Barack Obama’s A Promised Land tries to do God’s work as per Simone Weil:
It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. There is, indeed, a providential mechanism, but it only works in such a way as to mix a little genuine greatness with a lot of spurious greatness; leaving us to pick out which is which. Without it we should be lost.—”The Need for Roots”
Take the following essay on Obama’s memoir and the complementary posts on the legacy of Charles and Shirley Sherrod as a modest attempt to make First of the Month into another very human mechanism of historical transfer.
I
Someone—was it C.L.R James?—once paired the Montgomery Bus Boycott with the Hungarian Revolution, noting these two events were the most unforeseen and hopeful happenings between the end of WWII and the 60s. Plenty of uninspired leftists would resist linking those freedom movements. Back in the day, Fellow Travelers beamish about Leninism/Stalinism were delinkers. So were later generations of anti-American progressives. The sort who felt the fall of the Wall was kind of a drag even if it was a world historical miracle.
Barack Obama was never down with them, per this passage from A Promised Land, which is folded into an account of a NATO-focused European trip that included a stop in Prague (where he had a chat with Vaclav Havel):
I had been in law school in 1989. I recalled sitting alone in my basement apartment a few miles from Harvard Square, glued to my second-hand TV as I watched what would come to be known as the Velvet Revolution unfold. I remember being riveted by those protests and hugely inspired. It was the same feeling I’d had earlier in the year, seeing the solitary figure facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square, the same inspiration I felt whenever I watched grainy footage of Freedom Riders or John Lewis and his fellow civil rights soldiers marching across Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma. To see ordinary people sloughing off the fear and habit to act on their deepest beliefs, to see young people risking everything just to have a say in their own lives, to try to strip the world of the old cruelties, hierarchies, division, falsehoods, and injustices that cramped the human spirit—that, I had realized was what I believed in and longed to be a part of.
Obama’s expression of faith isn’t likely to speak to anti-capitalists whose concepts of people power are walled in by ideology. (To them he’ll never be more than a figure of neo-liberal consensus.) But A Promised Land also challenges center left types who assume they share Obama’s world-view without feeling his populist imperatives. The book clarifies how Obama’s politics are rooted in moments when movements of everyday people have made good trouble.
We all know his 2007-8 campaign became a vector for young people yearning to live through an unruly democratic experiment, though Obama would surely warn against conflating that anti-Establishment insurgency with struggles of youthful revolutionaries inside the Iceberg (to use Bob Moses’ term for the Jim Crow South) and behind the Iron Curtain. Obama et al. didn’t face the Klan or Russian Tanks.[1] Yet there was still something vaguely heroic about their stubborn pursuit of public happiness. A Promised Land’s section on the days of gold when Obama’s soulful supporters swung Iowa for him belong in any canon of democracy. On the decisive night he and his crew ditched the press to visit a school outside Des Moines where the caucuses were scheduled to begin in an hour or two. What they found was a “noisy festival of humanity…
No age, race, class, or body type appeared unrepresented… Over and over again people rushed up to tell me that they’d never caucused before—some had never even bothered to vote—and that our campaign had inspired them to get involved for the very first time.
Looking back on that moment in the moment (on the ride back to Des Moines), Obama images himself and everyone in the car with him trying to take in the lesson they’d learned in that packed Iowa high school: “we were mostly quiet, processing the miracle of what we had just witnessed.” Obama allows he knew then he’d been part of something “real and noble.” Deep (democracy) calls to deep. He thought of his late mother, tearing up as his companions looked away.[2]
Obama’s invocation of his mother goes beyond the particulars of his raising. It instantiates a kind of innocence that may be the best armor for a politician out to represent The Democracy in a massive country where cynics lead a disloyal opposition.[3] The great French historian Michelet once limned the qualities required for avatars of democracy:
Three things are required which are very rarely found together. Genius and charm (do not imagine that the people can be made to swallow anything insipid, anything weak). A very sure tact. And finally (what a contradiction?) there must be a divine innocence, the childlike sublimity which one occasionally glimpses in certain young beings but only for a brief moment, like a flash of heaven.
Obama’s account of his campaign in Iowa implies it was lit by something close to a “divine innocence.”
II
Obama’s angle on the Yes We Can campaign is indispensable—more on that anon—but it’s not as comprehensive as, say, Heilemann and Halperin’s Game Change. The same goes for Obama’s report on the financial crisis that blew up as he ran against John McCain. A Promised Land serves as a supplementary source here. Journalist Michael Grunwald’s The New New Deal (which devoted 500 pages to the first large stimulus package)[4] provides more details and insights into economic policy than Obama’s text, as does Stress Test, the book on the Great Recession that Grunwald collaborated on with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
But A Promised Land, which takes in the first years of Obama’s first term and ends with the killing of Bin Laden, covers much more ground than Grunwald’s nitty gritty twofer. I’ll allow this reader missed one figure who didn’t make the cut: where’s Shirley Sherrod? In case anyone’s forgotten, Mrs. Sherrod was the veteran of the civil rights movement (her husband Charles was SNCC’s main man in Georgia) who the Obama team rushed to fire in the summer of 2010 after Breitbart News released a doctored video that made her look like a racist. I grasp why Obama wouldn’t want to linger over one of the lowest moments in his tenure. Yet nobody should forget Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ shifty eyes and telltale glasses grabs as he double-talked around the White House’s role in the firing of an employee in the Department of Agriculture. Or Ms. Sherrod’s lucent smile when she watched him apologize to her on tv in real time. Not that she gloried in Gibbs’ comeuppance or his boss’s. Mrs. Sherrod made her disappointment with Obama et al. into an occasion for grassrootsy affirmation (and solidarity) during a memorable tv interview:
I don’t want [Obama] to apologize to me. I’d love to have a conversation though…I’d like to talk to him about the experiences of people like me, people at the grassroots level, people in rural America, people in the South. I know he doesn’t have that kind of experience. Let me help him a little bit to understand how we think, how we live and the things that are happening.….We are people who struggle every day, who do the best we can in our communities, who love this country, who love him. We want him to be successful because we feel he thinks, in some ways, like we do. And we think that’s good for the country.
