‘I Curse More Than I Should’: Obama Admits to the Occasional ‘Rant’ in Office
President Obama gave a big exit interview to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in Vanity Fair and did a lot of reflecting on his time in office.
He spoke of his “youthful ambition” in seeking the presidency and how absent father was “motivator for early ambition.” As he describes it, the president’s worldview is “the world only makes sense to me given my life and my background if, in fact, we’re not just an assortment of tribes that can never understand each other, but that we’re, rather, one common humanity that can meet and learn and love each other.”
There are a lot of references to Abraham Lincoln by both Obama and Goodwin. At one point, Goodwin brought up how whenever Lincoln and FDR got frustrated, they would draft out speeches or letters calling out people, then threw them out.
And Obama revealed that he actually does that “all the time”:
OBAMA: I do it all the time. I will write a response––a full rant.
GOODWIN: No kidding? [Laughter.]
OBAMA: And then I’ll crumple it up. Every once in a while, my team here will hear me go on a rant. Generally speaking, people who know me will tell you that my public persona is not that different from my private persona. I am who I am. You sort of get what you see with me. The two exceptions are that I curse more than I should, and I find myself cursing more in this office than I had in my previous life. [Laughter.] And fortunately both my chief of staff and my national-security adviser have even bigger potty mouths than me, so it’s O.K. And the second thing is that I can be much more sarcastic and, I think, sometimes withering in my assessments of things than I allow to show in my public life.
The president is not exactly known for having a foul mouth, though you may recall brief moments of amusement years ago when people highlighted certain profane passages in Dreams from My Father and how Obama said them in the audiobook.
You can read the full interview here.
[image via screengrab]
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