It was Small Business Saturday yesterday – and to show appreciation to small businesses (the same businesses he’s helped to quell growth or put out of business thanks to his “Affordable Care Act”), Obama took his daughters, Malia and Sasha, shopping at the liberal Politics & Prose book store in Washington, DC (owned by two former Washington Post reporters).
While looking around, Obama spotted “The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House,” by Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” As the New York Post reported it:
The commander in chief doesn’t think much of the man who labeled him “The Stranger.”
“Oh, Chuck Todd!” Obama exclaimed. “Let’s see what Chuck has to say here!”
Malia asked Obama “How is he writing a book already? Malia added that her father looked sad on the cover and teased that it looked like a “sad book.”
Obama’s response? “He’s just sad.”
Obama’s off-the-cuff pan was no surprise, considering what Todd thinks of the president.
The book, titled “The Stranger,” blasts Obama as a flip-flopping policymaker whose detached temperament has prevented him from implementing his ideas.
But Todd’s book summary doesn’t sound very anti-Obama in tone:
Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 partly because he was a Washington outsider. But if he'd come to the White House thinking he could change the political culture, he soon discovered just how difficult it was to swim against an upstream of insiders, partisans, and old guard networks allied to undermine his agenda— including members of his own party. He would pass some of the most significant legislation in American history, but his own weaknesses torpedoed some of his greatest hopes.”
In THE STRANGER, Chuck Todd draws upon his unprecedented inner-circle sources to create a gripping account of Obama's White House tenure, from the early days of drift and helplessness to a final stand against the GOP in which an Obama, at last liberated from his political future, finally triumphs.
Todd’s book didn’t make Obama’s list, but the president picked up 17 books including “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad and newer titles like “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson and “The Laughing Monsters” by Denis Johnson. Who knew he had so much time to read!
Obama put all 17 books on his credit card – and guess what? It didn’t decline. Too bad he doesn’t take the same precautions about America’s finances as he does his own.