I once argued Sherrod’s nuanced mix of emotional identification –“We are people… who love him” – and critical distance – “he thinks, in some ways, like we do”—offered a fine contrast to attitudinizing of self-enrapt progressives who started hating on Obama before his first Inaugural. (Her forbearance still seems right on—and it was on display again when she published her autobiography, The Courage to Hope. Don’t be fooled by Sherrod’s little dig at Obama’s catchphrase. When Ta Nehisi Coates interviewed the new author in 2012, she made sure there was nothing in the transcript of their colloquy that would hurt the president as he was running for re-election.) Now, though, I’m struck even more by the country valence of her down home tones. Richard Goldstein recently argued Democrats must dump class-bound, Ivy-esque versions of diversity. Sherrod’s invocation of “people at the grassroots level” anticipated Goldstein’s point about differences within difference: “people who share an identity are not the same when their class positions differ.” Looking back at Sherrod’s case statement in the aftermath of her firing (and before her less than restorative phoner with Obama who proposed she read Dreams from My Father (!?)), I’m reminded how she prepped us for Goldstein’s call to “solicit leadership from workers, so that our movement doesn’t have a Brahmin face.”
III
Obama may have failed to ensure his administration looked and sounded like America since few of its most prominent figures grew up beneath the gentility, yet A Promised Land proves Obama isn’t dim about intersections of class and race. He starts right in (on page 2!) memorializing encounters with support staffers at the White House whom he never reduces to “the help.” He names names of groundskeepers and valets and butlers. These everyday people are as much a presence in his book as world leaders and his insistence on getting them into his story testifies to his democratic instinct. (As does this remark sparked by critics of his Supreme Court pick Sotomayor who worried she lacked “intellectual heft”: “I’d met my share of highly credentialed, high-IQ morons and had witnessed firsthand the tendency to move the goalposts when it came to promoting women and people of color.”) His vignettes also bring home his symbiosis with African Americans of all kinds and conditions:
The most senior butlers were a pair of big, round-bellied Black men with sly senses of humor and the wisdom that comes from having a front-row seat to history…[Von Everett and Buddy Carter] were barely distinguishable from Marian’s brothers or Michelle’s uncles and in that familiarity they became more, not less, solicitous…
“We just want to make sure you’re treated like every other president,” Von explained.
“That’s right,“ Buddy said, “See, you and the First Lady don’t really know what this means to us. Mr. President. Having you here…” He shook his head: “You just don’t know.”
Obama had a clue though. On this score, another set-piece from the book is likely to become part of Americans’ heritage. Obama recalls the closing argument that convinced his reluctant wife to let him run for president in 2008…
Here’s one thing I know for sure, though, I know that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be president of the United States, the world will start looking at America differently. I know that kids all around this country—Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids who don’t fit in—they’ll see themselves differently, too, their horizons lifted, their possibilities expanded. And that alone…that would be worth it.
The room was quiet…
Michelle stared at me for what felt like an eternity. “Well, honey,” she said finally, “that was a pretty good answer.”
It surely came through to the late Amiri Baraka who once cut to the race when confronted with (what he called) soi disant radicals unimpressed by Obama’s win in 2008: “First of all the election of Obama has done more to bring some aspect of equality to the society than reams of pseudo-leftist posturing.” Back then, Baraka grasped complexities of Obama’s role as an anti-racist exemplar, chiding those who trashed the candidate’s careful approach to a “black agenda”: “He’s not running to be president of the NAACP!” Not that black Marxist Baraka didn’t wish Obama would try harder to be a tribune of the working class. It occurs to me a passage from Baraka’s unillusioned report on the 1988 Democratic Convention (which I apologize for citing again since I quoted it recently in a piece on rappers who speak to “Black Men Working”) defines a realm that’s a little outside Obama’s emotional and political reach. Baraka preserved the imperishable litany for the Rainbow’s working class in Jesse Jackson’s great ’88 Convention speech—“Most working people are not on welfare. They work hard every day that they can. They sweep the streets. They work. They catch the early bus. They work. They pick up the garbage. They work. They feed our children in school. They work. They take care of other people’s children and cannot take care of their own…” Baraka’s invaluable historical record reminds us Obama lacks Jesse’s knack for getting mighty real about lives on the margin. One can be moved—even exalted—by Obama’s rhetoric and accomplishments without pretending he’s realized the promise of Jesse’s Rainbow Coalition. The double truth of it is: Obama’s movement got beyond the horizon without getting over the rainbow.
IV
Jesse Jackson Sr. was ambivalent about Obama’s run (though his son Jesse Jackson Jr. was all in). Other older stalwarts of the Civil Rights Movement walked with Obama during his campaign. He recalls the memorable celebration of Selma’s Bloody Sunday “where respected elders”—including Reverends Joseph Lowery, C.T. Vivian, and Fred Shuttlesworth—“had his back.” His nod to another elder with roots in the Southern Freedom movement who weighed in for him during the 2007 Democratic primaries will take on a new resonance in the wake of the last presidential campaign:
When [Bill Clinton] had suggested ahead of the New Hampshire primary that some of my positions on the Iraq War were a “fairy tale,” there were Black folks who heard it as a suggestion that the notion of me as a president was a fairy tale, which led Congressman Jim Clyburn, the majority whip—South Carolina’s most powerful black official and someone who up until then had maintained a careful neutrality—to publicly rebuke him.
