>> this is "the chris matthews show." >> ask not what your country can do for you. >> tear down this wall. >> i can hear you. >> the time for change has come. chris: getting his act together. brand new details and barack obama's unlikely journey a young boy deserted by his african-american father and raised by his white mom and getting to the oval office, the heart ambition that gave him a strategic plan. and us the calm, cool, no drama obama. change you can believe in. can barack obama adjust the let's get together impulses that got him this far to confront the stubborn too often nasty opposition he faces? instead of just hoping for good

will from the other side can he become more forceful? and finally, seeking comfort. how did the young man who confided to a white girlfriend that he had a hard time finding his blackeyedity find it? i'm chris matthews. welcome to the show. with us today, the huffing post, howard fineman. "the christian science monitor's" liz marlantes. nbc's kelly o'donnell. and "the washington post's" david maraniss. author of the new book "barack obama, the story." first up, david's book traces the improbable story of president barack obama. from two continents, his two extremely unlikely parents, coming together to make the first african-american president. it's what barack himself called his improbable story. >> my parents shared not only an improbable love. they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. they would give me an african name, barack. or blessed. believing that in a tolerant america, your name is no barrier to success. >> zpwhr that's barack obama's

keynote address at the 2004 democratic national convention. the story of his rise to president on his introduction to the country itself he was already running on his exceptional story. david, it's amazing when you go back and look at those clips, go back and read your book, this man seemed like years ago developed this confidence, this sense of purpose. >> first of all, chris, thank you for letting me get on this show and talk about the book as opposed to having it cherry picked for six weeks by everybody else who hasn't read it. chris: yeah. >> but you're right. he has a -- both a sense of purpose and a coolness. that has gotten him this far. it helped get him to the white house. and into the white house. but also creates certain problems for him now. the coolness comes from an incredible self-confidence. part of which he got genetically from his dad who was in no way like barack in any other respect. but had a deep voice and self-confidence. and just came out of him. part of it came from hawaii, the coolness. there's a saying in native

hawaiian, cool head, main sing -- chris: what does that mean? >> whatever is going on, be cool -- chris: -- >> the will was there and an unlikely combination. chris: and we are all reading this book and this unusual background to have a kansan white mother a. kenyan father, who then leaves very early, hardly even know the guy. and yet out of that comes what david calls this need to prove himself. >> yeah. and actually, what really struck me reading the book, and we all know the elements of his story. put for some reason -- but for some reason he was abandoned by his mother as much as by his father. and she was a strong presence in his life obviously. throughout his childhood but she was not there for many years. and i do think that that is such a formative thing for so many great leaders. throughout history. who have been abandoned by parents. and it's an odd coincidence. but it does seem to create this

confidence and reliance on yourself. at a very early age. it clearly happened with him. >> unlike roosevelt who had a doting mother and bill clinton who had a doting mother, different. and there's also a sense of destiny in the young man. this interview with steve croft on 60 minutes after he was elected president, obama seemed to feel that. here's croft asking him how he had the confidence to handle the serious financial mess that he had just inherited. >> surprisingly enough, i feel right now that i'm -- i'm doing what i should be doing. that gives me a certain sense of calm. chris: howard, all the biographies i've read of politicians including autobiographies they never admit the one thing we know they have, whether hillary clinton or bill clinton or abraham lincoln, appear bigs. >> -- ambition. >> and david's book shows how that ambition came together and one of the great things about the book is that it makes clear that this is an american story. that only in america.

