“I get feeling worn out, tired, and embattled,” the former president said to more than 30 lawmakers.
Former President Barack Obama is embracing his role as mentor-in-chief, huddling with nearly three dozen freshman House Democrats at the Capitol Hill home of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) at a Wednesday night event hosted by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The event — moderated by Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) — saw Obama buck up Democrats and offer insights on surviving Republican majorities.
“I get feeling discouraged sometimes,” Obama told the room over soda, water, crackers and crudite, according to excerpts provided by his office to POLITICO. “I get feeling worn out, tired, and embattled. But in our second term, Denis McDonough, my chief of staff, used to pass out stickers based on a conversation that he and I had had that talked about, ‘we do not succumb to cynicism — cynicism is our enemy.’ And it’s pervasive in this town.”
Michelle Obama Says America Needs to ‘Grow Up’ Before a Woman Can Be President
He added that McDonough had stickers printed that read: “fight cynicism.”
“And that, I think, is our most important battle, right?” Obama said. “We don’t give into that, and then we’re going to be able to figure out the same stuff.”
Obama emphasized to attendees that he had “been in your shoes. Because when I was — everybody remembers the Democratic National Convention in 2004 — when you were. …well, you were in elementary school” — a line that drew laughter.
Inside Barack Obama’s stepped-up plans to fight back against Donald Trump
Obama also compared that moment more than 20 years ago to this one in the Democratic Party’s search for a path out of the wilderness.
“But what people don’t recall is that John Kerry lost that election,” Obama said. “And we didn’t control the House, and we did not control the Senate. And Tom Daschle, who was then the Democratic leader of the Senate, lost, which is unheard of. And Karl Rove, who was the chief architect of George Bush’s campaigns and political career was – could be found on all the TV stations, talking about the ‘permanent Republican majority’ that had been created.”
The former president continued, describing a similar sense of despair in 2004 that Democrats felt after 2024 when President Donald Trump swept all seven battleground states and decisively beat former Vice President Kamala Harris.
But it ultimately turned out well for Democrats two decades ago, Obama said.
“And two years later, Nancy Pelosi was the first woman speaker of the House of Representatives. And four years later, somehow, I ended up being president. The reason I tell you that is not for you to, you know, feel complacent,” he said. “It’s to indicate that the work that you are doing right now, the investment you’re making, the focus that you’re applying, the issues that you are developing, the interactions that you’re having with your constituencies. All that is creating the momentum and the opportunity for change.”
Michelle Obama Claims She Was Under a ‘Particularly White Hot Glare’ as First Black FLOTUS
bama took five questions on several topics, including on lessons learned on the Affordable Care Act fight. On that point, he told Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) that he overestimated Republicans’ willingness to work with him, saying he could have learned that lesson quicker.
“We wasted a lot of time trying to engage the ideas of Republicans on a good faith basis,” Obama said.
Obama lingered with McBride in a photo line amid the event, according to a person familiar with the gathering granted anonymity to discuss a private conversation, and has complimented her on her high-profile media appearances and her messaging, including her interview with Ezra Klein earlier this year.
Obama has never been far from the campaign trail over the last year, and his post-presidency has focused on boosting the next generation of Democratic leaders. He stumped for candidates in New Jersey’s and Virginia’s off-year elections, and has had phone calls with incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, among others.
Ahead of the 2024 elections, he hosted several small group sessions in his office with the goal of offering a sounding board, according to a person close to him granted anonymity to speak candidly, including with a group of Obama administration alumni, emerging voices within the party and in-cycle senators.
This is only the second time in his post-presidency that Obama has met with freshman Democrats: He also did so in 2019. Obama spoke on the last episode of the Marc Maron podcast recently of his “move from player to coach” in the Democratic Party.
“His goal,” a person close to the former president said, “is to build a sustainable Democratic Party that can survive without him.”
As Barack Obama stumps for other Democrats, the party gets to see what it lost
Inside Barack Obama’s stepped-up plans to fight back against Donald Trump
Barack Obama used to be confident America would survive Donald Trump. He’s not so sure anymore.
The 44th president can still draw a crowd of thousands or dial Gavin Newsom’s cell phone to strategize about the California governor’s redistricting push. But friends who talk to him say it’s become clear that eight years out of the White House, darkness and anxiety have crept in on Obama’s message of hope and change.
After deliberately stepping back during the Biden years — while remaining the party’s biggest fundraiser even then — Obama and his aides are reworking his longstanding strategy of minimizing his public presence to allow the next generation of Democrats to emerge. Trump’s moves to block Democrats from power since his return to the White House and his calls to indict or shut down liberal institutions might, Obama fears, deny that next generation the chance.
