Sometimes even the best-laid plans can go awry. The first volume of the long-awaited memoir from Barack Obama was scheduled to hit shelves on November 17th – two weeks after the US presidential election. The timing was supposed to ensure that the former president would not be weighing in during a highly contested campaign. Instead, A Promised Land landed as Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the election, plunging the country into an unprecedented constitutional stand-off.
Though Obama’s successor is not mentioned until the final chapters of this voluminous work, he is a ghostly presence throughout. Dipping in to the world of another president, just a decade ago, the contrast with the presidency of Trump is inescapable. While we must wait to see what illuminations Trump shares with us if and when he writes his own memoirs, Obama’s new work is an absorbing account of the events that brought him to the White House and the first 2½ years of his presidency.
Thoughtful, measured, deliberate, with flashes of eloquent brilliance, this 700-plus-page tome exhibits the characteristics of the man who made history as the first African-American president.
Obama, who spent more than three years writing the book, takes us through his political journey, beginning with his early community work in Chicago and audacious run for the US Senate. There are reminders of the knock-backs he endured, such as an ill-fated run for Congress in 2000. “Almost from the start, the race was a disaster,” he writes, frankly.
He is also open about the strain his early political ideals put on family life. Some of his descriptions of this time in Illinois as he juggles his work as a state senator with the demands of a young family are familiar from his wife Michelle Obama’s autobiography Becoming.
Political ascent
But as he moves to Washington following his election to the Senate, the energy of Obama’s political ascent fizzes on every page. He describes the constant national and international media attention, his nascent plans to run for president, and his encounters with the behemoths of the Senate such as Ted Kennedy.
In a poignant scene, the veteran senator, whose later endorsement of Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential race was a massive political coup for Obama, tells the young senator, “I can tell you this, Barack. The power to inspire is rare. Moments like this are rare . . . You don’t choose the time. The time chooses you.”
Obama’s description of the presidential campaign, culminating in the electrifying victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night in 2008, contains plenty of anecdotal nuggets – a dust-up with rival Hillary Clinton on the tarmac at Washington National Airport; then candidate Joe Biden’s declaration that the young senator was not ready to be president.
The bulk of the book focuses on Obama’s years in the White House. In rich detail he sets out the different policy and legislative challenges he tackled, and the painful process of getting these through Congress. Even before his election victory in November 2008, the clouds of the financial crisis had arrived, and he recounts the high-pressured decision-making processes that led to the formulation of the bank and auto industry rescue plans that dominated the early years of his presidency.
Similarly, his painstaking efforts to formulate a healthcare policy, culminating in the Affordable Care Act, are recounted in granular detail. His early frustration with the increasing polarisation of politics and the obstructionism of Republicans was a mark of things to come.
Sprinkled through the book are revealing anecdotes about the leading political protagonists of the time: On Nancy Pelosi: "I love that woman," he declares as he
puts down the phone after a conversation with the House Speaker, who promises to put a revised healthcare Bill through the House. On French president Nicolas Sarkozy: "all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric". He recalls Sarkozy joyously chanting Federal Reserve chair Tim Geithner's name at a G20 summit, prompting Angela Merkel to eye him "the way a mother eyes an unruly child".
Journey to realpolitik
If there is a theme in this book, it is the political realities and trade-offs that have to be made in the process of governing. Obama is intensely aware of his own political and personal journey from youthful idealism to realpolitik.
As the reader is brought into the decision-making process, we see a leader who painstakingly evaluates all possible scenarios and weighs both sides – characteristics often denounced by his critics.
As he reflects on the landmark financial legislation he introduced at the start of his presidency, he challenges the “if only” narrative, arguing that none of the options open to him at that time were fully palatable and many would have made things worse. Similarly, he sets out in revealing detail the deliberation that led to some of his most consequential foreign policy decisions, such as authorising action in Libya to pressurising Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to step aside during the Tahrir Square demonstrations of 2011, despite the threat that posed to the valuable intelligence relationship between Washington and Cairo.
Running through the book is Obama’s awareness of the weight of history and expectation on his shoulders.
When he is informed that he has won the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his presidency, he replies: “For what?” As he arrives in Norway to collect, he is fully aware of the irony of receiving a peace prize just as he is deploying more troops to Afghanistan. Looking out at a crowd in Oslo holding candles, he says the idea that he alone can bring order to the world’s chaos is “laughable”. But he also sees in the flickering candles an expression of hope shared by millions of people around the world. “Whatever you do won’t be enough, I heard their voices say. Try anyway.”
It is such sublime moments that make A Promised Land more than an average political memoir. The juxtaposition of the macro and the micro, the here and now versus the arc of history, is a recurring theme that will sometimes bring a tear to the eye.
After delivering one of the most famous speeches of his career, his address to the Muslim world known as the Cairo speech, Obama visits the Great Pyramids of Giza. Moved by an etching, he tries to imagine the “worries and strivings” that might have consumed the artist and the “palace intrigues, conquests and catastrophes” of the ancient world he occupied.
“All of it was forgotten now, none of it mattered, the pharaoh, the slave, and the vandal all long turned to dust,” he reflects. “Just as every speech I’d delivered, every law I passed and decision I made, would soon be forgotten. Just as I and all those I loved would someday turn to dust.”
Suzanne Lynch is Washington Correspondent