Obama gentles Bill, distancing himself from those “Black folks” who perceived a racial tinge in Clinton’s New Hampshire gambits and appeals to white voters in South Carolina, where Clinton averred to one largely white audience that Hillary “gets you.” (No doubt Obama has reasons to go easy on the Big Dog. After all, Clinton helped Obama roll during the 2012 campaign by making the case for his stewardship of the economy in a stem-winder at the Democratic Convention.) Obama offers something way less than a penetrating account of race-based tensions between the Obama and Clinton campaigns. He acknowledges his own team may have been too defensive at times and he passes over ugly turns during the run-up to the Carolina primary after one of Hillary’s prominent black supporters – Robert Johnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment TV (BET) – insinuated Obama had been cracking up in the 80’s. Johnson dove into the gutter as he was introducing Hillary at an event and defending her remark that the Civil Rights Movement required “a president to get it done” (i.e. LBJ). The Clinton campaign put out a statement denying Johnson meant to defame Obama, though the man himself apologized once it became clear nobody was buying that lie. I can understand why Obama avoided dredging all that up, but there’s a danger in going high here. Historian Sean Wilentz (F.O.B.), who’s still a prominent figure in his profession, once tried to sell a fantasy the Obama campaign engaged in “the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states’ rights.”[5] While I wouldn’t expect Obama to directly address such nonsense, I hope his circumspection doesn’t enable anyone to erase the Clinton campaign’s bad actors from official history.
I’m reminded just now Wilentz disserved democracy again when he spun the famous speech Obama gave after news broke about Reverend Wright’s anti-American rhetoric. Wilentz trashed Obama’s acts of imagination, suggesting his “Toward a More Perfect Union” oration came down to an assault on…Geraldine Ferraro! (Obama actually treated the first woman candidate for Vice President—and Clinton campaign surrogate–with respect, upholding her historic role after Ferraro had spoken disdainfully of him.) Obama’s speech chronicle implicitly answers another charge leveled by critics who claimed he “threw his grandmother under the bus” when he invoked her floating fears of random black men. His Toot, who raised him along with mother, was a taciturn woman and Obama didn’t expect over the top praise when he checked in with her in Hawaii after his speech to get “the most important review”:
“That was a very nice speech Bar.” She told me. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
“Thanks Toot.”
“You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?”
“I know.” I said. And it was only after I hung up that I allowed myself to cry.
Obama himself is a shrewd speech analyst. Reviewing his 2004 Convention oration, he lets a reader know what it feels like from within when an orator gets into a groove:
But there comes a point in the speech where I find my cadence. The crowd quiets rather than roars. It’s the kind of moment that I’d come to recognize in subsequent years, on certain magic nights. There’s a physical feeling, a current of emotion that passes back and forth between you and the crowd, as if your lives and theirs are suddenly spliced together like a movie reel, projecting backwards and forwards in time, and your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking, because for an instant you feel them deeply; you can see them whole. You’ve tapped into some collective spirit, a thing we all know and wish for—a sense of connection that overrides our differences and replaces them with a giant swell of possibility—and like all things that matter most, you know the moment is fleeting and that soon the spell will be broken.
The afterglow from Obama’s first “race” speech faded fast. He never put a spell on Reverend Wright who went off on him a week later at a DC press conference. Obama’s campaign was reeling at that point (thanks in part to the candidate’s “bitter clingers” gaffe). A Promised Land’s account of the final stage of the Wright episode builds to a darkly comic scene. Obama recalls a small gathering after a campaign event in Indiana (which had featured Stevie Wonder), where he hung tight with three other black guys—a couple of his Chicago buddies and body man Reggie Love. They all drank beer and broke each other up with imitations of Rev. Wright’s greatest hits, teasing their way through the prospect that a Black nationalist preacher might make it impossible for the Black nation’s candidate to break the caste ceiling. Campaign manager David Axelrod walked into their party, looking forlorn and bringing word polls had Obama losing decisively in Indiana. (Didn’t turn out so bad but who knew in that moment.) Obama wasn’t trying to hear that…“I said, Axe, I love you, but you’re a downer. Either grab a drink and sit down with us or get the fuck out.” Axelrod leaves the brothers alone who go back to stomping their blues. Obama doesn’t talk up their Black solidarity. He leaves it for readers to color in this American story on their own.
V
He’s more teacherly in another scene of Black American intimacy. Many readers may remember Obama holding his mother-in-law’s hand as they sat together “in companionable silence” (to use Obama’s phrase) and watched the returns on election night in 2008. At the time, I thought she was comforting him, since he’d just lost Toot who’d died the day before. But it seems Obama was helping his mother-in-law handle Change she wasn’t quite ready to believe in: “My mother in law made no pretense of being relaxed…I noticed her sitting on the couch, her eyes fixed on the television, her expression one of disbelief.” Obama tried to fathom for his reader what a Black president meant to an elder who’d grown up assuming White America was founded on contempt for her people. Alive to her shock and awe…
I took a seat next to her on the couch. “You ok?” I asked
Marian shrugged and kept staring at the television. She said: “This is kind of too much.”
“I know.” I took her hand and squeezed.
That sequence has a kind of bookend in A Promised Land, though the second squeeze lets Obama get his arms around a family-of-pops universalism rather than grab hold of “black experience.” On a Brazilian trip, Obama was put out when his daughters seemed blasé after they hear they might miss a chance to go with their dad to see Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue due to heavy fog. He felt distant from them, as they listened to their iPods and thumbed through magazines—scared he’d missed too much of their childhood. But the fog lifts and their trip up the mountain is back on…
A massive, shining figure seemed to beckon us through the mist. As we made our way up a series of steps, our necks craning back to take in the sight, I felt Sasha grab my hand. Malia slipped an arm around my waist.