“The harm is so profound that this calls for both a different approach generally, and a different involvement specifically by President Obama,” said Eric Holder, the former attorney general who described the mindset of his longtime friend.
As Trump’s abuses worsen, it seems Obama is increasingly fired up and ready to go
“If we are focused, if we’re willing to engage, if we are willing to do the work, the nation and our democracy can survive this,” Holder told CNN. “There will be damage done along the way — there’s no question about that. We won’t win every battle.”
Or as Obama tends to put it himself in private conversations, according to several who’ve spoken with him: “If you have convictions and they’re not being tested, then it’s just fashion.”
Hitting the campaign trail for moderate gubernatorial candidates, as Obama is scheduled to do in back-to-back stops on Saturday for Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, is the easy part for the former president.
It’s what to do every other day of the year, and each of the years to come, that he’s been struggling with, according to CNN’s conversations with two dozen top Democratic officials and operatives, as well as several friends who have spoken with the former president since Trump returned to office.
Obama declined an interview for this story.
Filling a leadership void in the party
Once an avatar of youth, Obama is now 64, so long out of the White House that a child born the day before he was first elected president will be eligible to vote in next year’s midterms.
America is not the united country without red states or blue states that Obama suggested it was 21 years ago at the Democratic National Convention. Nor is it the post-racial society some hoped for with the election of the first Black president.
People who know Obama say he has been surprised and appalled in how many of the rich people who now form his social circle have made concessions to Trump. He’s reaching out to business and other institutional leaders, urging them not to bend to the current administration even if it helps their bottom lines.
Obama is preparing for the prosecutions Trump is encouraging his Justice Department to pursue. He’s mulling whether to hold to tradition and invite Trump among all the other living presidents to the scheduled spring opening of his presidential center in Chicago. Presumably, he would be rebuffed. But Trump, always looking for a moment to tear into Obama and Democrats, could accept the invitation.
More on Obama’s mind is what to do and say if the Supreme Court strikes down the Voting Rights Act entirely after several justices recently appeared open to at least weakening the landmark law. Or if tensions rise with the immigration agents and National Guardsmen deployed to American cities. Or if Trump makes real moves to again try to stay past the end of his term, something Trump has downplayed recently.
“He doesn’t want to be the leader of the party — he was the leader of the free world. But it feels like sometimes he’s got to speak his mind,” another person who knows Obama well told CNN. “No one expected this: this bad, this ugly, literally the rule of law in play every day.”
He senses the politics of his party may be leaving him behind but also wonders if the Democratic Party’s problems are so deep that it needs his help to steer it back to relevance.
To a demographic of Democratic voters and media figures — embodied in many ways by Marc Maron’s having Obama as a return guest for the final episode of his long-running podcast earlier this month — the former president is forever their nostalgia for a time when intellectualism and progressivism reigned and the world made more sense to them.
“People who are barely old enough to remember his presidency make TikTok fancams about the guy,” said Rob Flaherty, a strategist steeped in social media and influencing, adding, “in this moment, Democrats need to make the case for liberal democracy, and he’s one of the most effective voices we could have.”
Spanberger and Sherrill have campaigned with some potential contenders for the Democrats’ 2028 nomination but have not appeared with the party’s last two nominees: former President Joe Biden or former Vice President Kamala Harris. Both, though, asked specifically for Obama.
The Obama allure among Democrats remains so high that even people close to him were surprised how much Harris in her otherwise score-settling post-election book let him off the hook for initially holding off in backing her last summer after Biden dropped out of the race.
In California, the strategists working on Newsom’s effort to redraw US House maps didn’t test Biden’s or Harris’s appeal, according to people familiar with the effort. Bill and Hillary Clinton registered a little, and so did a few others like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but no one matched Obama’s ability to get Democrats revved up and independents willing to listen.
Obama switched his position from supporting independent redistricting to backing California’s move to retaliate against Texas Republicans trying to produce five more GOP-held seats at Trump’s demand.
“If there’s one thing that our entire nation has come to understand about President Barack Obama, it’s that he cares deeply about democracy and decency and the decorum that comes with leading such a diverse and inspired nation,” said Isaac Bryan, an assemblymember from South Central Los Angeles.
The 33-year-old Bryan, who wore a “Hope” T-shirt in his first driver’s license photo, said he knows Obama’s appeal is running up against time.
