Former President Barack Obama said he has long wanted to run the country again via a “front man” in the White House.
The moment: “The Late Show Host” Stephen Colbert asked Obama in an interview that aired Monday whether he ever pines to return to power.
- “Did you miss you? Did you ever look at something going on in the news and go, ‘You know what this situation needs? Barack Obama,'” wondered Colbert, a prominent critic of President Donald Trump.
Obama, laughing, replied: “I’ve said this before, people would ask me, ‘Knowing what you know now, do you wish you had a third term?’”
- “And I used to say, ‘You know what, if I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or a front woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement with my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I would be fine with that,'” he said.
Obama’s appearance on CBS’s “The Late Show” was part of a media tour to promote “A Promised Land,” his third book about himself.
- The 768-page post-presidential memoir is to be the first of a two-volume series.
The stand-in: In an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt on Tuesday, Joe Biden rejected speculation that his presidency would be a continuation of Obama’s.
- “This is not a third Obama term,” said Biden, Obama’s vice president. “We face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration.”
