Barack Obama covers the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone. Below is an excerpt from the interview.
What has surprised you the most about these first two years in office? What advice would you give your successor about the first two years?
Over the past two years, what I probably anticipated but you don’t fully appreciate until you’re in the job, is something I said earlier, which is if a problem is easy, it doesn’t hit my desk. If there’s an obvious solution, it never arrives here somebody else has solved it a long time ago. The issues that cross my desk are hard and complicated, and oftentimes involve the clash not of right and wrong, but of two rights. And you’re having to balance and reconcile against competing values that are equally legitimate.What I’m very proud of is that we have, as an administration, kept our moral compass, even as we’ve worked through these very difficult issues. Doesn’t mean we haven’t made mistakes, but I think we’ve moved the country in a profoundly better direction just in the past two years.
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