“... visits a family living in the ‘blackwater slum’ of Makoko, just outside Lagos, and interviews Barack Obama during his historic trip to Alaska. The book skips along with the brisk pace of magazine journalism – some of the chapters first appeared in a different form in publications such as Rolling Stone – and Goodell finds people with visionary ...”

“... shared.What brought their free-floating racism into sniper focus was their mutual detestation of Barack Obama, who had the effrontery to be smooth, eloquent, slim, knowledgable, slyly ironic, a model of fidelity and fatherhood without nature’s bestowal of pasty skin. Trump’s ‘birtherism’ – his phony Inspector Javert pursuit of ...”

“... Whatever the general truth of the analysis, Trump’s process of thought works like that. If Obama often seemed an image of deliberation without appetite, Trump has always been the reverse. For him, there is no time to linger: from the first thought to the first motion is a matter of seconds; the last aversion or appetite triggers the jump to the ...”

“... however, forge a more ambiguous kind of populism. Hillary Clinton touts steadiness and experience; Barack Obama would douse the very antagonisms – between black and white, immigrant and native, rich and poor – that fired up traditional Populists. And yet Clinton and Obama share a kinship with the Great ...”

“... and amateur: crisp blue skies crisscrossed with lines of puffy white; doctored gatherings of Barack Obama with George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jacob Rothschild, one of their arms stuck out at an unnatural angle to point a gun at the viewer; frowning women next to cell phones emitting harmful energies; the blurry Twin Towers in the moments before ...”

“... renaissance of environmental technology, but it won’t be possible to order it from a catalogue. Barack Obama, caught on tape during a debate-prep session last year, identified the need for a collective solution: ‘We can’t solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my ...”

“... a kind of corruption (‘pork-barrel’), and it remains to be seen whether this will change under Barack Obama. The 2000 presidential contest was hardly a model of electoral propriety. It can be argued that the old Labour-Conservative see-saw in British politics was much about whose ‘turn’ it was to eat, or to eat well – which class’s turn, that ...”

“... the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him. And it was still hot. Barack Obama read this to an audience of children on the White House lawn last Easter. Make of that what you will. Though I’ve yet to put it to the test, I’m with Montaigne in finding myself less than horrified at the idea of being eaten, provided I’m ...”

“... causes, may in fact have been murdered by the Americans. Chávez died during the presidency of Barack Obama, admired by liberals the world over for his supposedly sophisticated moderation, but condemned by Ali as a representative of ‘the extreme centre’, along with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. A near rant from 2011 reprinted here describes them as ...”

“... of today’s culture war politics, focused on disputes over immigration. The electoral success of Barack Obama, despite the radical right’s denial of his status as an American citizen, helped to propel the Myth of the Movement forwards. At the same time, it inspired a resurgence of racialised nationalism. This was exemplified in hostility to the ...”

“... ruling from a lower court and then negotiated a settlement with the State Department after Barack Obama became president in 2009. In a letter to the American Sociological Association, the State Department’s legal adviser Harold Koh rejected the practice of ideological exclusion and promised to give ‘sympathetic weight’ to visa applications ...”

“... poverty nevertheless failing to connect with many of the beneficiaries of his policies. Like Barack Obama, another centre-left leader with a seductively rich voice and extensive powers of oratory, in office Brown was a disappointment to many of his admirers. In 2015 he retired from Parliament. Since then, despite his government’s grey, opaque ...”

“... leaders that he wasn’t permitted to address the Democratic National Convention that year, where Barack Obama ‘kept a mile’s distance between himself and me’. In what became known as the Winter of Love, the city issued around four thousand marriage licences before the state supreme court intervened in March: the marriages were all annulled, but ...”

“... these imperfect institutions entirely. Millennials​ came to public notice around the same time Barack Obama did. It’s hard to remember the optimism of that historical moment, before the 2013 government shutdown and the fights over Obamacare, before the deportations and drone strikes, before Trump. Many US millennials cast their first vote – for ...”

“... and Nebraska allocate some of their electors by results in congressional districts. (In 2008, Barack Obama carried a Nebraska district, winning one of that solidly Republican state’s five electoral votes.) Winner-takes-all maximises a state’s impact on the outcome, but also makes more likely a mismatch between the winner of the popular vote and ...”