“Are we supposed to pray or something?” Sasha asked.
“Why not?” I said. We huddled together then, our heads bowed in silence, with me knowing that at least one of my prayers that night had been answered.
Such memories of familial intimacy contrast with other scenes in A Promised Land where Obama seems blocked off from his wife. Michelle shuts the door on him (literally) the first time he brings up running for president. (She hates the thought her husband, who’d only just become a Senator, might disrupt their family life and hit the campaign trail all over again.) There seem to have been long periods during his first term in the White House when they weren’t fully present to each other. Obama’s portrait of their bond isn’t all doomy: “There were stretches when it really did feel fine…More often though, Michelle retired to her study once dinner was done, while I headed down the long hall to the Treaty Room. By the time I was finished with work, she’d already be asleep.” Lying next to her in the dark, Obama longed for days when “everything between us felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered.” He began having a recurrent dream in which he walks alone in a city where no-one recognizes him. He sits down on a bench, sips a drink (of something bland) and watches the world pass him by: “I feel like I’ve won the lottery.”
VI
Of course Obama is aware he’s been mad lucky in his time. His political campaigns have been informed by his faith that fortune favors the brave. His account of his effort to enact his signature policy achievement, The Affordable Care Act, includes a telling exchange with an advisor who’d just told him he might be able to pass the ACA without any Republican votes.
“I guess the question for you, Mr. President, is, do you feel lucky?”
I looked at him and smiled: “Where are we, Phil?”
Phil hesitated, wondering if it was a trick question. “The Oval Office.”
“And what’s my name?”
“Barack Obama.”
I smiled: “Barack Hussein Obama and I’m here with you in the Oval Office. Brother I always feel lucky.”
This is kind of a movie-made scene[6] but Obama tends not to shtick up his story of passing the ACA. It doesn’t require hype though the drama made citizens into policy grinds for a few seasons. Obama’s account of his final break with Republican senator Chuck Grassley (who’d been teasing the Dems for months, implying he might be brought around to support the ACA when, in fact, there was no chance he’d sign on) underscores how moral clarity may be at the mercy of dicey players. Anyone who was paying attention to the legislative process in 2009-10 will remember politicians and pundits on the right weren’t the only ones on the wrong side of history. I’m recalling just now how, in the run-up to the final vote, Lawrence me-love-me-long-time O’Brien insisted there was no way ACA would pass[7] even as Ezra Klein calmly demurred, reporting that Speaker Pelosi remained confident (and noting she wasn’t likely to put the bill on the floor unless she was sure she had the votes).
One trope in Obama’s account of his historic achievement jumped out at me. He tries it on first as he’s evoking the aftermath of the healthcare speech he gave in the fall of 2009, which bolstered Democrats even as it enraged some Republicans (one of whom—a dolt named Joe Wilson—notoriously raged “You lie!”). Obama ponders how he “never learned to sail a boat,” even though he grew up near the ocean in Hawaii, yet he still compares his (and his team’s) work on the healthcare bill to sailing on the open sea: “Maintaining speed and course in the constantly shifting winds and currents required patience, skill and attention.” He goes on to recount how “our ship” seemed to “crash” when Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley in the special election for Ted Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts and Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate.
His nautical metaphors might have sailed right by me if Eugene Goodheart hadn’t made a case that Obama’s approach to governance placed him in a long but imperfectly understood tradition of “trimming.” A term Goodheart lifted from the vocabulary of sailing, using it as a term of art for sincere efforts to steer the ship of state straight:
In order to keep a boat afloat and on course, the sails have to be trimmed as the winds change direction. The trimmer would like to draw a straight line down the middle, but the unpredictable behavior of the winds requires that he tack to left or right, creating a zig-zag motion, on order to keep the ship afloat.
For Goodheart the tradition of “principled trimmers” encompasses figures in English parliamentary history such as Lord Halifax, liberal intellects from Alexis de Tocqueville to Lionel Trilling, and consequential American presidents like Lincoln, FDR and Obama.[8] In Holding the Center and his follow-up, The State of our Disunion: The Obama Years, Goodheart defended Obama against dogmatic Leftists who assumed there was nothing behind the president’s style of liberal will but opportunism and a craven readiness to enlist Republicans. Obama’s defense of his own trimming in The Promised Land doesn’t invoke Brit parliamentarians but he does place himself in relation to previous presidents, noting there were plenty of zigs and zags in the New Deal, notwithstanding the fantasies of his critics who compared his Administration invidiously to FDR’s (and LBJ’s).[9]
VII
A glance at the Sunday Times review of A Promised Land suggests it might have made sense for Obama to spend a little more time laying out his a prioris. The reviewer, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, seemed to equate Obama’s trimming with shilly-shallying.
During Obama’s presidency, I would often say, accusingly, to my friend and argument-partner Chinaku, “You’re doing an Obama. Take a damn stand.” Doing an Obama meant that Chinaku saw 73 sides of every issue, and he aired them and detailed them and it felt to me like subterfuge, a watery considering of so many sides that resulted in no side at all. Often, in this book, Barack Obama does an Obama. He is a man watching himself watch himself, curiously puritanical in his skepticism, turning to see every angle and possibly dissatisfied with all, and genetically incapable of being an ideologue.
This is a muddle since it implies Obama’s stance causes problems that might be solved by “being an ideologue.” Yet a skeptic disposition didn’t stop Obama from taking a stand. His book proves he didn’t waste his first term Hamletizing. No doubt that’s one reason why it ends with the raid that killed Bin Laden. But there are other less harrowing episodes where Obama savors audacious acts. Like the time at the 2010 climate summit in Copenhagen when he and Hillary Clinton crashed a meeting of the leaders of China, Brazil, India and South Africa because they were “avoiding me and a deal we were trying to broker that would, ultimately, many years later, lead to the Paris Accords.” Obama relishes quoting body man Reggie Love who mused that his Boss and Hillary had been up to “real gangsta shit.”
