INTERVIEW – PETER BAKER – New York Times White House Correspondent and author of new edition of his 2017 biography, “Obama: The Call of History”
- BOOK: Obama Took 2016 Election as ‘Personal Insult,’ Blamed Hillary’s ‘Soulless, Scripted Campaign’ (The Hill) — Former President Obama viewed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to President Trump as a “personal insult” and a defeat of his own legacy, according to new updates to a 2017 book. Updates to New York Times correspondent Peter Baker’s history of the Obama presidency, “Obama: The Call of History,” published by the Daily Mail, detail how the president was overcome with anger in the days following Clinton’s defeat to Trump, which Obama saw as a result of her inability to translate his policy successes into a winnable message. “Obama may not have been on the ballot, but it was hard not to see the vote as a ‘personal insult,’ as he had called it on the campaign trail,” Baker writes, according to Fox News. “This stings,” Obama said after the election, according to Baker. “This hurts.” Struggling with the results of the election, Obama found himself thinking that the American people “simply could not have decided to replace him with a buffoonish showman whose calling cards had been repeated bankruptcies, serial marriages and racist dog whistles,” Baker continued. “I’ve got the economy set up well for him. No facts. No consequences. They can just have a cartoon,” he told one aide after the election, according to the book. Baker wrote that Obama directed much blame at his former secretary of State, who the former president thought ran a “soulless” campaign. “No one forced her to take hundreds of thousands of dollars from Goldman Sachs and other pillars of Wall Street for speeches,” Baker writes, according to the Mail. “No one forced her to run a scripted, soulless campaign that tested eighty-five slogans before coming up with ‘Stronger Together.’ “
