President and Mrs. Obama photographed in the White House Map Room on Aug. 10. (Photo: Ben Baker)
Sunday’s issue of Parade will include answers from President Barack and Michelle Obama to questions from the magazine’s readers.
Parade editor-in-chief Maggie Murphy and contributor Lynn Sherr put together a story about the stalemate in Washington D.C., what the Obama’s hope to accomplish and talk about the first four years in office.
President Obama on how he will talk to Republicans differently if he is re-elected:
PO:Republican voters, if you ask them about my particular policy positions, often agree with me. So there’s a difference between Republicans in Washington and Republican and Republican-leaning voters around the country. I think that after this election, we’ll be in a position to once again reach out to Republicans and say that the American people have rendered a judgment, and the positions we’re taking are well within what used to be considered bipartisan centrist approaches.
The President reacts to Mitt Romney’s remarks about the way Obama is making our country “far more like Europe, with a larger, more dominant, more intrusive government. …”:
PO: When you look at the policies I’ve promoted, they used to be considered bipartisan, mainstream ideas. What’s changed is not me. What’s changed is where the Republican Party’s gone. In fact, a lot of the things I’ve done are things that Mr. Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, seemed to promote. … What’s absolutely true is that we’ve had to take some emergency steps, like saving the auto industry, that weren’t free, that weren’t popular, but were the right thing to do.
Mrs. Obama on the conversation about the “superwoman.” Can women have it all?
MICHELLE OBAMA: I think that question limits us as women. I work with a lot of young women—we have interns coming in and out, and this is always one of the first questions they ask—and the thing I try to remind them is that we have fought so hard for choice and options with our lives, and we’re just getting to that point where we’re willing to embrace all the different facets of womanhood. I know that when I came out of college, what I wanted and what I thought I wanted were very different things. Then I get married and have a career and, lo and behold, now I’ve got kids. And how you feel about motherhood when your children are small and when they’re teenagers, that’s going to change.
Obama keeps trying to say he has a centrist position, if he can find any part of his leftist proposals that were ever agreed to by any Republican.
But he can’t be specific. Obamacare was always and still is unpopular, yet was rammed through without being read. Meetings were held with lobbyists secretly, behind closed doors, instead of having open bipartisan negotiations on C-SPAN, as Obama had promised.
Obama supports abortions in the 8th and 9th months … certainly not a bipartisan position, and not even popular among Democrats, especially when taxpayer funded.
Romney was attacked in the primaries as being too moderate, but now Obama and his media friends try to paint Romney as far right. Good grief.
If Obama wants to listen to Americans that have “rendered a judgment”, maybe he should have moved to the center after the midterms (like Clinton did), instead of appeasing his leftist base.
If you want to know what Democrats are up to, just listen to their accusations against conservatives.