Hope, despair, life at the centre of a divided nation

BARACK Obama laid out his concerns about picking Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008. The senator from Delaware loved to hear himself talk, he didn’t have a filter, and “he wasn’t always self-aware”, Obama writes in his new memoir.

While “we couldn’t have been more different”, Obama writes, he “found the contrast between us compelling”, along with what he called Biden’s good heart, foreign policy expertise