“Look, this piece is not about him saying something and me arguing the other side or agreeing,” says David Remnick, on this week’s Political Scene podcast, referring to his chronicle of the time he spent with President Obama. “My goal here was to try as best as possible—in as much detail as possible—to get his thinking out there.” Ryan Lizza and host Dorothy Wickenden join Remnick on the podcast to discuss Obama’s final three years in office and his legacy.

“There’s an awareness of time and the dilemma of fulfilling enormous ambitions that were laid out not only in the Inauguration, in 2008, but even more ambitiously in the second Inaugural, which I think was the most nakedly liberal Inaugural speech in many years,” Remnick says. “But the barriers are obvious.”

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Photograph by Pari Dukovic.