Not to worry. Obama doesn’t come on as a macho, though he takes the measure of the world’s hard guys. He notes how Putin switches between rants and the “practiced disinterest” of “someone accustomed to being surrounded by subordinates and supplicants.” He drops a dime on Netanyahu who lied on him and the 80 year old Saudi King Abdullah who joked about the difficulties of keeping up with his dozen wives: “news reports put the number closer to thirty.”
Obama also revealed how the King presided over bribery as usual. After a lavish midday banquet “like something out of a fairytale,” Obama and his aides returned to his villa where they found a large travel case on the mantelpiece. Inside there’s “a necklace half the length of a bicycle chain, encrusted with what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rubies and diamonds–along with a matching ring and earrings.” Obama muses on how many other treasures like that had been left for leaders “whose countries didn’t have rules against taking gifts or at least not ones that were enforced.” He doesn’t bring up Trumpery here. Instead he focuses on all the young men in the Middle East whose lifetime earnings wouldn’t come close to “the cost of that necklace in my hands”: “Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half of million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better.”
That thought presages his account of his attempt to speak to the Ummah is his momentous Cairo speech. His focus there is is on the crowd’s responsiveness, which made him imagine “an alternate reality in which young people in that auditorium would build new businesses and schools, lead responsive, functioning governments, and begin to reimagine their faith in a way that was at once true to tradition but open to other sources of wisdom.” Having just tried to envision a new Middle East, Obama noticed the old guard was in the house: “Perhaps the high-ranking government officials who sat grim-faced in the third row could imagine it as well.”
Obama doesn’t inflate the weight of his Cairo speech (though it probably helped undercut phobic fantasies about America among Muslims). He’s surely aware it might seem like a diminished thing after all that went down in the Middle East in the ensuing decade. Not to mention what didn’t happen. I’m reminded the late great Israeli activist Uri Avnery was thrilled by Obama’s address but a year or two later when a Palestinian state remained a pipe dream, he began referring to the president as Oy-bama.
I was tempted to echo Avnery when the Kurds came up in The Promised Land. They don’t make it into the index but Obama mentions them when he describes his working relationship with the Islamist president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Obama notes Erdogan looked to the United State for “military and intelligence assistance in fighting Kurdish separatists who’d been emboldened by the fall of Saddam Hussein.” Obama may wish to wait for his second book/term to address Kurdish struggles, but this line, which is suffused with a sort of blankness about the history (and future) of a heroic people, is worse than dumb. I fear there’s no way to get from it to a full acknowledgement of the Kurds’ decisive role in the war against the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” “Emboldened” Kurds have been America’s indispensable comrades (even if Kurds are often at the mercy of their own factions). In the key battle of Kobane, which may turn out to be the turning point in the war against Islamist terror, the Kurds defeated ISIL and their down-low allies in Erdogan’s Turkey. Forgive me for getting ahead of Obama here but if he wants credit for helping envision a new Middle East he must do better by the Kurds in his next volume.
VIII
They have been the fighters on the ground in Iraq and Syria that America never found in the never-ending war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. That war gets a lot of space in A Promised Land. Obama dives into his Administration’s internal debates over troop deployments, detailing his sometimes tense relations with military commanders and the National Security Establishment. His first Secretary of Defense, Republican Robert Gates, served the president well by becoming a useful liaison to that Establishment, which was wary of Obama (the Nobel Peace Prize winner who’d never served in the military). Gates was an important player in the process that led to the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. As was Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke with feeling at a Congressional hearing, becoming the “first sitting senior commander in the U.S. military to publicly argue that LBBTQ persons should be allowed to openly serve.” Obama makes sure Mullen is in the picture when he recalls signing the bill repealing DADT in a room filled with former and active duty LBGTQ service members: “…the biggest applause was reserved for Mike Mullen—a long heartfelt standing ovation. As I watched the admiral standing on the stage visibly moved despite the awkward grin on his face. It wasn’t often, I thought, that a true act of conscience is recognized that way.”
Obama’s relations with the American military during his first term were defined by his refusals of obliviousness. Ending DADT is exemplary on this score as is his decision to reverse the Defense Department’s policy barring media coverage of the homecoming of soldiers’ caskets: “Having at least some of these transfers publicly documented gave our country a clearer means to reckon with cost of war, the pain of each loss.” Obama recalls his own participation in one of those solemn ceremonies and writes movingly about his visits to wounded soldiers in military hospitals. He commends the care patriots receive there (often provided by immigrants to America) and comments on how the proud patients were put out by “even a modicum of pity.” Obama tried to keep his emotional cool with them but he betrays anger when he talks back to a hawkish critic who “opined” that no Commander-and-Chief should visit the wounded since being a witness to their suffering might cloud a president’s capacity to make clear-eyed, strategic decisions. Obama allowed he was tempted to call “that man” (whom he refuses to dignify with a name) to explain: “I was never more clear-eyed than on the flights back from Walter Reed and Bethesda.”
On those flights and in his study years later, Obama is still processing the pathos of wounded patriots and emotions of those who love them:
I wouldn’t forget the barely suppressed anger in the voice of a father I met at one point, as he explained that his handsome son, who lay before us likely paralyzed for life, was celebrating his twenty-first birthday that day, or the vacant expression on the face of a young mother who sat with a baby cheerfully gurgling in her arms, pondering a life with a husband who was probably going to survive but would no longer be capable of conscious thought.
