141: The alter egos of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

DecodeDC

One grew up the daughter of a Navy petty officer in 1950s suburban Chicago, the other spent formative years in Indonesia before being raised by his grandparents in Hawaii. Their experiences couldn’t have been more different but over the last eight years, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have become the twin pillars of the Democratic Party. Once rivals, then colleagues, it would seem that there’s not much daylight between the President and his former Secretary of State on major foreign policy issues. But there are differences and, as New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler discovered in reporting his new book, "Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power," those differences are sometimes quite significant. This week on the podcast, we sit down with Landler to talk about the relationship between the president and his party’s presumptive nominee, how their backgrounds shaped their views on foreign policy, and the pair's evolving relationship.