President Obama himself is famously transactional when it comes to relations with other leaders; in my new article on his foreign policy, I make note of his strong belief that countries tend to act in what their leaders perceive to be their core interests, and I’ve come to see that Obama doesn’t place enormous value in the notion that well-developed personal relationships between leaders could ever trump the cold-eyed pursuit of those interests. Nevertheless, he has intense relationships with many world leaders—and he has become, in his last years as president, a mentor to a handful of important new ones.
.. Among other things, he views the pope as a devout believer who nevertheless is fully committed to pluralism. This sort of commitment is what Obama is seeking from Muslim leaders, and it is what progressive Muslim leaders are seeking from the more fundamentalist-minded clerics in their midst.
.. Obama believes that he understands Israel’s existential dilemmas better than Netanyahu does, and Netanyahu sees Obama as hopelessly naive.
.. His constant question to Netanyahu, he told me, was, “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who? How does this get resolved?”
.. My previous understanding was that Obama viewed Putin in Hobbesian terms: nasty, brutish, and short. But Obama doesn’t find him nasty—Putin doesn’t leave him waiting for meetings, as he does other leaders. Obama believes Putin to be a thug, one who doesn’t understand his own best interests, but he also believes Putin understands Obama’s own red lines. Putin, for his part, sees Obama as hopelessly over-evolved. He’s said to be contemptuous of Obama’s lectures concerning Russia’s best interests, and he does not find Obama frightening.
Three Places Obama Could Teach
No doubt, Columbia would offer him a king’s ransom and every other academic perk imaginable. But, for me, to find the first black President—a former community organizer who has ventured more daringly outside the Oval Office (with a stop at a prison, a speech at a mosque, an impending visit to Cuba) than any other modern President—teaching at Columbia (or any school like it) would be a disappointment. To put it bluntly, rich white kids at rich white schools don’t need him. But there are places, and students, that do. I’d like to suggest three.
..Obama could teach at a historically black college/university, or H.B.C.U., as the common parlance has it. Some of the most illustrious names of the past American century, from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Thurgood Marshall to Toni Morrison, were educated at these schools.
.. Yet another place that could make great use of Obama’s talent and prestige would be any one of the nation’s eleven hundred community colleges.
.. The third place Obama could teach is perhaps the most improbable, but the one I hope he most strongly considers. I think Obama should teach, for one year, for even just part of the time, in an inner-city K-12 public school. A single course in U.S. government for high-school seniors would suit him well.
.. In 2013, less than two per cent of public-school teachers were black men, which tells us that the overwhelming majority of kids, both black and white, have little direct exposure to professional black men in their daily lives. This has had a disastrous effect on the development of black students, and especially black boys, contributing to their staggering levels of behavioral issues, suspensions, and, ultimately, dropouts.
.. A recent study by the Department of Education found that black boys receive more than two-thirds of all public-school suspensions. Another study showed that black students are less likely to be recommended for gifted programs when they are taught by non-black teachers.
Barack Obama : Call To Renewal – Faith and Politics 1of 5
Obama: Hillary had a harder campaign in 2008 because she is a women
“We had as competitive and lengthy and expensive and tough a primary fight as there has been in modern American politics, and she had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” Mr. Obama said. “She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her. She had a tougher job throughout that primary than I did.”