With High-Profile Help, Obama Plots Life After Presidency
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON — The dinner in the private upstairs dining room of the White House went so late that Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn billionaire, finally suggested around midnight that President Obama might like to go to bed.

“Feel free to kick us out,” Mr. Hoffman recalled telling the president.

But Mr. Obama was just getting started. “I’ll kick you out when it’s time,” he replied. He then lingered with his wife, Michelle, and their 13 guests — among them the novelist Toni Morrison, the hedge fund manager Marc Lasry and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr — well past 2 a.m.

Mr. Obama “seemed incredibly relaxed,” said another guest, the writer Malcolm Gladwell. He recalled how the group, which also included the actress Eva Longoria and Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems, tossed out ideas about what Mr. Obama should do after he leaves the White House.

“Where we’ll end up, I don’t know yet,” said Marty Nesbitt, the president’s longtime Chicago friend who is leading an extensive planning effort for Mr. Obama’s library and an anticipated global foundation.

Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House.

The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion. The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future.

The $1 billion — double what George W. Bush raised for his library and its various programs — would be used for what one adviser called a “digital-first” presidential library loaded with modern technologies, and to establish a foundation with a worldwide reach.

Supporters have urged Mr. Obama to avoid the mistake made by Bill Clinton, whose associates raised just enough money to build his library in Little Rock, Ark., forcing Mr. Clinton to pursue high-dollar donors for years to come. Including construction costs, Mr. Obama’s associates set a goal of raising at least $800 million — enough money, they say, to avoid never-ending fund-raising. One top adviser said that $800 million was a floor rather than a ceiling.

So far, Mr. Obama has raised just over $5.4 million from 12 donors, with gifts ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. Michael J. Sacks, a Chicago businessman, gave $666,666. Fred Eychaner, the founder of Chicago-based Newsweb Corp., which owns community newspapers and radio stations, donated $1 million. Mark T. Gallogly, a private equity executive, and James H. Simons, a technology entrepreneur, each contributed $340,000 to a foundation set up to oversee development of the library.

The real push for donations, foundation officials said, will come after Mr. Obama leaves the White House.

Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser, oversees an effort inside the White House to keep attention on Mr. Obama’s future and to ensure that his final 17 months in office, barring crises, serve as a glide path to his life as an ex-president. Mr. Obama’s recent visit to a federal prison indicates, advisers say, a likely emphasis on criminal justice reform after he leaves office. His eulogy for one of nine African-Americans killed at a church in Charleston, S.C., is a forerunner, they say, of a focus on race relations. Diplomacy with Iran and Cuba could serve as the foundation for foreign policy work.

“His focus is on finishing this job completely, thoroughly,” said Valerie Jarrett, one of Mr. Obama’s closest confidantes inside the White House. But officials in the West Wing said the president’s thinking about some of his signature issues — including health care, economic inequality and fighting climate change — also involves considering their incorporation into his life after January 2017.

The heart of the postpresidential planning is Mr. Obama’s own outreach to eclectic, often extraordinarily rich groups of people. Several aides close to Mr. Obama said his extended conversations over the lengthy dinners — guests say his drink of choice at the gatherings is an extra-dry Grey Goose martini — reminded them of the private consultations Mr. Obama had with donors and business leaders as he sought to build a winning campaign.

The process started as early as the week after Mr. Obama’s re-election in 2012, when the director Steven Spielberg and the actor Daniel Day-Lewis went to a White House screening of the movie “Lincoln.” Mr. Spielberg held the president spellbound, guests said, when he spoke about the use of technology to tell stories. Mr. Obama has continued those conversations, most recently with Mr. Spielberg and the studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg over dinner at a Beverly Hills hotel in California in June, according to some of Mr. Obama’s close advisers.

The advisers said Mr. Spielberg was focused on helping to develop a “narrative” for Mr. Obama in the years after he leaves office.

At a dinner this year at Spruce, a restaurant in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, Mr. Obama urged technology executives to focus their philanthropic efforts on helping government become more efficient, giving some the impression that the topic would most likely be a theme of his agenda after leaving office.

Dinner guests say that postpresidency planning is a big topic of conversation but not the only one. “He loves those sessions,” a top adviser said. “They’re very nourishing to him.”

The next milestone in the library planning will come this month when foundation officials kick off a global search for an architect by releasing a request for proposals to major firms.

The planning for the library is being managed largely out of Chicago, where it will be built. The board for the library foundation includes Mr. Doerr and Julianna Smoot, Mr. Obama’s chief campaign fund-raiser in 2008 and 2012. The Chicago library will include an office for the president, but aides said the Obamas could live in Washington while Sasha, 14, their younger daughter, finished high school here. Several said Mr. Obama, who graduated from Columbia University in 1983, may also have a New York office on Columbia’s campus.

