When I'm writing the book proposal in 2016, 2017, the question on everyone's mind is,

why does Trump succeed? And the question that I ended up thinking was a lot more compelling to me

and maybe more important in its own way was not how did Trump succeed, but why did Obama fail?

I'm going to read just a bit from the book. You do a really compelling description of how Obama has

all the things both in mind and in his person and his personality and his political temperament

to be the figure that he wants to be. So you're right. He operated the Democratic

machine with a skilled Martin Van Burin would have envied and played the part of the idealist

like a latter-day Charles Sumner, bringing audiences to tears by urging Americans to live up

to their founding creed. He reckoned with the power of the corporate order that Marcana embodied

in his day and the administrative state that theodore Roosevelt envisioned in his. He was as

perceptive and interpreter of race and American democracy as W.A.B. Du Bois and a skilled

and navigator of the American establishment as Walter Littman. He is the one we were waiting for,

you know, in your books, narrative in a way. And this comes from both an old millennial who's

therefore old enough to have been just enraptured by the Obama-2001 campaign. This is in some,

it's a very, very personal story for me. Like I believe so much in this, but also like old enough

now to have a five-year-old son who's obsessed with Star Wars and wants nothing more to do than

watch Revenge of the Sith every day. So ahead of my mind, like God, Barack Obama,

you're supposed to bring violence to the force, not leave it in ashes. So this, yeah, like Barack Obama

as the Anakin Skywalker, the American Left, is one way of summarizing that story. I'm so glad we got

you to say that.