The Obama Tapes: Outtakes from David Remnick's Interviews with the President: The New Yorker This week's issue of the magazine contains "Going the Distance," a portrait of Barack Obama, drawn from interviews with the President at the White House and on Air Force One during a fund-raising swing through Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. There was also an on-the-record call just as the piece was closing for publication. I think I will get no argument that the piece was long enough, thank you, but there were some moments that further illustrated the President's capacity to argue both sides of a question and, when needed, to opt for a magnanimous non-answer rather than launch a rhetorical missile. So, for the record ... First of all, yes, I did ask about Chris Christie - and got nowhere quick. Obama's answer fell into the magnanimous non-answer category. ("Well, I like Christie personally, and we've had a good working relationship on specific issues like the Hurricane Sandy recovery," he said. "Beyond that, David, I just don't have enough facts to offer a judgment.") I think it is safe to say that Obama saw no advantage in stepping into that particular puddle. And, yes, I also asked about "Duty," the new memoir by Robert Gates, who served as Defense Secretary for both George W. Bush and Obama - and who was, at times, critical of both. Gates got a lot of attention for suggesting in his book that Obama had lost faith in the mission in Afghanistan. When I asked Obama about that, his response resembled the ink cloud a squid expels. Obama said that Gates had sent him an inscribed copy, and I asked what it said. Well, it was reflective of a genuine friendship that I think we built up over time. And I don't take the press's characterization of the book at face value," Obama said. What I do believe is true, not just for Bob Gates and this National Security Council but for every national-security team in every modern White House, is that there is going to be some back and forth and give-and-take between Cabinet secretaries and White House staff. And the criteria that I imposed throughout my first term, and will continue to insist on in my second term, is: Are we getting it right? Even if it's messy, even if sometimes folks are frustrated, even if the conversations get heated - in the end of the day, are we putting forward the best possible policies to secure this country, and protect our troops, and make sure that if we send them on a mission it's the right mission and they've got the tools they need to succeed? And I think my understanding, at least, is that Robert Gates acknowledged that at the end of the day, in a very difficult circumstance, we made the right decisions and oftentimes ignored political expedience to do so. And that's ultimately how I'm going to measure success, and, hopefully, how history measures success. The one thing - and I said this publicly, so you could probably get a transcript of this, when I was in a bilateral with the Spanish President - the one thing I did say, getting to my motivations or body language in some of these meetings, is that war should be hard for everybody involved, that you should be asking tough questions at all times - most of all, of yourself. And that, if you are not asking difficult questions of yourself and your team, then you can end up with bad policy that hurts the national interest and that, in my mind, is a betrayal of those young men and women who I'm putting in harm's way. In other words, Obama will answer more fully in his own memoir. One area where the President is particularly touchy is the often repeated notion, in Washington and elsewhere, that if he only courted and/or punished members of Congress more aggressively he would get more legislation through the House and Senate. Obama has clearly given a lot of thought to the rap that if only he acted like L.B.J. he would succeed with more frequency. "There's no doubt that personal relationships matter at the margins and can tip something over the finish line if things are aligned to get - if things are aligned for legislation to happen," Obama said. So I have no doubt that Ronald Reagan's relationship with Tip O'Neill helped to facilitate the Social Security deal getting done. And the personal relationship and social relationship that O'Neill and Reagan may have had paid some dividends. But had Tip O'Neill not seen it to be in his interests to do a deal with Ronald Reagan because he had a whole bunch of conservative and Southern Democrats whose districts had been won by Reagan, and had Reagan not been looking at polls from his advisers telling him that Social Security was a very popular program and that he couldn't be seen as antagonistic toward it, it wouldn't have mattered how many drinks Reagan and Tip O'Neill had together. The interesting thing is that, when I was in the state legislature, I had great relationships with my Republican colleagues. And we had poker games and we had golf outings - so much so that I ended up having a number of Republicans say nice things about me when I ran for President. It came back to haunt them later. I interrupted, mentioning Kirk Dillard, a Republican friend of Obama's in the Illinois State Senate. When Dillard