Barack Obama

For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land. He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen. At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn't care; she just beamed with pride. President Truman called him Gene. President Ford liked to talk golf with him. He saw eight presidential administrations...

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is dismissing Republican criticism of his administration's handling of the attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Libya, calling the criticism a political sideshow. In his words, "there is no there there," Obama told a news conference Monday. He was asked about recent disclosures that talking points on the attack produced by the intelligence community were later watered down to delete references to suspected ties between last September's assault and...

Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road to domination. And where Barack Obama, already naturally inclined to believe his own loftiness, graciously accepted the kingly crown and proceeded to ride his reelection success to a crushing victory over the GOP at the fiscal cliff , leaving a...

Everyone knows that Barack Obama can put together a winning coalition in a presidential election. He did it twice. What's less clear is whether the Democratic Party and its 2016 presidential nominee will be able to build a coalition that resembles the one Obama assembled in 2008 and masterfully re-created four years later. New data from the Census Bureau help answer that question, shining a light on two pillars of the Obama electoral foundation: African Americans and young people.

Jena McGregor is a columnist for the Washington Post's On Leadership section. It's hard to know where to start when compiling a list of must-reads about Barack Obama 's leadership style. The president has been the subject of countless profiles , a multitude of books —including several of his own—and more news analysis pieces that pick apart his approach to governing than any sane person can really take in. What's worth reading after more than four years of scrutinizing one person has become harder and harder to...

Gridlock, polarization, obstructionism — if there's one thing Washington can agree on, it's that Washington can't agree on anything. The public's sufferance in recent years of petty filibusters, destructive budget showdowns and stridently partisan news outlets has given rise to a yearning for what's imagined to be a lost culture of reasonableness. It's easy now to pine for an era like the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O'Neill could put aside foundational...

Here are some things we can look forward to learning about Barack Obama: · That he was mentored in high school by a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party. · That he launched his Illinois state Senate campaign in the home of a terrorist and a killer. · That while serving as a state senator, he was a member of a socialist front group. · That his affiliations are so dodgy that he would have trouble getting a government security clearance. · That there is reason to doubt his "loyalty...

Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president's actions in Libya as "leading from behind. " — Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker, May 2 issue To be precise, leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine. Doctrines involve ideas, but since there are no discernible ones that make sense of Obama foreign policy — Lizza's painstaking two-year chronicle shows it to be as ad hoc, erratic and confused as it appears — this will have to do. And it surely...

One of the great differences between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives will freely admit that they have an ideology. We're kind of dorks that way, squabbling over old texts like Dungeons and Dragons geeks, wearing ties with pictures of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke on them. But mainstream liberals from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama — and the intellectuals and journalists who love them — often assert that they are simply dispassionate slaves to the facts; they are realists,...

Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana's primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to...

In July 2010, nearly two years after the 2008 financial crisis exposed the vulnerability of the world's economic system, Congress passed sweeping changes to laws regulating the U.S. financial industry. Washington Post associate editor Robert G. Kaiser persuaded the bill's main sponsors, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), to give him behind-the-scenes access to observe the bill's journey from conception to enactment, an 18-month odyssey that involved...

Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road to domination. And where Barack Obama, already naturally inclined to believe his own loftiness, graciously accepted the kingly crown and proceeded to ride his reelection success to a crushing victory over the GOP at the fiscal...

It's a bright Sunday morning and Gloria Borland is rushing her 10-year-old to hula class at Halau O 'Aulani, a Hawaiian cultural school in Arlington . Musicians in Tiki shirts and Tevas set up their steel guitars, and students with plastic frangipani flowers in their hair pull on yellow cotton skirts. Borland's daughter skips over to join a circle of dancers as her mother collapses into a chair, her arms filled with notes on President Obama's formative years in Hawaii and several biographies stuffed with...

Watching PBS's "NewsHour" the other night, I caught a debate between two academics about whether the United States should intervene in Syria. The British, French and Israelis say that Damascus has used chemical weapons, although Washington is not as sure . (Do you think George Tenet could find out?) So in the meantime the president will adhere to his policy of doing next to nothing and thus ensure that the war continues. One of the academics wanted America to intervene while the other did not. He kept saying, "We don't need...

C lare Boothe Luce liked to say that "a great man is one sentence. " Presidents, in particular. The most common "one sentence" for George W. Bush is: "He kept us safe. " Not quite right. With Bush's legacy being reassessed as his presidential library opens in Dallas, it's important to note that he did not just keep us safe. He created the entire anti-terror infrastructure that continues to keep us safe. That homage was paid, wordlessly, by Barack Obama, who vilified Bush's anti-terror policies as a candidate, then continued them...

Organizing for Action , a political group allied with President Obama, raised a relatively modest $4.9 million in its first quarter of operation, with an average donation of $44, the group reported Friday. In an e-mail to supporters, the group's executive director, Jon Carson , wrote that "109,582 supporters stepped up and invested what we're building together — from the grassroots up. " The group, which is focused on promoting Obama's budget, immigration and gun control...

There are Obama doubters and haters out there who claim with righteous anger that they are "vetting" the president, something they say the mainstream media never did. Some of them have said that my new biography — unwittingly, they argue, for I am too dumb to understand what my research has unearthed — proves that Barack Obama's defining memoir is phony and that his entire life is a fraud. My intent is not to defend Obama or his book; he can take care of himself, and I have my own questions about " Dreams From My Father ,"...

Barack Obama is on his way to Europe, where an adoring public awaits. But I wonder if the reception would be quite so enthusiastic if Obama's fans across the Atlantic knew a dirty little secret of his remarkable presidential campaign: Although Obama portrays himself as the best candidate to engage the rest of the world and restore America's image abroad, and many Americans support him for that reason, so far he has almost completely refused to answer...

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, red in the face, took off his jacket and rolled up a shirt sleeve — but there was no relief from the discomfort of his affliction. The poor guy is suffering from triangulation. The man triangulating him, President Obama, has proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of an attempt to find a middle ground in the budget debate. For Sanders (I), a liberal member of the Senate Democratic caucus, the betrayal stung so badly that he literally took to the streets, joining left-wing activists for a...

Germans generally like Barack Obama — 89 percent favored him over Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey . And he admires Germany back. The president once asked an adviser to explain Germany's success in high-wage manufacturing, according to a Post report by Zachary A. Goldfarb last year. The adviser's answer focused on German investment in workforce training and business-government cooperation. "If they can do it," Obama replied, "we can do it. " No doubt...