Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview

By Jann S. Wenner

Sep 28, 2010 7:00 AM EDT

The following is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.

We arrived at the southwest gate of the white house a little after one o'clock on the afternoon of September 17th. It was a warm fall day, but the capital felt quiet and half-empty, as it does on Fridays at the end of summer, with Congress still in recess. Rolling Stone had interviewed Barack Obama twice before, both times aboard his campaign plane — first in June 2008, a few days after he won the Democratic nomination, and again that October, a month before his election. This time executive editor Eric Bates and I sat down with the president in the Oval Office, flanked by busts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. The conversation stretched on for nearly an hour and a quarter. The president began by complimenting my multi-colored striped socks. "If I wasn't president," he laughed, "I could wear socks like that." ...

The President answered these questions, among others:

When you came into office, you felt you would be able to work with the other side. When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?

How do you feel about the fact that day after day, there's this really destructive attack on whatever you propose? Does that bother you? Has it shocked you?

What do you think the Republican Party stands for today?

What do you think of the Tea Party and the people behind it?

What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it's a good institution for America and for democracy?

More questions than these were asked during the interview -- it runs to seven pages! -- and The President answered all of them thoughtfully.

Click the post's title to read Rolling Stone's entire article.

Tea & Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster -- by Matt Taibbi

By Matt Taibbi

Sep 28, 2010 7:01 AM EDT

This is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, available on newsstands on October 1, 2010.

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.

"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."

Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean? ...

Click the post's title to read Rolling Stone's entire article.

"The Tea Party is many things at once, but one way or another, it almost always comes back to a campaign against that unsafe urban hellscape of godless liberalism we call our modern world."