As the first African-American President, Obama knows that white America wouldn t have tolerated him as an angry black man, which is much of the reason he seems to never go far enough for progressives, especially some African-American progressives like Cornel West. The presidency is far from Obama s final act, though. Once he s out of office, he said in an interview with Vanity Fair, he ll be speaking out a lot more and likely doing things that he can t do while in office.Obama sat down with presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for the interview, which was published on Friday.The walls of the private dining room where the interview was conducted didn t have past presidents. Instead, there were pictures of black civil rights leaders like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and of John Lewis during the 1965 march on Selma. Still, though, Obama s role model is Abraham Lincoln. My particular passion for Lincoln, though, dates back from my earliest memories of politics. And we ve talked about this before that there s no one who I believe has ever captured the soul of America more profoundly than Abraham Lincoln has.Not just his biography, of somebody who genuinely rose from nothing, self-taught, striking out along the borders of our Great Frontier. Somebody who worked with his hands and then worked with his mind, and somehow became one of the greatest writers in the English language. And I think, most importantly, somebody who was able to see humanity clearly, see the fundamental contradictions of the American experiment clearly, and yet still remain hopeful and still remain full of humor, and still have a basic sympathy for the human condition, even in the midst of a terrible war and having to make terrible decisions. And having a forgiving spirit. While Obama seems to have loved his time in office, he does regret some of the  institutional constraints  that might limit him from being who he wants to be. On the other hand, there are things he feels he can only accomplish once outside of office: Having had this office has given me this incredible perch from which to see how the world works. The power of the office is unique and it is a humbling privilege. With that power, however, also comes a whole host of institutional constraints. There are things I cannot say. There are things   that I cannot say, not out of any political concerns, but out of prudential concerns of the office. There are institutional obligations I have to carry out that are important for a president of the United States to carry out, but may not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the issues that I care most deeply about. Ex-President role models couldn t be any different. Perhaps the most respected post presidency, at least in modern times, would have to be Jimmy Carter s. He s dedicated his life to building homes for those who most need them and to social justice around the world. Bill Clinton has the Clinton Foundation, and the Bushes and Reagan, well, they retired into near obscurity.Obama is still young, though, at just 55. He will potentially have decades to finish his community organizing, only on a grander scale, or really, whatever he wants to do. You can be sure that no matter what he does, he will be working to try to make lives better for his fellow African-Americans, an in turn, his fellow Americans.Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images. 