Revisiting Obama’s ‘A Promised Land’
"In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."
That's maybe the best line from Barack Obama's infamous 2008 "Yes, We Can" speech. The one that Will.I.Am set to music, with a host of celebrities in black and white earnestly reading the lines with their eyes locked on the camera. Reading the speech now, it seems naive at best. At worst, it betrays the kind of delusional optimism that came to define the former President's time in public life.
Don't get me wrong, I love Obama. I was thrilled by his meteoric rise and followed his two terms with nerdy delight. I don't expect to be as impressed with any future President as I am by him - his integrity, his leadership skills, his humour. I’ve thought a lot about how different the pandemic would have been if he (and his specially created pandemic task force) were still in the White House. Donald Trump knew that this thing was airborne as early as February 2020 - how many lives could have been saved if that information was made public?
When the first volume of Obama’s memoir was released last November, I made an (illegal) trip to Easons to collect my copy. It's a great book - readable and well crafted. It's dishy in places and dense with exposition on how the legislative sausage is made in others. There are a smattering of genuinely funny lines and some beautifully evoked descriptions. He meets a nun with a face as “grooved as a peach pit. The final chunk, which covers the lead up to the 2011 Bin Laden raid, reads like a thriller.
Obama is a writer at heart, and it shows. More than anything, I recommend the book as a human story of what it is to be shot out of a cannon the way he was after his 2004 convention speech. Just four years earlier, he was broke and unable to get into the convention hall. 7 years later, he was President.
I read it last winter, in the aftermath of the presidential election, while Trump was ranting about fraud and thousands of people were dying everyday from covid. It was a respite to go back in time to the calmer Obama years. And yet, we know the price for that calm. We know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Obama’s incrementalism was a mistake. He was elected with Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, and still he failed to push through progressive reforms. There wasn't much change in the Obama years but there were plenty of speeches about it! Most egregiously perhaps, the grassroots movement that got him elected was never converted into a viable long term political force. These political miscalculations are rooted in his optimism. His hopeful temperament blinded him to the backlash that was to follow, the roots of which were already evident in the rise of the Tea Party and the racist intransigence of Senate Republicans.
Prior to reading his book, I read a bunch of others written by his former staffer's. Ben Rhodes's 'The World As It Is' (which is also the title of a chapter in Obama's book), From the Corner of the Oval by Beck Dorey-Stein, The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? By Alyssa Mastromonaco and The Audacity To Win by David Plouffe. And of course, I read a bunch of books analysing his presidency, the best of which was “We Were Eight Years in Power” by Ta-Neshi Coates. (My favourite line: “For eight years, he walked on ice and never fell.”)
Collectively, these books reveal a lot about Obama's political ideology which prized compromise, centrism, incrementalism. It's striking that the vast majority of the staffers Obama surrounded himself with were young, white and male. Nathan J. Robinson writes convincingly about how a generation raised on The West Wing had a view of politics that's more about making speeches than it is about fighting for change.
“It has always struck me as funny that Sorkin’s signature West Wing shot is the “walk and talk,” in which characters strut down hallways having intense conversations but do not actually appear to be going anywhere. What better metaphor could there be for a politics that consists of looking knowledgeable and committed without any sense of what you’re aiming at or how to get there?”
A Promised Land is not a perfect book, nor was Obama a perfect President. He made mistakes on Syria and on the drone program, which will be covered more in volume 2. ("It's not target practice," he told Stephen Colbert, a flippant comment in light of the thousands of lives lost and the PTSD experienced by drone operators.) Black Lives Matter began in 2013 at least in part due to the failure of his Presidency to make meaningful change on racism and police brutality. The main thing that struck me though was his persistent blind spot on gender equity. In an otherwise excellent interview with Speedy Morman, he says "all lives have hardships but there shouldn't be anything systemic”, referring to the role of race. To Obama, gender isn’t a systemic force that shapes people’s everyday lives.
In a revealing passage, he discusses how some of the male staff were speaking over their female colleagues. Obama hosted a dinner for the female staffers to share their concerns, though one gets the impression that it wasn't much of a priority beyond that. As David Runciman writes in the LRB:
“[Obama] continues to insist that his guys were all OK. Men like his chief strategist David Axelrod and his press secretary Robert Gibbs, along with his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and economic adviser Larry Summers, both of whom were notoriously abrasive. ‘Knowing them as well as I did, I felt that as much as any of us growing up in America can be free of bias, they passed the test.’ Really? These men were his colleagues as well as his type – smart, analytical, no bullshit, no game-playing. The idea that their ingrained intolerance was the tolerable kind is exactly what you’d expect from someone who saw the world like they did. For others, it was just bullying.”
During his presidency, Obama would glancingly refer to issues like domestic violence with bland comments like “it has to stop”. Without a plan, funding or other resources, though, it’s not going to just stop. He was interviewed by a teenage girl who made him aware of period poverty. He had no idea such a thing existed! The book makes reference to a former political opponent who dropped out of the race for because he "had sex with a 16 year old". That, Mr President, is rape.
These blind spots aside, you should still read it. It's a worthwhile book. It offers a revealing insight into the man and his work, even if many justifiable critiques remain. Obama initially planned on writing 1 volume and estimated that it’d take 2 years. It took 4 years, is 700 pages long and is only volume one. As Stephen Colbert joked, he’s planning to be his own Robert Caro which is a very nerdy joke that I love!
In addition to the book, I devoured most of his press tour too. Obama, now 60, has changed. He seems to have softened with age. His emotionality was more evident now that he’s never going to run for office again. He spoke candidly about the strain of the Presidency on his marriage and the joy he finds in his daughters. I particularly enjoyed his game of ‘Wastepaper Basketball’ with Stephen Colbert. Obama complained about the tightness of his pre-squeezed paper balls, muttering about “the principle of it” when Colbert suggested that he re-squeeze them. Around the same time, Trump was calling election officials and asking them to lie about the results! Principles, indeed!
More on Obama:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s NYT review. My favourite line: “The racist incident is never allowed to be and breathe, fully aired out, unmuddied by that notion of “complexity.” Of course racism is always complex, but complexity as an idea too often serves as an evasive device, a means of keeping the conversation comfortable, never taking the full contours of racism to avoid alienating white Americans.”
Trevor Noah + Obama, though I really wish that the interviewer had pushed for clarification on whether or not the former President thought that the ‘defund the police’ slogan was the reason democrats did poorly in the congressional elections.
Recommendations:
Adding Jessica Stanley's book to my reading list. I have been reading her newsletter since 2012!
An excellent profile of Kristen Stewart who is working on her first project as a director, an adaptation of “The Chronology of Water” by Lidia Yuknavitch.”
“The Greater Dublin Area is now the largest hub for data centres in Europe. Amazon’s latest plans for Mulhuddart will need the same amount of electricity as a small city.”
I devoured Natasha Trethewey’s beautiful book ‘Memorial Drive’.
Rebecca Traister meets Katie Couric.
“Using Instagram to conjure the feeling of coziness is like using an abacus to write a novel” This piece really made me think.