i mean, david could have called the book "only in america." because he draws from the roots of all this. and what i saw when barack obama arrived in the senate, which is where i really first got to see him, was a man of unbelievable confidence and the aura of destiny about him. and i think he brought that to the white house. the problem he had once he got there was that other people, specifically conservative republicans, didn't hear the music. they did not hear the obama music. chris: like the background music of a movie. >> and barack obama i think was confused by that. how come these people don't see how destined i am? chris: howard howard -- >> mitch mcconnell, on day one, our job is to kick you the heck out of office. by the end of the term. and in speaking to the president, in various situations, i got the sense that he can't believe -- first

of all, that a third of them, he says, don't even think he was born in the united states. meaning conservative republicans. how does he reach those people? how does he get them in the hawaiian sense of community that he grew up in? and the answer they're from a different planet than the one he's on and he hasn't figured -- he hasn't figured it out because he never had to deal with conservative -- chris: and this is profound what we're learning here. but this thing we always do. this guy as i said, when you mt. him, like 30 years old. he was calm and mature. he grew up early. but this coolness of his. >> it is alluring and disarming at the same time. people are drawn to it. they want to know how do you obtain such a sense of self? and now that he's in the office as howard is talking about, people are expecting more access. they're expecting more of a sense of being able to interpret him in ways that he in many cases will not allow people to do so. by that, i mean, i hear from a lot of very high level office holders in both parties. they wanted more time with him. they wanted more of a sense of getting beyond that. chris: and they're not getting

it. >> that cool have a near. not the card games he had in springfield. >> and not just the politicians. i happened to be asked to speak at a board of directors with "the washington post" the other day. and it was all these business potentates and surprised they can't get to him. >> and true that it's a leadership style thing. and the fact that he's able to see the big picture which you talk a lot about in your book that he has this unusual ability to see the whole chess board and see the big picture, and stay above kind of the fray, in a way that's also a weakness. because it -- at times he has been accused of detachment and something the public doesn't want to see in a president. >> this whole culture is based on the zeitgeist of the very moment. and obama has a different rhythm and never quite there. chris: you quote a close friend saying obama developed a perfectionist drive for unity. a perfectionist drive for unity. a reason he would have so much trouble with confrontation. it's almost like when you have written about people like bill clinton and reagan who are sons

of alcoholics, they want to find a -- accord, peace, harmony and isn't there and pretend it's there when it's not there. his tament to try to bring together adversarial forces, what's that about? the drive. >> it's about his whole being. he represents opposite forces, right? he represents kenya -- kenyan and an american and neither black nor white. and although he has to make a choice personally to become black. so everything about his essence involves that. and he took like 10 years of his life to try to figure that out. all the contradictions. chris: when you -- did you confront him in the interview about what you found to be the strains of his life that don't quite click and don't quite conform to each other, does he know that he's looking for peace and harmony in a washington of 2012 that is the opposite -- >> how could he not? pounded on it every day. of course, that's the intrnl struggle of obama. -- internal struggle of obama. can he keep his own sense of self and survive in this climate? or is it too -- is it too

frustrating for him and too frustrating for the country to deal with this way? it's an open question. bill clinton book came out, he was at the nadir of his popularity. february, 1995. when gingrich said that he was running the country. i can tell then that clinton, because of those survival skills, because of his combination of flaws and talents, he would figure out a way to do it. with barack, still an open question. chris: president clinton would say i'm one of those big plastic blown up dummies -- knock them over and you bring him back and they always bounce back. >> i think that my study of obama is he has this same will as clinton. but he has a completely different set of survival skills. chris: let's talk about the hill. you know at that there's a world up there. there's nancy pelosi, the former speaker, maybe future speaker who is a liberal, got about 180 votes of liberals behind her. you got about the same number of tea party people that boehner is trying to deal with. >> it's a biosphere. chris: they're not interested in getting together. >> no.

on one sense, they do want to be able to identify themselves as good public servants and doing things for the country. the map to get there is so entirely different. and i think what frustrates a lot of them about the president, democrats and republicans, is the integration of himself that you write about is something that's so hard for them to relate to. because so many don't have all these elements that define who they are or their constituents. chris: same question to you. how does he meet the reality? >> i think it's a huge challenge. because one of the things that we've seen, we live in an incredibly partisan age. and studies have shown that as soon as the president weighs in on an issue, it instantly becomes partisan. and the other side retreats. even if it had been an issue where originally perhaps it might have been bipartisan. the president entering into the discussion, immediately makes it partisan. that makes it very hard for him to be the kind of unifying figure that i think his instincts would -- chris: we live in a world of fox and msnbc and different worlds that don't try to love each other much. >> no. and it's a challenge as we've all said to who he has been. but i think if he had a sense of destiny about him to get to

