* Pre-election, Obama wasn’t the only potential president interested in keeping Gates. John McCain’s team had also let it be known that if he won, Gates would be asked to stay on.

* When Morrell, a former ABC News reporter who had left journalism to serve Gates, had asked Bush in an Oval Office meeting on Election Day 2008 whether Gates should stay on in the new administration, the president, in front of Dana Perino, his press secretary, and Ed Gillespie, his political director, told the Pentagon spokesman that he absolutely had to remain to serve the transition. Bush kept bringing up the issue with Morrell’s friends, who further conveyed the outgoing president’s wishes. Morrell sensed that Bush, who had been Barack Obama’s punching bag during the campaign, got a small sense of satisfaction that the new president needed Gates.

* When Gration, Obama’s first pick to run NASA, clashed with Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut and the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the space agency, Gration was shifted to the Sudan portfolio, a position that didn’t require Senate confirmation.

* Obama, to this day, loves that his foreign policy doctrine gets compared favorably to George H. W. Bush’s. The comparison is tinged with more than a bit of irony, given that he won the presidency by presenting himself as a polar opposite of George W. But the greater irony was to come: as Obama’s presidency progressed, he would continue many of his predecessor’s national security policies and see significant backlash. But that was in the future—at the time, his search was for those who saw the world through steady, veteran eyes, more E-Ring than evangelical.

* Several participants in the meeting recall that Summers became uncharacteristically quiet when Romer brought the word “trillion” to the table, a sign that he wanted to be sure Romer had enough rope to hang herself with.

* Some in the White House faulted Schiliro for failing to talk Waxman, his old boss, out of moving cap-and-trade legislation before health care; others saw Pelosi’s not-so-hidden hand behind the legislation’s advance—a signal, during complex negotiations with the Senate over health care, that the House was not to be taken for granted.

* Throughout the subsequent presidential campaign, it was hard to miss the signs of the Obama campaign’s interest in those voters: in briefings with reporters, Messina constantly touted the number of new voters the campaign had registered.

* In the end, treaty backers actually had a few votes to spare, in case of an emergency: Oregon’s Ron Wyden was recuperating from surgery, and Evan Bayh, who had just days left in his Senate career, was in his state on a farewell tour. Both men could have been called back if their votes had turned out to have been crucial to passage.

* Biden’s staff liked to joke that the vice president was the “McConnell whisperer.”

* Full disclosure: this author is a member of the Gridiron Club.

* One thing he does not yet grasp is the faster news cycle and the hit-and-run nature of social media. Bill Clinton likes to take his time.

* Biden had been counseling Suleiman to get out ahead of what was beginning to look inevitable. He had told Suleiman to call on Mubarak to quit, and to use his meetings with protesters to build his own relationships. But Suleiman wouldn’t do it. In his statement that Wednesday night, Obama praised the Egyptian army for its restraint, but he didn’t mention Egypt’s vice president.

* Maybe if the infant had been named “George Lincoln Washington,” the whole “planting” theory might have attracted more believers.

* This author, perhaps regrettably, declined the wager.

* The Obama campaign made as light of the situation as it could. Donors were soon bombarded with solicitations from the campaign that promised goods—a $25 T-shirt with a copy of the birth certificate on the back, a $15 mug with the same image—in exchange for donations. “We sold a hell of a lot of merchandise,” Plouffe said.

* After the president had nixed the joke about Tim Pawlenty’s middle name being “bin Laden,” one of his young speechwriters had suggested substituting “Hosni,” a reference to the recently deposed Egyptian president. Yeah, Obama had said, that works. Axelrod didn’t think it was terribly funny, but it went over well enough at the dinner.

* The source called this author not only to offer an early alert but to encourage the network to get wheels in motion for what was sure to be a major special report.

* A testament to Emanuel’s reach and grasp in Washington: when he got to the White House, he tried to import his contact list, all 6,000 names, onto his computer. The software crashed under the burden.

* Among Bachmann’s other blunders was mistaking the hometown of serial murderer John Wayne Gacy with that of actor John Wayne.

* After losing in the D.C. circuit court, the Federal Election Commission’s lawyers read the writing on the wall and dropped any appeal to the Supreme Court, which would have almost certainly been doomed to failure.

* The “foreign” money claim may have been one of the weaker arguments against the Citizens United decision, and it certainly was an ironic one, given that Republican conspiracy theorists openly questioned whether Obama’s own campaign was receiving foreign money in both 2008 and 2012. In any case, Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee who had written the Citizens United decision and who had attended the State of the Union that year, was caught on camera mouthing the words “not true.”

* To put Adelson’s primary help in perspective, realize that Joe Biden, during his run for the presidency in 2008, raised $17 million from thousands of donors. Gingrich’s Super PAC raised more than half of that from one household.

* They made the announcement, perhaps tauntingly, by talking to a reporter from the Center for Public Integrity.

* An ambitious effort to launch a third-party Unity ticket fizzled out. Even with their low poll numbers, all of the potential Unity candidates ended up drawing more support away from Romney than from the president. If anything, a third-party candidacy meant that Obama would have an easier path to re-election.

* The speech actually wasn’t really that well received in the moment, partly because the president looked like he was in the basement of some old school building with a few makeshift American flags. This was yet another staple of the Obama presidential years—some awful, very plain backdrops or wildly overcompensating sets clogged with American flags and imperial columns.

* Gallup measured only a three-point increase in Obama’s standing, one of the smaller bounces in recent history.

* If the Romney team wasn’t upset enough with Christie for his behavior at the Republican convention, their jaws dropped when they saw pictures of him and the president touring the Sandy wreckage together. The images were as good an endorsement as any Obama could have hoped for, and a statement by Christie that he could offer the sort of bipartisanship most Americans were hungry for.

* It may be safer, in the modern GOP, to be pro-choice than to be in favor of a path to citizenship for an undocumented immigrant living in America.

* Obama’s media strategists had privately mocked Hillary Clinton’s campaign for giving away some of the candidate’s precious time to Jake Tapper, the ABC News reporter, for an interview that would run only on his podcast. No undecided voter listens to a political podcast, they joked.

* His own path to stardom, however, had led straight over the fallen bodies of two contenders torn apart by a vicious and merciless Chicago media.

* This author included.

* The NRA ran advertisements against Daschle that year, when he lost his re-election bid; at the same time, the gun rights group endorsed Reid.