Amid renewed debate over gun control at home and tumult aplenty abroad, President Barack Obama arrives in the Bay Area on Friday to hold two fundraisers for the Democratic National Committee — including one with a rap artist harboring his own White House aspirations.
On Friday night, Obama will attend a reception at a private residence in San Francisco, and on Saturday morning he heads to San Francisco’s Warfield Theater for an event featuring rapper Kanye West.
No stranger to hyperbole, West announced at August’s MTV Video Music Awards that he’ll run for president in 2020, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Obama to endorse him Saturday.
Before arriving in California, the president will stop Friday in Roseburg, Oregon, to visit victims and families from last week’s Umpqua Community College shooting in which nine people were killed and nine more wounded. Given the GOP-led Congress’ refusal to consider gun-control bills, he’s considering whether to take executive action — a move that might be more popular in the liberal Bay Area than in many other parts of the nation.
Meanwhile, Obama is trying to convince Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty. He’s weighing whether to keep as many as 5,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2016, even while apologizing for the U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital there. He’s facing mounting scrutiny of U.S. policy in Syria, which involves supporting rebel forces caught between President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime and the even more brutal Islamic State.
And Republicans’ up-in-the-air, internecine battle to succeed House Speaker John Boehner might complicate upcoming showdowns with the White House over raising the debt limit, approving spending bills and deciding whether to defund Planned Parenthood.
Gallup now pegs Obama’s national approval rating at 46 percent and disapproval at 49 percent. The Field Poll will release new findings on his approval rating in California on Saturday.
This will be the president’s fourth fundraising visit to the Bay Area in the past year, after visits last October, in February and in June. Unlike the latter two — during which he spoke at a cybersecurity summit at Stanford University and to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco — this visit includes no official presidential business.
Tickets for Saturday’s fundraiser are $100 each for students, $250 for general admission, $1,000 for premium seating, $5,000 for a photo with the president and $10,000 to greet Obama in a small VIP “clutch.”
Obama and West are an interesting pair. The rapper performed at one of the president’s inaugural balls back in 2009, but after West seized Taylor Swift’s microphone at that year’s Video Music Awards — the “imma let you finish” incident that lives on in memedom — Obama called him “a jackass.” Obama said the same thing again in 2012, though qualifying that West also is “smart, he’s very talented.”
West downplayed that in 2013 but his wife, Kim Kardashian, shot back in a GQ interview in 2014. “I don’t think it’s very appropriate for the president of the United States to be commenting really on pop culture,” she said. “I mean, calling people ‘jackass’? … I guess everyone is entitled to their own opinion — even him.”
Then, in March at Oxford University, West claimed the president occasionally dials him up to chew the fat: “Obama calls the home phone, by the way.” Obama told Jimmy Kimmel days later that he has met West only twice and “I don’t think I’ve got his home number.” Yet West soon doubled down on his claim to TMZ: “I love Obama. He called our house before. He knows that. Don’t try to pit us against each other.”
Josh Richman covers politics. Follow him at Twitter.com/Josh_Richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
