It’s no secret that Michelle Obama isn’t a huge fan of being in the political trenches, and no one knows that better than her husband — who says he’s still working on making up for dragging her through them.
The former first lady has been vocal about having to be convinced to sign off on Barack Obama’s run for president in the first place, and now, the 44th commander-in-chief is offering a humorous window into how she felt when his two terms finally ended. In an April 3 conversation with Hamilton College President Steven Tepper, Obama was asked by the moderator how he’s been keeping busy since leaving the Oval Office.
“At the moment, I’m splitting time between the work for the foundation — Michelle and I set up the Obama Foundation to train the next generation of leaders here in the United States and around the world, and that keeps me busy,” he said. “I am also finishing the second half of my presidential memoirs. … People ask me, ‘Do you enjoy writing?’ I say, ‘Absolutely not,’ but I do enjoy having written when it’s finished. I’m hoping to get to the finish line on that.”
Then he went on to add that he’s balancing these post-presidency projects with keeping his wife more entertained than she was in the White House: “Beyond that — look, I was in a deep deficit with my wife, so I have been trying to dig myself out of that hole by doing occasionally fun things.”
That prompted a round of laughter from the crowd. And it’s worth noting that Mrs. Obama is keeping pretty busy these days herself, including with the new podcast she just launched alongside her brother, Craig Robinson.
The audience got little more insight into Obama’s personal life of late when Tepper asked the famously talented orator if he could think of instances when he hadn’t been able to communicate as effectively as he’d wanted to.
“All the time. First of all, I constantly lose arguments to my wife, my daughters. They mock me and ridicule me at the dinner table, so yes,” Obama said. (But he did follow that up with a more serious answer: “As president, look, there are things that I cared deeply about but couldn’t move at least Congress — and apparently couldn’t move the country forward.” One example? Not being able to achieve more in the way of gun control.)
Of course, the bulk of the conversation was much more serious than Obama’s quips about his marriage. The former president spoke at length about his worries about the country’s shifting norms when it comes to upholding democracy and living in a “rules-based society.”
“It is up to all of us to fix this. It’s not going to be because somebody comes and saves you. The most important office in this democracy is the citizen, the ordinary person who says, no, that’s not right. I do think one of the reasons that our commitment to democratic ideals has eroded is that we got pretty comfortable and complacent,” Obama said. “It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it. Now we’re at one of those moments where, you know what? It’s not enough just to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something and possibly sacrifice a little bit.”
Watch more of Obama’s musings on this in the video below:
