Barack Obama

honest, exposed about what you do when you're just having a conversation and connecting with people.

And so the question is, well, is there another way for me to catch that?

Yeah.

You know, but you don't have to rush into it.

I guess my main thing would be, you know, take your time unless, unless you really got some bills to pay.

Yeah.

I mean, what was unusual for me was, obviously...

A lot of what I represented, a lot of what Michelle and I had tried to project, the values, our thinking about America, my successor seemed to represent the opposite.

Right.

Not seemed, didn't.

Yeah.

And so I think there was a lot of anger, a lot of sadness.

sadness, some fear among a big chunk of the country.

And one of the problems with the American political system is, although we have political parties, we don't have a parliamentary system.

So basically, the president, in my case, Democrat, I leave office, and there's no obvious person who's now

The shadow prime minister, the leader of the party for the Democrats, right?

And so there were a lot of terrific people who were doing good work.

But we have this weird situation where you don't have a designated person who's speaking on behalf of the whole party.

So I actually found myself drawn back in.

day-to-day politics or commentary more than I had wanted to be.