this job, he has to understand that this is really his big challenge. in many ways, once he found who he was, it was almost smooth escalator all the way up. in many ways, remarkably, maybe too smooth and too fast. now he loves superheros as a kid having read the books about him including david's. he's got a super hero's challenge here because on a different planet than the one he originally was on. chris: is he a fan of super heros or a super hero? >> he's got to meet the challenge. he's got to meet this challenge. chris: one of the items david maraniss' new book concerns the future president's experimentation with marijuana in high school. bill clinton was ridiculed for hedging on that very same topic. >> i experimented with a time or two and didn't like it. and didn't inhale. and never tried it again. chris: well, obama never tried to be so coy. >> you admit to smoking pot in the book. >> not recently. >> not recently. [laughter] >> this is when i was in high

school. i just want to clarify. >> senator, you are under oath, did you inhale? [laughter] >> well, i was telling somebody -- somebody asked this question. that was the point. [laughter] chris: this year there's a tee-totaling romney. romney is actually going up to people smoking pot on the beach near his san diego house to tell them to cut it out. here's what steve colbert thinks of that story. >> they're trying to make mitt romney seem like officer buzzkill. oh, mean old mr. romney on the corner of won't let you smoke your doobies. [laughter] that guy should be grateful. a mormon republican running for president sees you smoking weed and doesn't gnashing you out to the cops who are -- narc you out to the cops who are guarding him? i would say that makes mitt romney chill.

why hasn't he been endorsed by high times? [laughter] chris: when we come back, how barack obama went from feeling primarily white to identifying himself as african-american. plus scoops and predictions from the notebooks of these top reporters. we'll be right back.

>> my white grandmother a. woman who helped riz me, a woman who -- who helped raise me a. woman who sacrificed me and a woman who loved me as much as anybody in this world but a woman who confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street. and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. chris: welcome back. that was president obama in his speech on race back in 2008 in philadelphia. describing his white grandmother's worries about black men on the street corner.

as david maraniss relates in his new book, that memory was pivotal for the young barack obama. as obama moved from high school to college, and beyond, he increasingly turned toward his african-american self. david, you have a great story in there about when he's playing tennis, in high school, and his coach does something, that really lets him know that he's being identified as black. and kind of nasty way. >> actually, he's only in sixth grade when this happened. that prep school in honolulu. and his first sport was tennis. and they would have tournaments up on the courts up at puntoho and one afternoon he was checking the different brackets to see who he would play next. and the tennis pro, the coach, said barry, don't touch that, you'll smudge it. and he and all the other kids there knew exactly what he was talking about. that he was black. so the question with obama, with a lot of white america, is he's half white, and half black, why does he identify as black? well, of course he makes that

choice eventually. but society already makes the choice for you. and that was one of the early lessons to him about that. chris: and one of the unique things about american history. that if you're one drop black you become black. and not true everywhere in the world. that's for sure. and let me ask you about the college, the anti-apartheid movement. one chance to jump into something that had a racial aspect and getting rid of white supremacy in south africa. >> right. and according to the book t. really was the beginning -- to the book, it really was the beginning of his political career because he was the first overtly political speech where people took notice and were commenting about it afterward. i thought was so interesting in the book that you had the anecdote about how after he had given the speech, the sort of consciousness raising speech he gave this sort of cynical comment later saying it's not going to make any difference. and of course the university didn't divest for i think nine years, something like that. so even as he's giving this, inspirational speech, and finding his political voice in a way, he gets that it's probably not going to make a big difference.

