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Ta-Nehisi Coates: I Wrote Obama a Letter Telling Him 'You Should Be Better' Than Giving Paid Speeches

February 14, 2018

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates revealed Wednesday that he sent a letter to Barack Obama expressing disappointment in him for taking money for speeches, saying he thought the former president "should be better."

Coates is one of the nation's foremost writers on race and a strong supporter of Obama, writing in a piece for the Atlantic that he "came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history."

In an interview on "The Jamie Weinstein Show" for National Review Online, Coates said he had not kept in touch with Obama since he left the White House but had tried to contact him about his high-figure paid speeches.

It was revealed in September that Obama had given at least nine paid speeches since leaving office, with at least one of them fetching $400,000 alone.

"I sent him a letter about when he started doing the speeches, when the speech money came out," Coates said. "I thought that was bad."

"You think it was bad for him to get money?" Weinstein asked.

"I thought it was bad, yeah. I thought it was bad, so I just sent a letter," Coates said. "And I sent the letter because I didn't want to extend my term as interrogator of Barack Obama ... I really did not want to continue with that at all."

"You sent a letter saying that you were disappointed? Is that what you're saying?" Weinstein asked.

"Yeah, yeah, like, 'You should be better,'" Coates said, laughing.

"I thought, given the tenor of the country and given how people felt ...  it's a broader question whether you should accept money for speeches at all," Coates added. "You know what I mean?"

"Do you not accept money for speeches?" Weinstein asked.

"I do, but I don't owe my prominence to the democratic process and people investing their hopes and dreams in me, which I think is a little different," Coates said. "I just think that you take money from a group of people, and you end up around them quite a bit, and that probably affects your worldview."

Weinstein said that made Obama no different from any other politician, but Coates countered that Obama promoted himself as a "cleaner" politician.

"I think people actually saw them that way," Coates said. "I think that when you do that, people view you on a different level ... I mean it's bad to take however amount of money, $200,000, whatever it was, you know what I mean, to talk on Wall Street. I just don't think you have to do that."

Published under: Barack Obama , Wall Street