Tuesday, October 25, 2011

41 - Steve Jobs predicted Obama would be a one-term president

By Rachel Rose Hartman | The Ticket – Fri, Oct 21, 2011

Jobs (Jeff Chiu/AP)

Steve Jobs, known for his aggressive and sometimes prickly personality, didn't hold back when he met President Obama in 2010:

The Apple CEO warned Obama he wasn't going to win re-election.
"You're headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs said during a meeting with the president that took place a year prior to Jobs' death related to pancreatic cancer, according to his upcoming biography as reported by the Huffington Post.
 
Walter Isaacson, who wrote the forthcoming Jobs bio, reportedly reveals that Jobs argued that Obama was jeopardizing his re-election prospects because of what Jobs took to be a pervasive anti-business climate in his administration. Jobs cited excessive federal regulations and operating costs for businesses as harmful legacies of the Obama White House.
 
Also, Jobs nearly missed the meeting in the first place.
 
From the Huffington Post:
 
Though his wife told him that Obama "was really psyched to meet with you," Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.
 
After laying into the White House's purported anti-business outlook, Jobs offered to help Obama repair the rift  by arranging meeting between the president and a group of CEOs. When the guest list began to grow, Jobs reportedly resolved to back out of the gathering. 

Instead, he attended,  though he poo-pooed the fancy menu. "But he was overruled by the White House, which cited the president's fondness for cream pie," Huffington Post writes.
 
Jobs also offered to to help create political ads for the president in 2012. Jobs had scotched a similar effort to craft Obama ads in 2008, when Isaacson claims that Jobs was unhappy that Obama strategist David Axelrod showed insufficient deference to the Apple honcho.
This and other political news is just the latest information to leak from the hotly anticipated book.
 
Another revelation that Isaacson has teed up for a "60 Minutes" interview featuring the biography this Sunday is that Jobs wished he had chosen sooner to undergo cancer surgery.