Former President Barack Obama blamed a splintered media landscape for the lack of a second Obama-like political figure emerging on the national stage during an interview on Tuesday.NBC "Today" co-host Craig Melvin talked to the former president about the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on his "Glass Half Full" podcast and told him, "You’ve always represented a lot of different communities, but there has always been this singularity to your story.Earlier this week, one of your former aides was talking on one of these cable shows and said Democrats should stop looking for Obama 2.0.
Not gonna happen.""Do you think in the current climate that someone like you with your background and your story, do you think that you could break through now the same way you did back in ’07, ’08?" Melvin asked Obama. "I do think it’s harder because of the nature of your business, the media, it’s more splintered," Obama said.OBAMA CHOOSES SUPPORTER STEPHEN COLBERT FOR DEBUT INTERVIEW AT CONTROVERSIAL PRESIDENTIAL CENTERFormer U.S.President Barack Obama smiles at the official opening of the Obama Presidential Center on June 19, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois.
(Pablo Martinez Monsivais-Pool/Getty Images)"I hadn’t even been elected yet to the U.S.Senate," he continued.
"I had won the primary.I’d won the nomination — Democratic nomination to be the senator of Illinois, but nobody really knew who I was except outside of Illinois.
And when I gave that speech at the convention, suddenly I’m a national figure because all the networks covered it.And if you’re on the cover of Time magazine or Newsweek back then, suddenly everybody knows who you are because we all shared one culture."Obama said that people "who are just as gifted or in some cases more gifted" than him were not breaking through because of a splintered media.He suggested the country was in a transition period."So I think we’re in a transition period where there are a lot of Barack and Michelle Obamas ...