The answer is… MAYBE, but I don’t remember.
Barack Obama and I were both in the Class of 1983 at Columbia College, so it’s entirely possible our paths crossed. But I have no memory of him. So, if we DID meet, we didn’t make much of an impression on each other.
My wife studied at the Bush School at Texas A&M. Several groups in the class where assigned projects and the final product would be a presentation for an administrator at the school.
On the day of the presentation, they were surprised when Bush Sr. showed up instead of the administrator. So my wife got to brief the (former) President. She was pretty thrilled about it.
Luckily it happened at the last minute, so little time to get nervous.
I saw the Reagans in their limo when they passed me on a Washington street in Jan. 1985, just a few yards away. I saw Vice President George H.W. Bush at a speech later that month.
I met Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Jesse Jackson and Paul Simon during the 1988 campaign, but of course none of them ever moved into the White House.
I’ve met Bill Clinton twice - in the spring of 1992, when he was campaigning in Cleveland, Ohio, and then in the fall of 2010, when he was in town in support of then-Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland’s reelection campaign. I also saw Clinton at a great distance along the National Mall at his first inauguration in 1993, but never met him while he was in office.
Oh, yeah, and there’s this: In which I meet the President and smooch the First Lady - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board
I got to meet and talk to President Ford in the spring of 1976. He came to my high school for a public forum that included a question & answer session.
The closest I ever got was in the mid-1990s. Ex-president George HW Bush came to Bangkok, and he was riding with the US ambassador in a limousine that passed the wife and me at Siam Square. The windows were tinted, but I could still see someone’s arm leaning pressed against the window in the backseat. That may or may not have been Bush’s.
I’ve met Al Gore twice, once before and once after he was Vice President.
Of all the stories about Bill Clinton’s nearly supernatural ability to connect with people, my favorite was from Politically Incorrect (I think). Bill Maher asked someone “Have you met Bill Clinton? He has amazing charisma. I’d fuck him!”
What about a guy named Barry Soetoro?
If you have any desire to meet Presidents, just move to New Hampshire. I have relatives there and they’re very casual about all the Presidents and Presidential candidates they’ve met. It’s apparently difficult to avoid meeting candidates in New Hampshire when they gather there for primary season.
I shook hands with Obama and Biden during the 2008 campaign, outside the Paoli train station. I saw him at three other events that year.
I met Nixon at the Seafood Shanty in Paoli, PA sometime in the mid-90s. A group of coworkers were there for a birthday lunch, and somebody noticed Nixon and Julie Nixon Eisenhower sitting in a booth nearby. He apparently was in the habit of coming down from New York by train and meeting her for lunch on a weekly basis. One of the bolder members of the group went over and asked him if he would mind saying hello, and he came to our table and shook everybody’s hand.
I met the then-gov of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, at a little county fair in … west of Helena. He was glad-handin’ & politikin’ the whole time. Very good-looking back then / his persona reminded me of “Kennedy” … this was 1986 or thereabouts. I couldn’t vote for him because I was becoming a resident of Oxford, Miss.
Yup. When I was working on the Dukakis campaign in New Hampshire in 1987-88, my fellow staffers and I agreed that any political junkie should move to New Hampshire (or Iowa, I suppose). You could meet any and all Presidential candidates, sooner or later.
A college friend of mine now works at a N.H. paper and is rather blase about all of the candidates who traipse through her newsroom every four years.
Yes, and I’ve heard him say that, in cool overcast weather, that there is nothing like curling up with a good boob.
Shook Carter’s hand at a Habitat for Humanity build in Baltimore, 2010. Secret Service guys are way nicer than you expect.
How could I ever forget it … they let school out that fateful day in Waco, Texas (1958 I think) when President Eisenhower came driving down the Heart of Texas Blvd. in a Cadillac convertible he waved and everything.
I was able to look right at him too.
Not so lucky with President Kennedy, but we had to shine our shoes and put on our best whites uniform and stand at attention on the deck of the USS Nerus submarine tender in San Diego Bay at Ballast Point submarine base in April 1963 while President Kennedy flew overhead in a helicopter.
Does that count? 
Carter. about 6 years after he was in office.
I was at the Atlanta airport waiting to board a flight to Chicago. About 10 minutes before boarding, some Secret Service looking guys came out of a secured door, followed by Carter. Carter proceeds to stand near the gate waiting for them to begin boarding the plane. I approached one of the Secret Service guys and asked it it was okay to approach the president, he nodded, so I did. Introduced myself, and we chatted for a few minutes. Mostly me telling him how much I admired some of the work he was doing. Besides at the time he was doing some diplomacy in Africa and championing a few causes I found admirable. He asked what I was going to Chicago for, and asked about where I was from. Really pleasant conversation. He was really interested in my first name (Hiram), which comes back in the story later.
Anyway, we board, him in First Class, me in the absolute back row of the plane. Worst seat on the plane. We push back from the gate and then we proceed to sit for over an hour because the FAA put a ground hold on because of thunderstorms near the airport. Lots of people on the plane were buzzing about Jimmy Carter being on the plane, and apparently word of that got to him. He got up, and came down the aisle, and shook hands with everyone on the plane!! He would chat with a person every once in a while, but just a quick interchange.
So, he finally gets back to me sitting in the front row. So here is where I was blown away. He said "Hiram, you really need to get a better travel agent. You have the worst seat on the plane! I laughed, he chuckled. people all around where looking at me, like “Dude, the President knows your name!”
Not done yet. About two weeks later, a personalized copy of his book “The Blood of Abraham” showed up in the mail. He had remembered my first and last name, and apparently what city I was living in, and had someone find my address. The inscription reads “To Hiram, my fellow traveling partner. Jimmy”