Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker

Excerpt: David Remnick's New Yorker Piece on Obama

By ABC News January 19, 2014

Sunday on 'This Week' David Remnick joins the powerhouse roundtable. Read an excerpt from his latest piece on Obama, "Going the Distance" here. On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent-lower than George W. Bush's in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that "turned out to be wrong." Also, Obama said thickly, "I've got a fat lip."

That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I. headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse the transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle Healing Yoga. This had happened before. In 2010, after taking a self-described "shellacking" in the midterm elections, Obama caught an elbow in the mouth while playing ball at Fort McNair. He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Decerega wasn't invited to play again, though Obama sent him a photograph inscribed "For Rey, the only guy that ever hit the President and didn't get arrested. Barack."

This time, the injury was slighter and no assailant was named-"I think it was the ball," Obama said-but the President needed little assistance in divining the metaphor in this latest insult to his person. The pundits were declaring 2013 the worst year of his Presidency. The Republicans had been sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years earlier, and HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency; the failure to get anything passed on gun control or immigration reform; the unseemly waffling over whether the Egyptian coup was a coup; the solidifying wisdom in Washington that the President was "disengaged," allergic to the forensic and seductive arts of political persuasion. The congressional Republicans quashed nearly all legislation as a matter of principle and shut down the government for sixteen days, before relenting out of sheer tactical confusion and embarrassment-and yet it was the President's miseries that dominated the year-end summations.

Obama worried his lip with his tongue and the tip of his index ?nger. He sighed, slumping in his chair. The night before, Iran had agreed to freeze its nuclear program for six months. A ?nal pact, if one could be arrived at, would end the prospect of a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities and the hell that could follow: terror attacks, proxy battles, regional war-take your pick. An agreement could even help normalize relations between the United States and Iran for the ?rst time since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. Obama put the odds of a ?nal accord at less than even, but, still, how was this not good news?

The answer had arrived with breakfast.

ABC NEWS