyss, to visit the purgatory of the coastal elite \u2014 to enter, in horror, the balsamic inferno.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014 Matthew Continetti is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, where this column first appeared. \u00a9 2015 All rights reserved.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Obama\u2019s Big Plans Don\u2019t End With His Presidency By Matthew Continetti \u2014 August 22, 2015 The closest I\u2019ve ever come to glimpsing hell was on Monday, when I read an article in the New York Times headlined, \u201cWith High-Profile Help, Obama Plots Life After Presidency.\u201d Reporters Michael D. Shear and Gardiner Harris reveal the \u201cmethodical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25590"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25611,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25590\/revisions\/25611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}