ran for governor in 2010, his opponents ran ads against him using that friendship as evidence of his disloyalty to the conservative cause. Obama agreed. "As one example," he said, "when I was in the U.S. Senate, I formed friendships with folks like Tom Coburn that continue to this day. And I actually enjoy spending time with a lot of these folks. There have been times where I've been constrained by the fact that I had two young daughters who I wanted to spend time with, and that I wasn't in a position to work the social scene in Washington. But having said all that, on fundamental issues like getting Republicans to raise taxes or eliminate loopholes, or getting Democrats to consider reforms to entitlement programs, what matters is the makeup of their districts and their electorates, and I think probably, just from a purely political point of view, the bigger challenge that I've had has to do with the fact that there is a core group of Republican House members in particular who know that I lost their districts by twenty-five or thirty points, and that there is a Republican base of voters for whom compromise with me is a betrayal. And that - more than anything, I think - has been the challenge that I've needed to overcome. Another way of putting it, I guess, is that the issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base so that they feel persuaded that I'm not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, but I'm somebody who is interested in solving problems and is pretty practical, and that, actually, a lot of the things that we've put in place worked better than people might think. And as long as there's that gap between perceptions of me within the average Republican primary voter and the reality, it's hard for folks like John Boehner to move too far in my direction. The last point I'll make on this, when it comes to Democrats, the truth of the matter is: with fairly thin margins over the last five years, what's been remarkable is the degree to which Democrats have been unified and worked with this Administration to accomplish some big things, even when there were a lot of political risks involved. And I'd like to think that part of that is because the Democrats up on Capitol Hill that I have relationships with know that the things I'm fighting for are things they care deeply about, and that I have a genuine commitment to seeing them succeed. You haven't seen me, I think, go out of my way to play against Democrats on the Hill. But I've tried to be supportive of them in every way that I can. Obama spoke about the need to acknowledge the history of American foreign policy, its successes but also its misadventures and even disasters. Here is an even fuller version of the answer I quoted in the piece: My working premise, what I believe in my gut, is that America has been an enormous force for good in the world, and that if you look at the ledger and you say, What have we gotten right and what have we gotten wrong, on balance, we have helped to promote greater freedom and greater prosperity for more people, and been willing, as I think I said to you earlier, to advance causes even if they weren't in our narrow self-interest in a way that you've never seen any dominant power do in the history of the world. And so, to apologize for certain historic events out of context, I think, wouldn't be telling an accurate story. On the other hand, I do think that part of effective diplomacy, part of America maintaining its influence in a world in which we remain the one indispensable power, but in which you've got a much more multipolar environment, is for other people to know that we understand their stories as well, and that we can see how they have come to certain conclusions or understandings about their history, their economies, the conflicts they've suffered. Because, if they think we understand their frame of reference, then they're more likely to listen to us and to work with us. So for me to acknowledge the fact that we were involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran is not to pick at an old scab or to do a bunch of Monday-morning quarterbacking. It's to say to the Iranian people, We understand why you might have some suspicions about us; we've got some suspicions about you because you have held our folks hostage and murdered our people and threatened our allies. So, now that we understand each other, can we do business? That, I think, is useful and important precisely because we are far and away the most powerful country in the world. And, having lived overseas, the one thing I know is how much the world admires America, but also how much the world thinks America has no clue as to what's going on outside our borders. Later, he added, "Now, if other countries don't think we see them or know them or understand them, then they may grudgingly coöperate with us where they have to, because it's in their self-interest, but, at the margins - where we need them to participate in Iran's sanctions, or we need them to work with us around a non-proliferation agenda - a population that thinks we hear them, we understand their history, is more likely to support their leaders when they work with us. That's part of exercising effective power in