>> an observer of his own life -- chris: the really pols can step back. david, you write about a long-time girlfriend in new york, genevieve cook, and she said he felt like an impostor because he was so white. i guess socially that there was hardly a black bone in his body is the way she remembered him saying it. >> he did say it to her. but of course he wouldn't say everything to her that he might say to someone else. chris: yeah. >> but these are the new york years. four years when he lived in new york city. he went there, ostensibly to get closer to harlem, to get closer to the real america, and the black america. in four years, in new york, he didn't make a single after can american friend of lasting note. so he was still learning his way. it's fascinating to see this arc toward home of obama's life. from the island of honolulu which was very diverse, but -- chris: what a life. >> through los angeles, to new york. and finally finding his home on the south side of chicago. in new york, still in the incubation period. >> and that girlfriend so

interestingly her family had a real international experience and she had lived in indonesia. she had a connection to her that spoke to part of who he was. chris: talk, kelly, about congress. you cover congress and you got bobby rush, a tough guy from the south side. very much identified with the neighborhood. and in comes barack obama. from harvard, from colombia, harvard law. and bobby rush just makes mincemeat of him and says you're a harvard guy, give me a break. >> and one of the things the president then as an aspiring politician learned through the tough world of chicago politics is how important it was to be connected to the right african-american power centers, whether it was church or state senator who was very influential and to use that to gain credibility. the community organizing that gave him real on-the-ground -- chris: so before he could go to the suburbs and downstate illinois and become a -- statewide and national figure he had to have a base. >> yes. chris: and he decided it had to be black. >> and how to connect to it and did it very skillfully and he found people who could really connect to what he brought in terms of this -- aspirational

quality but learned the mechanics of politics. chris: at the same time, when he ran for president, he did another sort of walkback because he ran not just a an african-american but a guy who was a son of immigrants. where i come from an immigrant background, too. >> yes. and i think he did it superbly. and he made his own story. the story that david tells so well. the ultimate american story and ultimate american story of hope. that out of all this diversity, we can find common ground as a country. now, it turns out that it's not as easy as just electing a guy. ok? barack obama thinks of himself as the master of his own destiny. and he has been. and he assembled himself in a brilliant way and sold himself to the country as a beacon of hope and a great way. what he has to do now, if he wants to be elected, is to admit mistakes that -- one thing i've noticed about him as president, and david, i think you know this from writing

about him, he doesn't admit a lot of mistakes and he has to say i'm still growing and i'm understanding and i'm the barack obama you hoped in and i can learn how to do this right. chris: when we come back sco [ male announcer ] it would be easy for u.s. olympian meb keflezighi

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♪ woooo! [ male announcer ] citibank mobile check deposit. easier banking. every step of the way. chris: welcome back. howard, tell me something i don't know. >> the new conventional wisdom is that the republicans are going to outraise barack obama in money. don't believe it. the obama people are poor mouthing, they have more big donors at this work than last time. chris: big sandbag.

liz. >> barack obama's poll numbers as we all know are down. they're down among almost every demographic group except for one and that is hispanics. where he has actually gained two points from where he was in 2008. right before the election. >> pins and needles over the supreme court decision that we wait for on health care. and behind the scenes, both parties are already doing kind of a message and policy strategy to be able to pounce whatever happens to take the next step. chris: real quick, can the democrats come out on top if they lose on health care? is it possible they can turn it to their advantage? >> the likelihood that they would keep some of it is so great that they can try to use that and make that a case going forward. chris: david maraniss. >> since i'm from wisconsin and going back there in a few weeks, and i'll talk about wisconsin, where the democrats walked into a terrible trap. and now they hope the republicans do the same thing by pouring money into wisconsin. for the fall. chris: and try to win the general there. when we come back the big question of the week, what is mitt romney's bigger strength, being perceived as a true blue conservative or pragmatic

moderate?

chris: welcome back. this week week's big question is mitt romney better off if voters see him as true blue conservative or pragmatic deal making moderate? howard. >> moderate. >> moderate. >> moderate. >> pragmatic for sure. >> we all agree. chris: thanks to a great roundtable. howard fineman, liz marlantes, kelly o'donnell, and david maraniss. that's the show. thanks for watching. a personal note by the way, tonight, hbo premieres newsroom. and among the cast members is our son, thomas. break a leg, thomas. we'll see you all back here next week. must be nice, cheering on team usa from the shallow end.

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