“We all have to accept when we’re not the coolest anymore,” Bryan told CNN. “For this new generation, President Obama doesn’t have the same swagger that he did for my generation and the ones just above me.”
Obama did not endorse Zohran Mamdani. Aides say his summer phone call to the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor was meant to validate the candidate to those suspicious of the 34-year-old democratic socialist and embrace his own role in guiding the next generation.
When word of the call spread, some of Mamdani’s most hardcore supporters started posting about how just talking to Obama was proof that Mamdani must have been co-opted.
The criticism surprised not just Obama’s orbit, but Mamdani’s.
“There’s always going to be a small subset of people that treat politics like a cool indie band and they feel like they’re kind of uncool when more people discover them,” said Jabari Brisport, a fellow Democratic Socialists of America member of the New York legislature and close Mamdani friend. “It’s not always that Obama’s calling you so you’re selling out. No, Obama has for the first time had to congratulate a socialist. That’s movement on Obama’s side.”
A 2024 campaign misfire
For Obama and his detractors, last year’s campaign stands as a measure of what he doesn’t get and what can go wrong. Behind the scenes, he had been asked by Harris’ campaign to push Black celebrities like Jay-Z and LeBron James to support her. His comments at a stop in Pittsburgh on the way to his first rally for her, letting loose on young Black men for not supporting a Black woman, immediately blew up.
“I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama said, adding that “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
For days, the campaign was fielding angry responses, including from popular radio host Charlamagne tha God, even as they watched Republican online networks heighten the tension for their own ends.
Jay-Z never did endorse, blaming the indictment of fellow rapper Sean Combs for putting too much heat on him.
His stump speech for future rallies was quickly reworked after Pittsburgh.
Lessons were taken for the rest of the campaign, but also for what came next, starting with a post-election speech at the annual Democracy Forum hosted by his foundation in which he lingered on how to push back at “times, potentially, when one side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power, either by actively suppressing votes, or politicizing the armed forces, or using the judiciary or criminal justice system to go after their opponents.”
Since then, Obama has decided even smaller moments need pushback, like when he deliberately took a moment during an appearance in London last month to respond to the “spectacle of my successor” making unproven claims about women taking Tylenol while pregnant that went well beyond his administration’s new advisory.
Aides have built up networks to boost comments he’s slipped into other events either rebutting Trump directly or, as when he spoke through his Obama Foundation work to young leaders in Eastern Europe about authoritarianism rising around the world, delivering a pointed framing of the situation in America.
“Simply put,” Holder said, “because a president says this doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s true. Oh, look, there’s this other president who sounds rational and sane.”
They are constantly trying to avoid what happened in September, when the Trump digs he made at an event in Erie, Pennsylvania, got so much attention that they competed for attention with the political violence speech that same day by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, long one of Obama’s favorites.
Preparing for what might be next
In August, at the height of Texas Democrats’ failed pushback to Trump’s demanded mid-decade redistricting, state Rep. James Talarico was given a number for a conference line to call into. At first, the voice he heard patching in sounded like an Obama impersonator, but soon he was basking in the praise for his appearances on Fox News and Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Talarico, who is now running for US Senate, said on the call that as a 36-year-old millennial, he thinks he grew up being more hopeful because of Obama’s leadership.
“He appreciated that. He said that we’ve got to help Gen Z get to that more hopeful place, because they’ve been through a lot,” Talarico recalled to CNN, adding, “I definitely sensed an urgency that he felt that he had a responsibility to help the next generation of leaders be able to meet the moment.”
In addition to checking in with allies like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and meeting a few politicians who’ve sought him out — Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, among others — Obama hosted several unannounced gatherings with influencers, trying to keep up with the rapid shifts in media and attention to inform his own decisions about how and where to speak out. He asks to be challenged in ways that some who’ve spoken to him believe is revealing his doubts about whether his rejiggering to talk about the “abundance agenda” is enough.
Among those Obama invited in: Faiz Shakir, the top Bernie Sanders adviser who also founded the progressive media and content company More Perfect Union. They talked progressive politics.
Shakir acknowledges that Obama can’t run for president again, but he’s hoping for a more public presence, maybe town halls to model what other Democrats should do and how they should act at them.
“He can’t get out there and have the rubber meet the road, sadly,” Shakir said, “but I think he’s wanting to challenge himself: Do I have my head on right about what people are thinking about in this country?”
