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The Washington Post

He looks back at his college years and, at 55 years old, wonders who he was, and why he couldn’t seem to express himself adequately. Or go on more dates with girls.
“In retrospect,” said US President Barack Obama, speaking in an interview released Monday, he realises he was “wildly pretentious.”
Obama says he would have beaten Trump, and Clinton played things too safe
As he prepares to write a post-presidential book, Obama told old friend David Axelrod, he is reading his “old journals” and letters to girls he was “courting.” He is chagrined at what he wrote.



“They’re impenetrable,” Obama said in an interview for the The Axe Files podcast. “I mean, I don’t - I don’t understand what I’m saying . . . I’m like what - what are you talking about?”
I should’ve tried, like, you know, ‘Wanna go to a movie?’
Barack Obama on his college dating woes
Obama’s comments about his time in college and the years that followed, particularly when he was a junior and senior at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1983, come in the wake of the release of the Netflix movie Barry. The movie focuses on his relationship with a white woman who is a composite character of those he dated at the time, as well as his developing views on race relations and his estranged father. The movie depicts him smoking, dancing, dating and partying.
Obama, while not referencing the movie in his interview with Axelrod, remembered himself as decidedly stodgy. He was, he said, a “monk” and “humourless,” begging off from parties because he had to read the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The women on campus found him “too intense.”
Looking back, said the president of the United States, “I should’ve tried, like, you know, ‘Wanna go to a movie?’”


Obama cringes to recall his ‘wildly pretentious’ college years when he struggled to get a date

Actor Devon Terrell portrays a young Barack Obama in the Netflix film Barry. The film focusses on Obama’s relationship with a white woman, a fictitious amalgam of real-life people. Photo: Netflix

(FILES) File photo dated 1979 shows US Senator from Illinois and presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama is seen with his maternal grandmother Madelyn Dunham after his high school graduation in Hawaii in 1979, in a family snapshot released by his presidential campaign in 2008. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama announced on November 03, 2008, on the eve of the presidential election, that his grandmother Madelyn Dunham had died from cancer, aged 86. AFP PHOTO / OBAMA FOR AMERICA

US President Barack Obama addresses troops with First Lady Michelle Obama at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kailua on December 25, 2016. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM

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As new film ‘Barry’ examines Obama’s early life, the president looks back and explains that women found him ‘too intense’


Obama cringes to recall his ‘wildly pretentious’ college years when he struggled to get a date

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}As new film ‘Barry’ examines Obama’s early life, the president looks back and explains that women found him ‘too intense’

As new film ‘Barry’ examines Obama’s early life, the president looks back and explains that women found him ‘too intense’