I have long found that memoirs by American politicians are full of humbug and new knowledge, especially those intended to pave the way to the White House like Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Kamala Harris’ The Truths We Hold, Cory Bookers United, and yes, the best of them, Barack Obamas The audacity of hope.
With his political career behind him, I hoped the former president would get a little more open, blunt, and daring in his new essay, The Promised Land.
Seven hundred pages in the book, I had mixed feelings, or maybe I was a little too generous with my hope. Obama may not be as politically handicapped anymore, but he is certainly legacy haunted.
My first impression on reading The Promised Land is that, unlike sitting President Donald Trump, who cannot articulate a thought or finish a sentence, Obama is a gifted writer because he is a brilliant speaker.
Indeed, the opening chapters show how his personal narrative, storytelling, and extraordinary oratorio, highlighted in his speeches against the Iraq war and address to the 2004 National Democratic Convention, drove him onto the national political scene. You played an important role in his rise from Illinois state senator to US senator and then to two-term president.
Obama appears thoughtful, forgiving, funny and sarcastic, as if he wanted to contrast his divisive, deceptive and miserable successor. It is as if the former president is haunted by the impact Trump’s victory has on his legacy and his attempt to undo everything that Obama is doing.
Indeed, it is significant that he decided to end the book with the assassination of Osama bin Laden and his humiliation of Trump at a White House Correspondents Association dinner.
Obama may be Trump’s opposite, but not because he accepts black nationalism the way Trump accepts white nationalism or domination. Rather because he deliberately or instinctively turns in the middle and always looks for two sides to each topic.
He’s the type who directs traffic and always puts himself at the center of any dispute, between hope and fear, idealism and realism, principles and interests, homeowners and bankers, grieving mothers and army commanders, protesters and police officers, young advisors and political veterans .
Likewise, Obama positions himself internationally between the Europeans and the Chinese, for example on climate change, between the Palestinians and Israelis, the Arab demonstrators and allied Arab dictators, whereby he almost always puts down the first roots and explains, justifies or even defends them.
He carefully contrasts the writing of letters to the grieving families of dead soldiers with his support for a military upswing in Afghanistan and accepts the Nobel Peace Prize with escalating war efforts.
He willingly reconciles the promise and the danger of his first two years in office, praising the impressive record of his administration and blaming himself for the democratic losses in the 2010 mid-term elections. He writes: “… it has proven that – whether for lack of talent, cunning, charm or luck – I had not managed to rally the nation, as the FDR once did, behind what I believed was right . “
His critics may view his memoirs as the memories of an opportunist, but it’s actually a long exposure in defense of pragmatism.
Obama claims to be inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and most revered American presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklyn Roosevelt, who presided over two of the toughest periods in US history.
Whether or not he will go down in history as one of these transformative leaders is too early to judge. But Obama seems to indicate that his success in being elected not once but twice as the first black president is in and of itself a transformative event for America.
To his credit, Obama, unlike his successor, looks like someone humiliated by experience and hurt by democratic reality.
He recognizes that during his tenure, the president can change some US guidelines but cannot change his political culture. He also admits that he lacked the political experience and political allies, considering he went from a freshman senator to a leading presidential candidate in just two years.
Likewise, his knowledge of the world was limited to his childhood in Indonesia and university friendships with international students. Obama hoped that through hard work and fresh new ideas, he could make up for what he lacked in experience.
But within two years the mood in the country had shifted to the right and the social, political and racial divisions in America had deepened.
Likewise, the foreign policy establishment, or the blob, proved powerful, tenacious, and determined. He said he came to end the war mentality but has been constantly undermined by both the military and the civilian establishment, including members of his cabinet.
Obama accuses himself of not being forceful enough, dare I say, like Trump. He expressly regrets failure to presciently urge Democrats to abolish the filibuster – a tactic used to prevent a bill from being voted on – which allowed Republican senators to undermine his agenda with just 40 percent of the seats or even block it.
But it wasn’t just the Republicans. Obama admits that America suffers from a deeper cultural and racial disease under a dominant (white) political culture that feels threatened by multiculturalism and is hostile to immigrants and foreigners.
Paradoxically, some of the most revealing passages in the book about America’s political culture are those he thought of but never spoke of during his time at the White House.
For example, he writes how the decline in his popularity in the polls after he labeled a policeman’s attack on a black man in Boston as “stupid” reminded him “that our nation’s social order was never simply consent was; It was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against blacks and browns. “
Or as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill showed: “We Americans love cheap gasoline and our big cars more than the environment.”
Obama also had more than a few illuminating things about his predecessor’s mistakes in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Israel, as well as hostility towards the Arab Spring, the domestic ramifications of disagreements with Israel, and the reasons for the stalled Middle East peace saying process “and more.
But that would have to wait for another day.
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