Barack Obama went to a comedian’s garage to have a bit of a chat. You can listen to it below or by clicking here (wtfpod.com). In the interview, which took place two days after the Charleston murders, he speaks passionately about the shootings and race relations in America.
“Do not say that nothing has changed when it comes to race in America unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s, or 60s or 70s,” he tells comedian Marc Maron, presenter of the cult WTF podcast. “It is introvertable that race relations have improved significantly in my life time and yours, and that opportunities have opened up and that attitudes have changed.”
“That is a fact. What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives that casts a long shadow . . . That’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it . . . Racism, we are not cured of. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination . . . Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened two to three hundred years prior.”
Maron's very enjoyable WTF podcast is more typically a hangout for creative types like Louis CK or Lena Dunham or David Byrne, all happy to have a rambling, confessional chat with the likeably cantankerous comedian.
But it’s not that strange a choice for Obama. Comedy has become a news source for a generation of Americans thanks to programmes like the Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.
And Obama seems to enjoy interviews with comedians . He's the first sitting president to appear on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and he even appeared on Zach Galifianakis's situationist, anti-comedic chat-show Between Two Ferns (Sample questions: "In 2013 you pardoned a turkey; What have you planned for 2014?" "What's it like to be the last black president?" "Where are you planning to build your presidential library, Hawaii or your home country of Kenya?")
Maron is, by his own admission, not the most politically-engaged comedic interviewer, and begins the podcast with an overawed description of the security detail accompanying Potus – the secret service tent, the sniper on the roof, the fact he had to lock his cats in a bedroom when the sniffer dogs were around. He, endearingly, sounds terrified. Obama? Not so much.
“I don’t imagine you were flying in on the chopper thinking ‘I am nervous about Marc’,” says Maron a little way into the interview.
“No I wasn’t . . . that would be a problem, if the president was feeling stressed about coming to your garage for a podcast,” says Obama.
Still, it would be nice to feel he might be a little bit nervous. I like Marc Maron, but it’s clear this isn’t going to be the toughest interview in the world.
Obama discusses how mass shootings were a problem unique to America, the grip of the NRA on congress and the need for “basic common-sense gun-safety laws”.
“Each time that these events occur, ironically gun manufacturers make out like bandits,” because, he says, people fear the government’s black helicopters are coming to take their guns.
“Just to be clear, there are no black helicopters?” asks Maron a little later.
“There are,” says Obama. “There are black helicopters but we generally don’t deploy them.”
He talks about the polarisation of American politics. “If you watch Fox News you inhabit a different world with different facts than if you read the New York Times.”
He clings to the notion that the American people are less divided in actuality and speaks of the need to bring communities locked out of opportunity back into society and not to alienate them with draconian policing.
In a rare moment of radicalism, Maron evokes the “corporate occupation of the American government” and suggests that the presidency is really a middle management position that can only “seed so much to poor people.”
Obama doesn’t quite disagree (“I think you’re onto something”), but outlines a belief in incremental change. “It turns out that the trajectory of progress always happens in fits and starts,” he says, adding later: “Progress in a democracy is never instantaneous and it’s always partial and you can’t get cynical or frustrated because you didn’t get all the way there immediately.”
He’s a little muddier on foreign policy. “Whatever abstract views you have about drones or that you have about intelligence gathering,” he says, “if you were sitting there in the situation room you’d realise that you’ve got some responsibilities and you’ve got some choices to make and it’s not all . . . clear cut the way oftentimes it gets presented.”
Maron does not observe that drone strikes aren't so abstract for people who are on the wrong end of one.
In general Obama is in control of the message and stresses the things he wants to stress – healthcare reform, the end of two wars, the staving off of economic depression. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” he asks the American people, consciously echoing Ronald Reagan. (“You are,” is the answer he’s looking for).
Given Maron's style, the interview is an opportunity for Obama to further humanise himself (at this stage some politicians are almost too human) with tales of his aging form on the basketball court, his relationship with his daughters, his rock of a mother, his rebellious teens, his "tragic" father who sank into failure, alcoholism and abuse and his struggle with his racial identity.
He tells us his favourite comedians are Dick Gregory, Richard Prior and Louis CK. He tells us that Michelle hates it when he is late and that he was often late, and that the biggest job of a parent is not to pass on their “craziness” to their kids.
He also thinks he would be a better more fearless president if he ran again, because “I’ve been in the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls and . . . I emerged and I lived.” I presume, given the heavy security presence, that this is a metaphor.
Also he says “folks” an awful lot, which is folksy, and connects him to common folk. Indeed, he refers to the “folks in congress” as though they’re happy villagers chewing straw in a hay barn – but he doesn’t end the podcast with “That’s all folks!” which, if you think about it, is a lost opportunity.