As Barack Obama stumps for other Democrats, the party gets to see what it lost
The wit and wisdom of the superstar ex-US president make him the best candidate – too bad he can’t run
UK Twitter hacker who breached Obama’s account ordered to repay $5.4 million in Bitcoin
Joseph James O’Connor, 26, pleaded guilty in the United States to charges including computer intrusion, wire fraud and extortion and was sentenced to five years in prison in 2023.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service on Monday said it had obtained a civil recovery order to seize 42 Bitcoin and other crypto assets linked to the scam, which involved using hijacked accounts to solicit digital currency and threaten celebrities.
“We were able to use the full force of the powers available to us to ensure that even when someone is not convicted in the UK, we are still able to ensure they do not benefit from their criminality,” prosecutor Adrian Foster said in a statement.
Reporting by Sam Tabahriti; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Sarah Young
Obama tells Arkansas audience young people give him hope for US democracy
The former president spoke in Bentonville as part of new lecture series
Although the country is more divided and democracy is more unstable than he’s seen in his lifetime, former President Barack Obama said young people give him hope for the future.
Obama shared his thoughts Monday on democracy, civic engagement and understanding others during the inaugural conversation of Building Bridges, a new lecture series hosted by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art focused on “meeting in the middle with curiosity, courage, and care,” according to a press release.
After speaking with hundreds of Arkansas students about civic engagement, the former Democratic president spoke to around 700 people who packed into the Heartland Whole Health Institute’s ballroom on Crystal Bridges’ Bentonville campus.
Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next year, museum board chair Olivia Walton, who moderated the lecture, asked about the American spirit. Obama described the country as an“eternally youthful” and “forward-looking nation” where each person can pursue their dreams and there’s a sense of working together to build the country up.
“The last element, and I mentioned this to the young people that I was speaking to today, of the American spirit is each successive generation deciding we can remake this,” he said. “There’s a process of self-invention that is uniquely American.”
After noting his concern that the country is losing some of those elements, Obama rejected the notion that patriotism means you can’t criticize the country.
“The reason I think patriotism got politicized is that both the left and the right sometimes got confused in thinking that it was not possible to take an honest look at America’s flaws and be critical of it and still love it and that’s a mistake,” he said. “It is a great expression of love for this country to say that we have not always been perfect, and the reason that we have kept getting better is because we had a bunch of people who said this isn’t as good as we can be, but the ideals were there.”
The first and only African American to hold the nation’s highest office, Obama served two terms after being elected the 44th president of the United States in 2008. Since leaving office, Obama said he didn’t expect to see the legitimacy of an election and the peaceful transfer of power challenged. He’s also been surprised by how the politicization of the Justice Department and the military has been encouraged.
“You don’t have your military involved in partisan politics,” he said. “Its loyalty is to the Constitution. Its loyalty is not to any party and it is not to any president.”
Obama said it’s concerning to see how people have been willing to overlook the erosion of norms and values in part because of fear of being punished by the state.
“The reason I think that we have found ourselves in a position where we have folks in power who are not abiding as much as I would like with these norms and rules does have to do with underlying divisions in our society that had been building up for some time,” he said.
There are several reasons for this, Obama said, including political rules, like gerrymandering, that encourage political polarization. Social media has compounded the issue by giving people with the most extreme views the most attention, he said. The country has also lost genuine communities where it’s possible to learn that people are complicated and have nuanced views on issues.
“This undermines the part of American exceptionalism that I mentioned earlier about us being joiners and us just constantly interacting with people and being in public spaces and getting to know each other and telling each other stories so that we understood each other and gave each other the benefit of the doubt,” Obama said. “That’s what we’ve lost.”
This can’t be solved simply by fixing political rules or electing one party over another, he said. Civic habits underlying these issues need to be addressed.
One step in that direction will be the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in the South Side of Chicago next year. The space will be a community hub with exhibits, a library and programming to help “train the next generation of leaders,” Obama said.
“The center, it is explicit about championing democracy,” he said. “All our programming, all our displays argue and insist that for all its flaws, it is the best system we got.”
Several Democratic state lawmakers who attended Monday’s lecture said they were inspired by the former president’s speech, including Rep. Tippi McCullough of Little Rock who said she felt “a sense of relief” that the country will get through hard times. Rep. Denise Ennett of Little Rock said she liked how Obama emphasized the importance of leading for everybody, not for one side.
“I love that he reveres democracy in a time when nobody reveres it at all,” Ennett said.
For his part, Obama said young people give him hope because of their energy, insights and their natural instincts toward including people and being interested in others even if they’re not exactly like them.
“I am hopeful as long as young people don’t succumb to cynicism or despair because if they believe in their future, they will lift us all up,” he said.
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