the world. I asked Obama if he would say he was the first President to acknowledge these historical events in the way that he does. "I think, if you look at Kennedy's best speeches, the notion that we are connected with folks around the world, and that we lead not simply by the force of arms but because of values and ideals, and that we have to uphold them, is part of what made Kennedy an inspiration not just in this country but around the world," Obama said. And he may not have spoken about certain specifics in the same way, but partly that's because he lived in a more innocent time, in some ways. "When I make a speech now, it is broadcast around the world in an instant, and there are entire blogs devoted to picking apart every factual assertion that is being made, and people expect a level of accuracy and understanding that wouldn't have been the case in 1961 or "62." Finally, one of the biggest headlines of the second Inaugural Address had to do with Obama's commitment to work harder on climate change. I don't have the sense that this is in the forefront - but maybe we will know something more concrete after the State of the Union, on January 28th. There was one interesting exchange worth noting, for the record: Q.: Mr. President, when the Copenhagen pact was signed, our carbon emissions were about the same as the Chinese. Now the Chinese are double ours - double. And you've now had meetings with the Chinese leadership, and you know the forces that impinge on them in terms of development and lifting people out of poverty. But, as I think I remember you saying, if India and China develop at our rate we'll be "four feet underwater." THE PRESIDENT: Yes, we've got problems. Q.: What leverage do we have? THE PRESIDENT: Well, the good news is the Chinese and Indians understand that. I may have mentioned this to you earlier - the most popular Twitter account in China is the U.S. Embassy's daily air-quality measurement. When you talk to China experts, they will tell you that the most active, robust civic organizations, and the area where there's been the loudest complaint about government inaction, alongside corruption, is the issue of the environment. The Chinese understand that if things continue on this pace they're going to run out of water, and they're not going to be able to stem the kind of pollution you see in Beijing during the summers, and things are just going to get worse. So we've seen some progress, very modest. Their willingness to work with us on the hydrocarbon reductions that are embodied in the Montreal Protocol, I think, are an example of that. But my goal has been to make sure that the United States can genuinely assert leadership in this issue internationally, that we are considered part of the solution rather than part of the problem. And if we are at the table in that conversation with some credibility, then it gives us the opportunity to challenge and engage the Chinese and the Indians, as long as we take into account the fact that they've still got, between the two of them, over a billion people in dire poverty. And it's not sufficient for us to just tell them to stop. We're going to have to give them some help. We're going to have to take some of our research and development on things like clean-coal technology and be able to export it to them or license it to them. We're going to have to look at our best practices, or, probably more pertinently, Japanese best practices, on energy efficiency, and figure out how can some of that stuff get written into Chinese and Indian building codes. There's going to be a process where we help them leapfrog some of the development stages that we went through. This is why I'm putting a big priority on our carbon action plan here. It's not because I'm ignorant of the fact that these emerging countries are going to be a bigger problem than us. It's because it's very hard for me to get in that conversation if we're making no effort. And it's not an answer for us to say, Well, since the Chinese and the Indians are the bigger problem, we might as well not even bother. It's also why, though, sometimes I get into arguments with environmentalists on something like carbon capture or natural gas. The notion that not only [can we] duplicate the emissions rates of Sweden, let's say, but that the Chinese and the Indians can anytime soon, frustrates me. Factually, that's just not feasible. It's not correct. And so if we can figure out a carbon-capture mechanism that is sufficiently advanced and works, then we are helping ourselves, because the Chinese and the Indians are going to build some coal plants, and even if we don't build another coal plant in this country, there are going to be a lot of coal plants around the world that are built. And we have a huge investment in trying to figure out how we can help them do it more cleanly. Natural gas is a fossil fuel. If it's not done correctly, the methane emissions are profound. There could be, obviously, environmental consequences if some of the chemicals involved seep into the groundwater. But, if we can get that right, then for us to see natural gas supplant coal around the world the same way it's happening here in the United States, that's a net plus. Photograph: Pete Souza