Tina Brown and Newsweek will probably stir up trouble among their liberal base with an article in this week's issue on now that "his re-election is down to a coin toss," they have "eight ideas for Obama's post-POTUS career."
Nick Summers and McKay Coppins began: "At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves: Barack Obama would make a pretty damn good ex-president. We're not saying he should become an ex-president after just four years in office—only that this line of thinking isn't premature." He could be Carteresque, and they mean that in a nice way:
So it's worth considering: what would his next act look like? If defeated, Obama would become, at 51, the youngest former president in more than a century. (Only Teddy Roosevelt was younger: he was 50 when he left office in 1909.) With strong health and an agile mind--and no shortage of ways to make staggering sums of money--Obama would have the time and skills to mount one of the most impressive ex-presidencies on record.
And if history is a guide, the worse Obama fares as commander in chief, the better he might shine as ex-commander in chief. "It may sound whimsical, but it's true," says historian Richard Norton Smith. An administration that ends badly creates an equal and opposite zeal for rehabilitating a legacy, says Smith.
Example A is Jimmy Carter. Fired after four years of stagflation and malaise, the former peanut farmer reinvented the office of the ex-presidency, thrusting himself into world diplomacy, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Obama might burn over losing, but he's already a historic figure:
For Obama, losing would surely burn. "You have a terrible narcissistic wound when you lose an election. You feel rejected," says Justin Frank, a psychoanalyst and author of Obama on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. But for the country's first African-American president, a place in the history books is already assured, and further amplified by landmark health-care legislation and the killing of Osama bin Laden.
And maybe Michelle Obama is the next Oprah:
As an ex-first lady, Michelle Obama would also find a degree of freedom and have the potential to be a new kind of stateswoman. It might even be her chance to become, for the first time, the more visible Obama. "Would the president see a postpresidency as payback time for his wife, as Bill Clinton has—a time to let her take the lead?" says Jodi Kantor, a New York Times reporter and author of the forthcoming book The Obamas. "I can absolutely imagine her as a TV personality. It would be a more natural fit for her in many ways than political life."
Which would leave Barack ... a stay-at-home dad?
Newsweek made that one of the eight potential jobs, in addition to Chief Justice Obama, "Bill Clinton 2.0," Midas Mouth, Bestselling Scribe, Chairman of the Board, Obama U. -- and Obama 2016.
The liberal base of Newsweek preferred the tone of Michael Tomasky's very imaginative piece (currently the hottest article at The Daily Beast): "Could Obama Be Headed for a Landslide?"
Tomasky declared "The only thing that might bring back sanity and civility is the destruction of the current GOP." He insisted "I am not here to say the GOP had better grow up fast. Quite the contrary. If this tantrum lasts through the election, and if 2012 is for the Republicans what 1984 was for the Democrats, then finally our polity stands a chance of functioning again. The Tea Party will be dead and buried. Grover Norquist’s vise lock on the GOP will loosen." The golden days of Eisenhower-Nixon me-too Republican moderation will return.