That last hit to the body and brain has extra force since A Promised Land amounts to a chronicle of Man Thinking (to borrow Emerson’s phrase). Obama’s mind is fully there on almost every page (even when he’s filling out the form for the historical record). His performance as a presidential memoirist reminds me of an older discourse about men (sic) of action vs. men (sic) of imagination. Back when John Kennedy was killed, certain mourners took the assassination as a heavy blow to Mind in America since Kennedy was one of those rare figures in public life with the reflective inclinations to bridge gaps between doers and thinkers.[10] They’d been prepped to pick up on Kennedy’s mix of wit and clout by decades of argufying about the role of intellectuals in politics. Andre Malraux’s interventions were central to such debates for much of the 2Oth C. and I went back to his life and times and texts after I finished A Promised Land.
IX
Malraux was a world-shaking novelist and publisher, aesthete and art thief, war hero and self-promoter, man of the left and Gaullist minister of culture. He wasn’t so much a Renaissance man as a 20th Century fox (per Isaiah Berlin). He was also, according to his most recent biographer, a compulsive fabulist. That separates Malraux from our scrupulous ex-President.
Malraux famously became De Gaulle’s confidant and his Anti-Memoirs, which range over his encounters with large figures such as Nehru and Mao, show off his own A-list adrenaline. By contrast, Obama never gets grand about his own meetings with world leaders. That’s in part because Nicolas Sarkozy was no Charles De Gaulle but it’s also true that Obama’s persona is more homey than Malraux’s. (Malraux’s biographer is tart about his subject’s mandarin-ish dailiness: “Malraux does not know the price of a bus ticket or a pound of butter. When living with [his last lover], he asked about the washing machine, ‘Do you know how to make that work?’ He still does not know how to put plates in a dishwasher.”[11]) Andre-the-Giant didn’t do family in his writing but Obama goes there repeatedly (as we’ve seen).
The opposition between their ways in the world, though, isn’t absolute. Neither was/is big on beautiful losses. (In his novel of the Spanish Civil War, Man’s Hope, Malraux tells how Lenin danced when he realized the Russian Revolution had lasted a day longer than the Paris Commune. It’s a story that almost made me strong enough not to hate Lenin, but Malraux wasn’t in Lenin’s camp; revolution wasn’t an end in itself for him.) The author of Man’s Hope had a bias toward what’s doable as does Obama who’s associated with “the audacity of hope” and the maxim: “Don’t do stupid shit.”
My look back at Malraux’s high/art life underscored Obama’s domestic and practical sides. It also helped me see our ex-President has an eye:
One thing cameras don’t capture about the Oval Office is the light. The room is awash in light. On clear days, it pours through the huge windows on its eastern and southern ends, painting every object with a golden sheen that turns fine-grained, then dappled, as the late-afternoon sun recedes. In bad weather, when the South Lawn is shrouded by rain or snow or the rare morning fog, the room takes on a slightly bluer hue but remains undimmed, the weaker natural light boosted by interior bulbs hidden behind a bracketed cornice and reflecting down from the ceiling and walls. The lights are never turned off, so that even in middle of the night the Oval Office remains luminescent, flaring against the darkness like a lighthouse’s rounded torch.
Obama’s Apollonian angle on the Oval Office shines like the cultural politics of Malraux—advocate of “Museums Without Walls.” Obama is out to open up this “sanctum of democracy” (where “day after day” the “light comforted and fortified me, reminding me of the privilege of my burdens and my duties”) to every citizen-reader.
X
Obama and Malraux share a rare gift for twinning patriotism with internationalism, though Obama is careful not to overthink the power of his own example. On a Brazilian trip where a staffer got giddy after a walk-around in the favelas—“I’ll bet that wave changed the lives of some of those kids forever.”—Obama acknowledges he’d told himself (and Michelle) something similar when he was justifying his own ambition. He goes on, though, to think against himself: “By my own estimation, my impact on the lives of poor children and their families so far had been negligible—even in my own country.”
Obama has kept on thinking straight. Take the 2018 Mandela lecture he gave in South Africa, where he placed Trumpism at the tip of a worldwide reactionary tsumani. He started with a better wave, bringing home to his Durban audience a sense of possibility that reconciled local and global autonomism.
When…as a law student, I witnessed Madiba emerge from prison, just a few months, you’ll recall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world.
Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable…
But that term, “inexorable,” is double-edged. Obama knows “forces of progress” deserved to stumble since globalization led to an explosion in economic inequality:
It’s meant that a few dozen individuals control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s a statistic. Think about that.
Our Man Thinking hasn’t become a born-again socialist. He’s not about heightening contradictions between urban haute-bourgeois elites and exploited workers in all the “fly-over” areas of the world. Yet his Mandela speech, which included a nod to the need for guaranteed annual incomes for national populations at the mercy of global capitalism, acknowledged right-wing populism’s appeal to working classes: “we’re going to have to worry about economics if we want to get democracy back on track.”
Back to A Promised Land, where Obama hints he may have made an error that helped get democracy in America off-track. He admits to having second thoughts about his mockery of the birther-in-Chief at the 2011 Correspondents dinner. His account circles around his own sense of complicity. He recalls how the audience “howled” at his jokes at Trump’s expense. Not a term that suggests he’s remembering with advantages. Still, he goes a little too easy on himself when he goes blank on the next line: “I couldn’t begin to guess what went through his mind during the next few minutes I spent publicly ribbing him.” What counts isn’t what’s in Trump’s mind (same as it ever was) but the fact that Obama took a “few minutes” to bash him. Maybe you always have to pay for engaging in a considered, extended act of public humiliation (as opposed to a reflexive comeback). Even if the human you’re mocking is someone like Trump who makes you appalled and embarrassed to be a member of the same species.[12]
XI
Though MAGA Man has an “unfortunate superpower,” as Thomas Beller noted in a recent piece ID-ing Trump with Ugly George—the pre-millennial public access cable pimp who was another id that came from Queens. Per Beller these con artists manage to avoid…
not only self-reflection, but the part of the inner dialog that includes morality as anything other than a chess piece to be deployed when useful. It is this absence, inside, that makes the pitch so compelling, when it is made manifest in the voice.
