Barack Obama won’t join Biden administration because Michelle ‘would leave me’
'She'd be like, 'What? You're doing what?'' Obama half-joked to CBS' Gayle King in a new interview.
Former President Barack Obama made it clear he won’t be joining the new administration of his former VP, President-elect Joe Biden.
Obama joked that the reason he wouldn’t do it is that the former first lady wouldn’t support it.
“There are probably some things I would not be doing because Michelle would leave me,'” he joked. “She’d be like, ‘What? You’re doing what?'”
Obama was being interviewed by Gayle King on CBS Sunday Morning when he replied that he was “not planning to suddenly work on the White House staff.”
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The beloved former president is doing press in support of his new book, A Promised Land, the memoir written following his two-term presidency. The hefty tome comes in at nearly 800 pages.
In the interview, he talked about his wife, who was named again this year the most admired woman in the world. “I am mindful of the sacrifices she had made, but the good news is that for whatever reason, she has forgiven me — sort of,” he said. “She still reminds me, occasionally, of what she put up with.”
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“When the presidency was over … she was able to let go of some of the stress of feeling as if, ‘I’ve got to get everything right all the time,'” Obama explained, adding that when he left office, Mrs. Obama was finally able to release a breath she had been holding “for close to 10 years.”
Since the end of their time in the White House, the Obamas have launched a production company that will produce original content for Netflix, and Mrs. Obama has created The Michelle Obama Podcast.
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Both the former president and former first lady were active in campaigning for Biden.
Obama told King that his harsh criticism of President Donald Trump during the campaign was not his preference. However, he explained, “I think we were in a circumstance in this election in which certain norms, certain institutional values that are so extraordinarily important, had been breached — that it was important for me, as somebody who had served in that office, to simply let people know, ‘This is not normal.'”
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