President Obama apparently doesn’t need gadgets and gizmos to help pass the time on his many plane trips, just a good ole fashioned deck of cards.
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes disclosed Obama’s airtime activity in Fortune magazine’s 40 Under 40 list released Thursday.
{mosads}When asked if he and the president have any travel rituals, Rhodes replied, “He’s a card player, I’m not.”
Obama’s former personal aide, Reggie Love, revealed last year that a card game was the time-passer of choice for the president during the night of the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Love said playing cards helped ease the tension over the course of a long day.
“Most people were like down in the Situation Room and [Obama] was like, ‘I’m not going to be down there. I can’t watch this entire thing.’ ” Love said, adding, “We must have played 15 hands, 15 games of spades.”
In Rhodes’s Fortune interview (he came in at No. 13 on the list, while Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, and Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky shared the top spot), the Obama staffer also revealed the president has a tendency to tweak speeches endlessly.
“The one ritual that’s always the case is that, on speeches, he works very late, so he’ll constantly be making line edits and fiddling with text up until the last minute,” he said.
Rhodes, 36, says amid all the late nights, the key is to “pace yourself,” explaining, “You’ve got to find ways to relax over the course of the day” in order to have a “reserve of mental energy that you can draw from.”