A Promised Land

crashing the party of China, South Africa, India and Brazil at Copenhagen to sign another Kyoto style treaty. Obama staffers had been informed by their Chinese counterparts that Premier Wen had left for the airport when in fact he was still in the building meeting other leaders. Obama turned to Hillary , When's the last time you crashed a party? With a gaggle of staff and Secret Service agents hustling behind us,we made our way upstairs.The Chinese security team began moving towards Obama to intercept him, hands held up as if ordering us to stop but realizing who we were , they hesitated.With a smile and a nod, Hillary and I strolled past and entered the room, leaving a fairly noisy tussle between secuirty details and the staffers in our wake.

You ready for me , Wen ? I called out, watching the Chinese leaders's face drop in surprise. I then walked around the table to shake each of their hands. Gentlemen I 've been looking everywhere for you. How about we see if we can do a deal? 

I gabbed an empty chair and sat down. Across the table , Wen and Singh remained impassive, while Lula and Zuma looked sheepishly down at the papers in front of them. Mr Premier, we're running out of time. 

Once the translators in the room caught up to me, Premier Wen a slender, vein -lined hand and the minister abruptly sat back down. I suppressed the urge to laugh and turned to the young Chinese woman who was translating for Wen. Wen shook his head and whispered something. Premier Wen asks if you have the agreement you're proposing with you, so that everyone can look at the specific Ian-guage again. 

IT TOOK ANOTHER half hour of hagging... the group had agreed to our proposal. I spent another thirty minutes getting the Europeans to sign off on the modest changes the developing country leaders had requested. 

Reggie said to me .... that was some real ganster shit back there. I pulled a rabbit out of a hat. 

Steve Chu , the man was like a kid in a candy store, regaling me with detalied explanations of his latest standard setting expliots. A 1987 law gave the Department of Energy authority to set energy - efficiency standards on everything. Although it was hard to match his excitement over washers and dryers, the results really were pretty amazing: By the time I left office, those new appliance standards were on track to remove another 210 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere annually. 

Obama smoked more. 

A crew of young Dreamers who were willing to disclose their undocumented sta-us in order to share their personal stories with undecided senators and media outlets. Several times , Cecilia and I talked about the courage of these young people, agreeing that at their age we could never have man-aged such pressure. 

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann as she had been decrying newfangled energy - efficient lightbulbs as an un American Big Brother intrusion and a threat to public health and a larger plot to impose a radical sustainability agenda. 

Add more of Robert Frost , I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

There is very little mention of the siging into law of the Patient Access and Eective Drug Enforcement Act 2016 by Obama. John Mulrooney then DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge , He said it makes it “all but logically impossible” for the agency to issue immediate suspension orders against drug companies in the most egregious cases because the standard of proof had been sharply increased. This is the context of the Opioids crisis killing thousands of Americans. 

Obama wrote I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homelesss as it had to  getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day car. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. I took  as a measure of how far my presidency still feel short of what I wanted it to be - and how much work I had left to do. 

Considering the state of America when Obama took office, the successes of the Obama government , health care , lifting the ban on funding stem cell research , signed the Lilly Led better Fair Pay Act, conduct the research into the impact of gay . lesbian soldiers on the military's ability to excute missions and then repealing DADT, by the time of writing his book more than half if the money given to the banks had already been rapid with interest, Dodd - Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Bin Laden killed.     

The Senate is not where good ideas go to die. The late John McCain voted to protect Obamacare even when he hated it .