Book Review: A Promised Land — Barack Obama
Especially at the present moment, it feels as if first-class politicians are hard to come by. The kind who shape history and therefore become assimilated into it. Obama is perhaps the only politician in my lifetime who has experienced this before he was even inaugurated.
Especially at the present moment, it seems incredible that a black man harnessed 21st century-America’s bizarre mix of liberal intelligentsia, rural industrialists, tech entrepreneurs, rootin’-tootin’ cowboys and batshit crazy cultists into a workable coalition, and became the most powerful person in the world. Already it seems vaguely mythical; a relic of a former age.
Except it’s not. This is in many ways a story about the birth of the current age, as a rising tide of Hope. and Yes We Can! and O-BA-MAAAAAHH is gradually dragged by the currents of post-truth and hyperpartisanship and nationalism back into the depths.
A strained metaphor, there. Apologies for my writing style.
No apologies necessary for Obama, though, as this weighty tome is written exquisitely. This will come as a relief to anyone who suffered through his two previous memoirs, each written before he became President and each a soporific, soliloquising snoozefest. A Promised Land couldn’t be more different — the heavy stuff is clear and unpretentious, and the lighter stuff is emotionally wrought and often riveting. The one thing it’s not, though, is short. This 700-page burglar-whacker of a book is only Part One of Obama’s memoirs, and despite the fact his childhood is over before page 20, it still makes it less than halfway through Obama’s time as president.
Herein lies my first issue. This book provides plenty of insight into Obama the man, but relatively little into how Obama the boy became such a man. He doesn’t seem to find his childhood particularly interesting: there are vague references to listlessness and his mother’s difficulties, a father absent after his eleventh birthday and lots of fond memories of Hawaii. Then come his college years, where he studied law and “lived like a monk”, reading voraciously and thinking about the big questions in life, and then President Barack Obama seems to emerge, fully formed. He jumps into Chicago civic work, he jumps into the Senate, he jumps into the Presidency: bish, bash, bosh.
I don’t buy it. I wanted to know the meaty, grisly details of how such a personality arises. But I can understand why Obama keeps this section lite. The one bit of genuine insight here has actually become a minor scandal — Obama admits that his major motivation for intellectual expansion was trying to impress girls at college.
“Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm…”
It continues in this vein for some time. I loved this — mainly cos it’s such a relief that it wasn’t just me. Admittedly, he could probably have phrased it a little better, but the people jumping at him as a sexist are clutching at straws. It’s natural to want to impress people you fancy, and those of us as skinny as Obama have to use methods other than one-armed pushups.
As a smooth segue, Obama’s desire to be liked comes through quite strongly throughout, which was surprising, since his most effective quality as a politician is his almost magnetic likeability, that gosh-darn charisma. If there’s an answer to how he succeeded as a politician in such a racially sectarian country, it’s that he could be liked so easily. Black people, but certainly other ethnic minorities too, saw him as a pioneer. And white people saw him as, well, a white man’s black man. Obama is, after all, mixed race, and due to his absent father he was raised by a white mother and white grandparents. He possesses the elements of black culture which are appreciated by white people (the charisma, the charm, the appreciation for Martin Luther King), but without the elements of black culture which alarm us (speaking about racism or white privilege too much, appreciating any figure of the black liberation movement who came after 1960). I hope I don’t come across as callous, or offensive. To use Obama’s own words: “I learned not to claim my own victimhood too readily.”
Obama hit the sweet spot, in a way that almost no one else could. And he got stuff done, which is what the vast majority of this book entails. It does at times come across as self-congratulatory, as each chapter is structured around an issue (e.g. the economy), the Republicans making things difficult (what if we gave the rich more tax breaks?) and then Obama and Co. persevering, with an ending sentence which is something like it was these days that we all lived for, as all our hard work paid off, and I knew Deborah Kentucket from Missouri would keep her home after all. But to be fair to the guy, he achieved quite a lot in those first few years, often against the odds.
Make no mistake, this is a fairly heavy-duty political tome. There is lots of detail on financial stimulus packages, lots of “to fully understand this issue, consider General Robert E. Fawkes 1876 decision…”, and a quite insane amount of backstory detail of each and every one of his fellow politicians and White House staffers, some of whom never appear again. But it is balanced out by a lot of heart: unlike many political memoirists, there are many mentions of his daughters “daddy talks SO slow”, and a lot of love for Michelle, even if her main role seems to be trashing Barack at every available opportunity. He makes no secret that she was opposed to his political career from the beginning, and considering its eventual result, she might even feel vindicated.
Because the secondary origin story here is the birth of the alt-right. It begins with Sarah Palin, a rabid hockey mom who is treated largely as a joke, a larger-than-life character seemingly destined for South Park. Then it metamorphoses into the Birther movement, claiming that Barack Obama isn’t a true American, then that he was born in Kenya, then that he was a Muslim born in Kenya, then, somehow, that he was a SOCIALIST Muslim born in Kenya. For those who aren’t aware, it was through this movement that Donald Trump muscled into the political sphere. I certainly wasn’t aware that in 2012, a Fox Poll showed Trump as the most popular potential candidate, despite him never actually announcing. Suddenly it seems we should’ve been taking him seriously a lot earlier. And despite the Obama administration’s attempts to brush it aside, they eventually released the full birth certificate. The movement was legitimised, even as it was proved wrong.
And so beneath all of the political intrigue, the global affairs and the heartfelt steps towards progress, Trumpism lingers. Obama is firm in his rebuke of Trump, in fact a bit harsher than expected: but he stops well short of the line. In fact, he is more directly critical of Hillary Clinton, who he does not appear to personally like, and even Joe Biden, who is “his brother” but whose primary role seems to be a wildcard figure who can distract attention away from Obama while he thinks things through. Which doesn’t bode hugely well for the next four years.
The next memoir will probably be different in tone. It is very hard to disagree than Obama did well in his first few years, even from a leftist perspective. But as Tea-Party politics rose against him, as the Senate blocked everything he tried, and as he began to commission 3 drone strikes per day on foreign soil, as he criminalised more whistleblowers than every former president combined, as his brand of liberal centrism became increasingly outdated, he became a more divisive figure for both left and right. Despite my personal reservations, I do believe that the man did a decent job in the circumstances which were given to him, and I did like this book. As with everything Obama, it’s quite hard not to.