Obama, thankfully, lacks Trump’s superpower. Obama’s version of the past may occasionally be too self-exculpatory. His misanalysis of that “few minutes” at the Correspondents’ dinner seems slippery as does his choice to pass over what happened on his watch to Shirley Sherrod. Yet A Promised Land isn’t morally slack. Obama recalls how he began his political career with dirty hands since he came to run unopposed in his first campaign due to his ethically iffy choice to challenge signatures on the electoral petitions filed by other candidates. He goes on to admit his first campaign resulted in him missing the end of his mother’s life…
I thought about my mother and sister alone in that hospital room, and me not there, so busy with my grand pursuits. I knew I could never get that moment back. On top of my sorrow, I felt a great shame.
A confession that walks the line separating Obama from Trump.
There are other scenes in A Promised Land that are telling on this score. Obama recalls how three of his high school buddies came through for him during his first run for President. They became “as skilled at defending my record as anyone on MSNBC,” yet he’s alive to another side of their collective response to his rise. He catches a “certain bafflement” on their faces when they watch him preside as President at ceremonial occasions “as if they were trying to reconcile the greying man in the suit with the ill-defined man-child they’d once known”: “That guy? they must have said to themselves. How the hell did that that happen?”
In Trumpworld, by contrast, it would be unacceptable for a true believer to betray any hint of surprise that a bankrupt and bamboozler had become commander-and-chief. (Trump’s attitude toward his fans is simple: fleece ’em and fuck ‘em if they can’t stay star-struck.)
Obama leaves the contrast with Trump implicit again in another scene of instruction though his own designs on his reader are clearer this time. He recalls how his mother chided him after she found out he’d been part of a group who’d teased a kid at school.
“You know Barry…there are people in the world who think only about themselves. They don’t care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important.
Then there are the people who do the opposite, who are able to imagine how others feel and make sure they don’t do things to hurt people.”
“So,” she said looking me squarely in the eye. “What kind of person do you want to be?”
I felt lousy. As she intended it to, her question stayed with me for a long time.
Obama’s sentence structure highlights his mother’s intention but he’s the one who’s chosen to invoke her square biz, betting (I’m guessing) it’s the right fit for the Age of Trump.
XII
That long-ago lesson also distances him a bit from the Woke. Obama’s is partial to old verities and uses of tradition. He respects his elders (as he’s often said). His bows to the past are partly strategic. He always wants to give Americans—especially those who lean right—a political option that seems at once new and Old School.
His openness irritates tight-minded types on the left whose politics come down to one bottom line: “We were right.” I’m flashing this instant on that progressive voice who just upbraided liberals for going wobbly on George W. Bush, citing images of Bush “painting pictures and swapping cough drops with Michelle Obama.” When it comes to W., Obama gets the balance right in A Promised Land. He cites Bush’s professionalism and his family’s various kindnesses during the transition to his own presidency but also notes Bush advised him passage of TARP in the months before Obama’s inaugural meant “the tough stuff” had been taken care of: “You’ll be able to start with a clean slate.”
For a moment I was at a loss for words. I’d been talking with [Treasury Secretary] Paulson regularly and knew that cascading bond failures and a worldwide depression were still distinct possibilities….
“I took a lot of courage on your part to get TARP passed.” I said finally. “To go against public opinion and a lot of people in your own party for the sake of the country.”
That much at least was true. I saw no point in saying more.
His tact then chimes with another recent instance of his forbearance toward the Bush family. When Obama eulogized John Lewis last summer, he gave the first President Bush too much credit when it came to the 1964 Voting Rights Act:
…one of the crowning achievements of our democracy. It’s why John crossed that bridge, why he spilled that blood. And by the way, it was the result of Democrat and Republican efforts. President Bush, who spoke here earlier, and his father, signed its renewal when they were in office.
Obama slipped an inconvenient fact here. George H.W. Bush voted against passage of the original Voting Rights Act. Born to privilege in Connecticut, Bush I moved to Texas where he became a Congressman and his no vote anticipated the GOP’s Southern Strategy which has shaped the party since the early 70s. Obama’s desire to find the sweet spot near the center of American life is almost always defensible. It wasn’t the time or place to criticize Bush I and/or legacy Republicanism. I’ll say, though, as someone who’s had to contest Facebook memes claiming black Americans are mad to vote for Democrats rather than for the Party of Lincoln, I wish he’d avoided that obnubliatory turn.
OTOH, his eulogy was an effective argument for a Big Tent coalition to counter Trump’s racism. The following rant by a Trumpist relative of mine confirms Obama wasn’t too soft:
Former President Obama go to hell you disgust me for making a Eulogy for Rep. John Lewis go f**king political just so you can make your mouth cater to the left. My heart and prayers go out to the Lewis family for how he disgraced his memory by a rah-rah o slamming President Trump. You are inciting trouble and took away the beauty of the man who fought so strongly for peace…
XIV
In the New York Times’ second pass at A Promised Land, reviewer Jennifer Szalai suggested the explosion in April 2010 that tore through the Deepwater Horizon–“the oil pulsing in thick columns from the surrounding wreckage like emanations from hell”–gave Obama (and her) an image for the ugly upsurge of populist rage that’s pumped up Trump as well as his precursors like Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Szalai links Obama’s frustrations about trying to manage the “novelty and immensity” of the Deepwater Horizon disaster with his reflections, one hundred pages on, about the Republicans’ Reaction to his presidency: “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” he writes, “a sense that the natural order had been disrupted…
Obama doesn’t force the metaphor, but the events described in “A Promised Land” suggest that something very old and toxic in American politics had been unleashed too. It was as if the Republican Party, having sidled up to the jagged shores of white grievance, was starting to founder on them. As he writes of the Deepwater disaster: “Where the rest of the oil ended up, what gruesome toll it took on wildlife, how much oil would eventually settle back onto the ocean floor, and what long-term effect that might have on the entire Gulf ecosystem — it would be years before we’d have the full picture.”
