Obama's Last Stand, an e-book published on August 20, 2012 by Politico and Random House gives an indepth look at the political operatives at work
inside Obama's Campaign. This LEFT-LEANING analysis gives details to the infighting among advisers, political discontentment of Romney, and the
President's own "negative" words for Senator Rubio.
Excerpts from POLITICO e-book: Obama campaign roiled by conflict by Glenn Thrush
www.politico.com...
Obama’s trash-talking competitiveness, a trait that has defined him since his days on the court as a basketball-obsessed teenager in Hawaii, was on
display one night last February, when the president spotted a woman he knew was close to Sen. Marco Rubio in a Florida hotel lobby. “Is your boy
going to go for [vice president]?” the president asked her. Maybe, she replied.
“Well,” he said, chuckling, according to a person who witnessed the encounter. “Tell your boy to watch it. He might get his ass kicked.”
This has produced a campaign being animated by one thing above all. It is not exclusively about hope and change anymore, words that seem like distant
echoes even to Obama’s original loyalists — and to the president himself. It is not the solidarity of a hard-fought cause, often absent in this
mostly joyless campaign. It is Obama’s own burning competitiveness, with his remorseless focus on beating Mitt Romney — an opponent he genuinely
views with contempt and fears will be unfit to run the country.
To give Obama a break from the relentless negativity of the campaign, friend and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett quietly set up a salon/dinner for
Obama over the summer — which lasted more than two hours, a huge block of presidential time.
On hand were Jarrett’s friend and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, Facebook billionaire and new New Republic Publisher Chris Hughes, and Apple
executive Scott Forstall, who led the team that developed the iPhone.
One of the topics?
Civility and political discourse.