The community organizer turned US President, is now ready to turn into a media mogul.
According to a press release, former POTUS Barack Obama, and wife Michelle, have reportedly signed with Penguin Random House for publishing rights to both their books.
The bidding war for the Obama story reportedly exceeded $60 million according to the FT.
The exact numbers of the deal was not disclosed.
Axios reports…
The priciest presidential book deal before the Obamas was Bill Clinton’s 2004 memoir, which was bought for $15 million.
Who else was bidding: HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, and Macmillan.
Meanwhile Politico is reporting that Obama, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, are about to surface from the shadows, and start making political appearances.
Via Politico…
Holder said he’s been talking to the former president about ways — including fundraising and interacting with state legislators — that could help the new National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which Obama asked Holder to chair last year.
“It’s coming. He’s coming,” Holder said, speaking to reporters at a briefing for the new group. “And he’s ready to roll.”
Throughout, Holder said, Obama “will be a more visible part of the effort.”
Holder also predicted that the usual pattern of the party in the White House losing state legislative seats in off-year elections would hold next year, but “I expect we’ll see that on steroids with President Trump.”
The NDRC is looking to be an intensified central force for Democrats to tackle their disadvantage in gerrymandering. The mission is to direct resources into winning targeted state elections, push ballot initiatives for nonpartisan district-drawing commissions and wage legal challenges to existing maps. The hope is that this would put Democrats in a stronger position in state houses, but also in the U.S. House of Representatives, if districts are drawn that more accurately represent the distribution of the popular vote, citing statistics that showed Republicans winning 49 percent of the vote in those elections but getting 55 percent of the seats in the 2016 elections.
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