The reviewer’s leap didn’t lose me. There’s something else, though, in Obama’s recollection of the Deepwater Horizon crisis that stuck. I locked into his account of the way Energy Secretary Stephen Chu “took charge.” Obama zeroes in on how Chu, underwhelmed by BP engineers, recruited a team of independent geophysicists and hydrologist to help him figure out how to cap the well. They came up with a contraption that worked and after eight-seven days, oil stopped leaking into the Gulf. In Obama’s executive summary of their work, David Axelrod becomes a story-board when he tells Obama how he ran into Chu at a deli near the White House, “sitting with his food barely touched, drawing various models of capping stacks on his napkin.”
A Promised Land upholds the value of this kind of reparative thought. Obama has drawn a map of public intellect that’s meant to empower his audience—even those of us (like Axe) who couldn’t follow Chu’s explanation of how that contraption would work. Looking back on his presidency, Obama’s remains true to the meld of sensibility and sense that made him run for office in the first place:
My ideal reader is some 25-year-old kid who is starting to be curious about the world and wants to do something that has some meaning. I want them to read this and say, “Okay, this is not all rocket science; this is something I could contribute to and make a difference in.”[13]
Notes
1 Not that the candidate didn’t face a non-trivial threat of assassination. Obama leaves it to friends to convey worries on this score. He doesn’t amp up their fears in A Promised Land. Doubt his wife was always so cool.
2 Obama commends David Plouffe and Valery Jarrett for their tact in this instant and it seems apt to consider how he presents them in A Promised Land. The author gives lots of love to players in his inner circle, but I was struck by one of his bows to Plouffe. Obama recalls reviewing the 2007-8 campaign with David Axelrod who was nominally Plouffe’s superior at the start of the process. Axelrod wonders at how Plouffe stepped up: “a fucking revelation.” There are no revelations about Valerie Jarrett in A Promised Land. Jarrett, by all accounts, was extremely close to the Obamas, but the author remains relatively reticent about their relationship, which may be a sign of just how tight they still are.
3 See Fredric Smoler’s brilliant account of Joe Biden’s “better angels” politics, which extrapolates from a childlike look on the president-elect’s face as he watched fireworks at a covid-cramped victory celebration. (Obama may be going over the top when he writes that he found a “brother” in Joe Biden, but, as he once said to a journalist, “I believe my own bullshit.”)
4 Obama echoes Grunwald when it comes to one major takeaway from the “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” Biden and his chief of staff then (and now) Ron Klain did a fine job overseeing the program: “An audit found that as a result of their efforts, just 0.2 percent of Recovery Act dollars had been improperly spent—a statistic that even the best-run private sector companies might envy given the amounts of money and the number of projects involved.”
5 Wilentz’s past errors don’t invalidate his recent critique of the 1619 project but it is hard to watch him come on from above on any issue where race matters.
6 I was reminded of dialogue in a notorious scene from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry where Clint dares a black perp—“Do you feel lucky?”– who then insists—“I need to know.”—only to find out it’s his time to die. Given Eastwood’s later role as a less than effective critic of Obama at the 2012 Republican Convention, perhaps Obama was having a little fun at Dirty Harry’s expense. [Editor’s Note: A reader has pointed out I seem to have misremembered the details of this scene. The Eastwood connection, though, may not be all in my mind.]
7 O’Brien had been involved in the original attempt to pass a healthcare bill during the Clinton Administration when he was a senate staffer. His negative attitude about the ACA’s prospects seemed tinged with envy.
8 Obama has been known to cite certain of Goodheart’s favorite writers but the ex-president’s trimming owes more to the black radical tradition than to white liberal imaginations. A passage in Dreams from My Father’s epilogue is worth revisiting since Obama melds the Declaration of Independence—the founding document of American democracy—with lines that invoke the range of African American protest: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. In these words I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delaney, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln, the struggles of Martin and Malcolm, and the unheralded marchers bringing those words to life.” Nick Bromell notes that Obama here (and elsewhere in his early writings) means to uphold the value of “antagonistic cooperation” that’s shaped the history of black struggle in America. Obama refuses to choose between figures who are often thought to be opposed. For him (and so many others) it’s Martin-and-Malcolm not one or the other. While Obama doesn’t lock back into his black radical inspirations in A Promised Land, he has lately invoked the importance of James Baldwin’s empathetic example. In a recent interview he commended Baldwin for daring to get inside his fellow Americans even if what he found was fearsome or hateful. If the black radical tradition has informed Obama’s clarity about the uses of compromise, it’s also clear (as Bromell points out) a black trimmer like Obama starts from a darker place than Goodheart’s tweeners. Black trimmers don’t need to Niebuhr their way to a tragic sense. Thanks to African American history, they come by it natural.
9 Per Goodheart: “Anyone who has read the history of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations has to be struck with the unfairness of the contrast. Their presidencies proceeded through fits and starts, hesitations and uncertainties. Rarely did they avoid making compromises to achieve results. Either unread in that history or willfully ignoring it, Obama’s critics express dismay and disbelief at every failure, every inconsistency, apparent and real, in his performance.”
11 Malraux: A Life by Olivier Todd
12 Pace Jim Dwyer.
13 Atlantic Magazine interview.