Barack Obama could have made a career as a successful writer, if he had chosen writing instead of politics. This is evident from his book A Promised Land in which he has displayed his creative language skills, gift of storytelling, poetic sensibility, intellectual depth, and philosophical ruminations. Obama attributes his learning to a number of authors who had influenced his own writing and inspired him. He keeps the readers interested throughout the thousand pages of its length with his stories, analysis of events and cerebral reflections. He delves deep into the grand political issues while at the same time paying attention to small details and giving graphic description of people, places and situations through his observant eyes and rich imagination.
Obama has approached his life of achievements with a deeply introspective and detached manner in his signature style of self-criticism and self-deprecating humour. He is a rare politician who openly admits his weaknesses, limitations, dilemmas, gaffes, flaws and failures. He tries ‘constantly taking stock to make sure I wasn’t buying into the hype and remind myself of the distance between the airbrushed image and the flawed, often uncertain person I was’. He has not been carried away by the glamour and power of the POTUS (President of the United States). He concludes, ‘for all its power and pomp, the presidency is still just a job and our federal government is a human enterprise like any other, and the men and women who work in the White House experience the same daily mix of satisfaction, disappointment, office friction, screw-ups, and small triumphs as the rest of their fellow citizens’. He confesses, ‘The work, I loved. Even when it didn’t love me back’. For him, ‘each day had its share of aggravations, worries, and disappointments. I’d stew over mistakes I’d made and question strategies that hadn’t panned out. There were meetings I dreaded, ceremonies I found foolish, conversations I would have rather avoided’.
Here is an example of his self-criticism, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low. But my care with words raised another issue on the campaign trail: I was just plain wordy, and that was a problem. When asked a question, I tended to offer circuitous and ponderous answers, my mind instinctively breaking up every issue into a pile of components and subcomponents. If every argument had two sides, I usually came up with four “e lede!” Axe (his advisor) would practically shout after listening to me drone on and on and on”. He then started making his statements brief and go with the absorption capacity of the audience.
He has not filled the book with just about himself. He has given generous credit to numerous people who inspired him, supported and advised him at all levels including his butlers, security men, secretaries, drivers and gardeners with whom he had sincere conversations and shared experience and jokes. He shows genuine interest in the lives of others and expresses appreciation for other people’s achievements and sacrifices.
Obama gives pen portraits of people describing their face, body and appearance with apt descriptions such as ‘tall and angular, with a jutting jaw, deep-set eyes’, ‘face of an Irish boxer’, ‘ long, hangdog face and throaty midwestern drawl’, ‘ruddy-faced with a whisk-broom mustache’, ‘voices soft as the patter of rain (Japanese emperor and his wife), ‘smile brushed with melancholy’, ‘raspy-voiced, lip-biting Arkansas charm (Bill Clinton), ‘the man was all muscle, sinew, and bone, with a long, angular face and a piercing, avian gaze’,’ broad-shouldered and sturdy with a Roman nose’.
Here is his take on some of the world leaders he had met:
British PM David Cameron – ‘possessed an impressive command of the issues, a facility with language, and the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life. With a youthful appearance and a studied informality (at every international summit, the first thing he’d do was take off his jacket and loosen his tie)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel – ‘I found her steady, honest, intellectually rigorous, and instinctually kind. But she was also conservative by temperament, not to mention a savvy politician who knew her constituency’.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy – ‘was all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric. With his dark, expressive, vaguely Mediterranean features and small stature he looked like a figure out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting’.
Sonia Gandhi – ‘striking woman in her sixties, dressed in a traditional sari, with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence’.
Rahul Gandhi – ‘has an unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject’.
PM Manmohan Singh – ‘a gentle, soft-spoken, wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest and uncommonly decent man’.
On the substantial political issues faced by him, he gives clinical and comprehensive analysis approaching the issues from all angles besides his own. He gives meticulous details of the issues, the various options to deal with them, the challenges in finding solutions and the compromises he was forced to make by the Republicans and other players.
Obama reveals the powerlessness of POTUS on three issues: impunity of the Wall Street bankers, the all-powerful Israeli lobby and the multi-billion dollar military-industrial complex.