In Chicago, Mr. Nesbitt, the leader of the planning effort, also runs committees overseeing the future library’s architecture, fund-raising and what the organizers call “vision.” The vision committee, which solicits ideas from supporters around the country about how Mr. Obama should approach his postpresidency, is run by Lynn Taliento, a McKinsey & Company consultant in Washington who met with Mr. Obama in the Oval Office in February 2014, according to White House visitor logs. The planning is coordinated with the White House by Mr. Obama’s deputy chief of staff, Anita Decker Breckenridge.

Among the debates at some of Mr. Obama’s dinners: How could technology be used to provide global access to his presidential library? How prominent should Mr. Obama seek to be, especially in the first few years?

One top aide said Mr. Obama respected Mr. Bush’s decision to limit his time in public after leaving office, but also admired Mr. Clinton’s aggressive use of the spotlight to press his agenda.

“My sense is that he’s probably a blend of the two,”’ said David Plouffe, one of Mr. Obama’s closest former aides and a member of the library foundation board.

In response to a question from Mr. Doerr at the February White House dinner, the president told the group that he wanted to focus on civic engagement and opportunities for youths, pushing guests for ideas about how to make government work better, Mr. Hoffman recalled in an interview. The president asked if social networks could improve the way society confronted problems.

In their conversations with Mr. Obama and his advisers, people from Silicon Valley and Hollywood are pressing for a heavy reliance on cutting-edge technology in the library that would help spread the story of Mr. Obama’s presidency across the globe. Ideally, one adviser said, a person in Kenya could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and be transported to Mr. Obama’s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia.

Some discussions at the dinners have focused on the role Mr. Obama might play internationally after the diplomatic opening with Cuba, the nuclear deal with Iran, the confrontations with Russia and the drawdown of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an interview on the website Tumblr last year, Mr. Obama was asked what he expected to be doing in 10 years. The president took more than 30 seconds to respond, in a manner that suggested he had not yet settled on a good answer.

“I haven’t projected out 10 years,” he said, offering his standard promise to remain engaged in policy-making until his last days in the Oval Office. “I know what I’ll do right after the next president is inaugurated. I’ll be on a beach somewhere drinking out of a coconut.”

歐巴馬夜宴名流 替卸任鋪路

紐約時報報導，今年二月的一個晚上，美國總統歐巴馬夫婦在白宮宴請十三位社會菁英，討論歐巴馬卸任後的生活，席間歐巴馬興致高昂，一直聊到凌晨兩點多。

午夜時分，LinkedIn創辦人霍夫曼（Reid Hoffman）提醒歐巴馬：「若要下逐客令，別客氣。」正在興頭上的歐巴馬說：「時候到了就會趕你們走。」

這場晚宴的賓客包括諾貝爾文學獎得主、非裔女小說家童妮．摩里森（Toni Morrison）、避險基金經理人拉斯瑞（Marc Lasry）、矽谷創投家杜爾（John Doerr）、作家葛拉威爾（Malcolm Gladwell）、昇陽電腦共同創辦人科斯拉（Vinod Khosla）、影集「慾望師奶」中的女星伊娃朗格莉亞（Eva Longoria）等。

歐巴馬在公開場合都說不急著為將來打算。私底下，他拿出2008年競選白宮寶座的鋼鐵紀律與募款企圖心，為卸任生活做準備。幕僚估計，將為歐巴馬卸任募款十億美元，其中八億美元用於打造第一座數位總統圖書館，以現代科技建立可供全球人使用的圖書館。

歐巴馬的資深顧問夏拉．莫瑞的任務之一，就是確保歐巴馬任期的最後十七個月，能與他的卸任生活順利接軌。

幕僚說，歐巴馬最近參訪聯邦監獄，顯示他卸任後可能從事刑事司法改革。他們也說，他為查爾斯頓非裔教堂槍擊案九名死者中的一人發表悼文，因此，種族關係也是他卸任後的工作重點。與伊朗和古巴的外交突破，也是他未來外交工作的基礎。

白宮官員說，歐巴馬任內最具有代表性的議題，包括健保、經濟不平等和對抗氣候變遷，都是他卸任後會繼續做的事。

紐時指出，歐巴馬卸任計畫的核心其實與他結交的一群朋友有關，其中不乏超級富豪。幕僚說，他在餐敘時與這些人長聊，有點像他在競選前與金主和企業領袖聚餐，私下向他們請益。

歐巴馬2012年當選後的那一周，導演史蒂芬史匹柏和演員丹尼爾戴路易斯揚到白宮與歐巴馬一起觀賞電影，賓客說，史匹柏談到用科技說故事，歐巴馬聽得入迷。

歐巴馬今年六月與史匹柏和「夢工廠」執行長卡森伯格在加州共進晚餐。一位高級幕僚說，歐巴馬對前任總統布希卸任後盡量不參加公開活動的決定很敬佩，也很羡慕柯林頓積極利用鎂光燈推動他的工作。

歐巴馬的前幕僚普洛夫說：「我感覺他（歐巴馬）可能會是兩者的混合。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/politics/with-high-profile-help-obama-plots-life-after-presidency.html

2015-08-18．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