Obama's West Wing: Bono, BlackBerries



Posted June 3, 2009 7:00 AM

by Mark Silva

Retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, National Security Adviser to President Barack Obama, is "a Bono fan.''

Rahm Emanuel, making his second tour of duty in the West Wing of the White House, isn't about to publicly compare the greatest strengths of his two bosses, Obama and former President Bill Clinton.


And Obama himself, which could satisfy those critics who view him as a slave to the TelePrompTer, cannot always deliver a perfect take on the first run of his weekly radio-Internet address.

We learned all this in the first installment of NBC News' Inside the Obama White House, a two-part series that started last night and airs again this evening.

We heard some things we already knew: Emanuel, a former Chicago congressman who really would have loved to become the first Jewish speaker of the House and has forfeited time with his own family' to serve the president, is driven, obsessed with his BlackBerry. And he's not alone in that. The Obama Oval Office is a shirt-sleeves sort of operation - though we did see the president, sans suit-coat, with feet up in the backseat of the armored presidential limousine on his way to the Five Guys cheeseburger run he made last week with NBC's Brian Williams, narrator and supporting actor of the series.

But we didn't know that National Security Adviser Jones, who occupies a corner office of the West Wing where one normal computer terminal sits adjacent to one secured computer terminal, likes Bono. Williams, spotting a U2 disc on the desk near the computers, asked about it. "I'm a Bono fan,'' Jones said.

(U2's Bono performed at the Lincoln Memorial near the eve of President Barack Obama's inauguration in January. Photo above by Charles Dharapak / AP)


We suspected that it isn't always as easy as it appears for the president to read the scripts of those weekly addresses that he tapes each week for play on the radio, YouTube and the White House Website each Saturday morning.

Obama boasted at the start of the taping of the one that aired Saturday about his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, that he would get it in "one take.'' But, one paragraph in, he stumbled over a line. So much for one take, he joked. It took four, the NBC narrator revealed.

But we really never expected Emanuel to answer Williams' questions about the differences between Clinton and Obama.

Is it true, Williams asked, that Obama has "all the intelligence'' of Clinton, but also "discipline?''

Emanuel, clearly tempted, replied: "I'm not going to do that... They're totally different.''

Oh, and Obama is installing basketball hoops on the tennis court of the White House grounds. He's hoping for a game a week.

Williams promises some "tough questions'' for the president in the second installment this evening. We're looking forward to that.

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