He is of the view that ‘Wall Street really did increasingly function like a trillion-dollar casino, its outsized profits and compensation packages overly dependent on ever-greater leverage and speculation. Its obsession with quarterly earnings had warped corporate decision-making and encouraged short-term thinking. Untethered to place, indifferent to the impact of globalization on particular workers and communities, the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth in a handful of cities and economic sectors, leaving huge swaths of the country.’ He was outraged when the AIG executives pocketed 170 million dollars of bonus after the company was saved from collapse by the 70 billion dollar rescue by the Treasury department with tax payers’ money. These were the same executives who had caused the subprime lending crisis with their reckless greed. The regulatory system and legislation was gamed by the Republican leaders and lobby to ensure impunity for the fat cat bankers. Obama expresses his anguish saying, “many of the people most culpable for the nation’s economic woes remained fabulously wealthy and had avoided prosecution mainly because the laws as written deemed epic recklessness and dishonesty in the boardroom or on the trading floor less blameworthy than the actions of a teenage shoplifter”. The all-powerful POTUS could not touch them except expressing his anger in private.
He was equally helpless with the immunity enjoyed by Israel which got away with inhuman atrocities against Palestine because of the unconditional solid support by the US under the power of the Jewish lobby. The Israeli PM Netanyahu simply ignored Obama and went over his head to the Congress to get whatever he wanted. With his offensive tactics, he put Obama on the defensive and made POTUS powerless.
The generals and the arms manufacturers pushed for more wars and intensification of the ongoing wars for billions of dollars of profit and trillion dollar business. The military-industrial complex did not care for the peaceful and non-violent diplomatic methods preferred by Obama. This reminds me of the interview in which the Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma was asked about for his opinion on the loss of US jobs to China. He said, “The US had spent around two trillion dollars in the destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, If the money was used for constructive domestic development, the US would not have had any unemployment problem”. Obama reflects, “I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care”. He admits, “we meddled in the affairs of other countries, sometimes with disastrous results; we had invaded Iraq, broken that country, helped spawn an even more virulent branch of al-Qaeda”.
Since the right wing Republicans constantly attacked and teased Obama as incapable and unsuitable for being a commander in chief, Obama had to prove to them that he could also do what Bush did. This explains Obama’s regime change war in Libya and killing of Qaddafi as well as the raid and killing of Osama Bin Laden.
Obama has handled the ‘black man issue’ upfront in some places and subtly and discretely in other contexts. He preferred to send his vice president Joe Biden to negotiate with the Republican leader Mitch McConnell because of his ‘awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperating with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do’. Obama has analysed and come out with the reasons for the backlash in the ugly form of Trump and right wing extremism. According to him, the anti-intellectual and anti-reason movement started with Sarah Palin when she campaigned as vice presidential candidate along with John McCain. Unable to match the intellectual discourses of Obama, she took to trivializing and trashing Obama’s wisdom and erudition. Trump took it from where Sarah Palin left and made a career out of attacking the black man. Obama says, “antipathy had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety”.
Obama clarifies, ‘I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start’.
The book ends with the chapter on the daring raid and killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. I look forward to reading the second volume of the memoir Obama is working on.
I have read and reviewed his earlier books which were also equally inspiring:
The Audacity of Hope: https://floatingweed.blogspot.com/2009/02/audacity-of-hope-book-by-barak-obama.html
Dreams from My Father: https://floatingweed.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreams-from-my-father-obama.html
He wrote those two before he became president. But in this book he wanted to offer readers a sense of what it’s like to be the president of the United States. He has done it candidly and lucidly. Still I like better the part of his story before he became president. His narration of his emotions and feelings in chasing his dream and the struggle he went through are more fascinating and poignant than his writings on his presidential years.
In the last four years, President Trump has made US as a laughing stock and insulted the intelligence of people with his shameless, wicked, indecent, racist and juvenile statements and actions. It comes as a relief and a source of confidence and optimism that the same US which disgraced itself by voting for Trump, had elected and reelected a black man with a Muslim name. Obama’s success becomes even more admirable and amazing after seeing the disastrous presidency of Trump who had unearthed the ugliness from under the ground.
Obama could not have achieved the success alone by himself. He could have become a successful lawyer or writer with his talents and skills. But to become the president, he had to move the whole country, which has a built-in system to discriminate the blacks even from voting, let alone get voted. He had to get past the torturous systems of primaries, no-holds barred debates, dirty tricks of the opponents, scrutiny of the media and above all the formidable candidature of Hillary Clinton. Obama was supported, helped and guided through the process by thousands of Americans who believed in him and worked hard much before he became famous. He also got the votes of many Republican states and whites. Most importantly, credit is due to the old rural white folks of Iowa who elected him in the very first primary giving him the much needed critical moral boost in the beginning of the game. This is why Obama calls the country as “A Promised Land”.
