Barack Obama frowns during a December 2008 news conference in Chicago. Obama's pet peeves

It was one of those nonstop days: President Barack Obama was flying back to Washington from Los Angeles to meet President Mahmoud Abbas, then he was scheduled to tape an interview for "The Colbert Report" and sit down for his regular briefing with advisers. But he was missing something equally important: one of his daughters’ concerts at school.

“When he learned about it, he came up and asked us how it happened,” an aide at the White House recalls. “He was annoyed and he let us know.”


“This is unacceptable,” the aide recalls Obama saying. “Make sure it never happens again.”

With that, White House staffers quickly learned one of their boss’s pet peeves: Never put something on the calendar that interferes with his duties as First Dad.

For the most part, staffers say the president, who earned the nickname “No Drama Obama” during the campaign, is a pretty laid-back guy. Even so, like everyone, the commander in chief has a few peccadilloes that are best avoided.

Some are easy to identify with. As White House senior adviser David Axelrod puts it, the president dislikes it when “folks try to get him to wear baseball gear for teams other than the White Sox.”

Other issues are related to the schedule and scrutiny of living in presidential bubble. He doesn’t like to miss his daily workout, which usually takes place in the morning or before an evening event. “If there’s no workout time, he’ll get a little upset,” said one senior aide who has worked with Obama for more than four years.

He also doesn’t appreciate the seemingly endless click-click-click of the cameras when photographers take photos of him. “OK, guys,” Obama told a gaggle of photographers snapping his every move before a golf game in Hawaii last December. “How many shots do you need?”

Obama also confessed recently that one of his biggest pet peeves is what he calls “the shine police” — aides and makeup artists who powder his face before he does television. “You notice that even before this interview, they constantly want to powder my nose and forehead and it's never enough — that I find quite irritating,” Obama told The Associated Press.

As a workplace, the White House can generate small annoyances for the 44th president, such as events that are overstaffed and overplanned. Don’t bother mapping out his every move and giving him step-by-step instructions. “If you spend too much time telling him where to go, how you get there, and everything in between, it drives him crazy,” said an aide who has worked with Obama for more than two years.

When staffers tell him not to take questions, for example, Obama will often take them anyway. “If we tell him to take one question, he’ll take two,” one senior administration official said. “He doesn’t like too much instruction.” Obama also doesn’t like people to regurgitate what he’s already read in a detailed briefing book. “He sees it as a waste of time.”

At meetings, the staff knows the do’s and don’ts. And the key to it all is being prepared and precise. Axelrod said Obama bristles when “people talk too much at meetings and prevent others from speaking.”

When it’s time to go around the table to talk about something, “You better make sure you have everything there to discuss the issue,” press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Another senior aide agrees: “If people aren’t prepared, if ideas are half-baked, he gets a little annoyed because he feels like he could be using his time better.” People who don’t communicate directly and speechwriters who give him “wishy-washy” language also get a thumbs-down.

And what happens when he’s displeased? "You can tell he's annoyed," Gibbs said.

But the president doesn’t yell, according to Gibbs: "It's far more convincing than yelling. He gives you a smirk."

Which is in keeping with his best-known dislike: drama. “He hates it,” a senior aide said. “If you come to him with a problem, you had better tried to figure out 100 ways to solve the problem.

Even more than he dislikes drama, though, Obama “hates being late,” one senior aide said. (Lately, more times than not, he arrives ahead of schedule.) “His biggest thing is he hates inconveniencing people,” the aide said. “He wants meetings to start on time and wants to have enough time to meet with people, and so we try to build in some extra time. He hates being rushed, and he hates shortchanging someone. He’s always very conscious about running on time. That’s a big deal to him. ”

There are, however, plenty of times when he takes seemingly annoying things in stride. When a cell phone went off with a duck quack during an East Room event, Obama stopped mid-speech, smiled and asked, “Whose duck back there?”

“It’s a duck,” said Michelle Obama, standing by his side and laughing.

“There’s a duck quacking in there somewhere,” Obama said. “Where do you guys get these ringtones by the way, I’m just curious.”

Moments later, he returned to his speech, seemingly not at all irritated.

But Obama might have a new pet peeve to add to his list, Axelrod quipped: “When aides share his pet peeves with reporters.”