B2 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020
too. “Do we care to match the reality of
America to its ideals?” he asks in his preface.
It is the question that infuses the book and
the country it describes, just as closing the
gap between ideal and reality — even simply
acknowledging it can suffice sometimes —
animates the man and his life.
Obama meant to write a single-volume
memoir of his presidency, and I wish he had.
“A Promised Land” ends in the aftermath of
the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden,
with so much still left to revisit and
reconsider. Syria and the red line. Trayvon
Martin, Ferguson and Black Lives Matter.
Newtown and Charleston. The brutal 2016
campaign, Russian election interference,
and the shock of the four years since Obama
left office.
I don’t want to wait to learn how Obama
saw all this at the time or how he sees it now.
He connects Trump’s appeal to his own
presidency — “for millions of Americans
spooked by a Black man in the White House,
he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety”
— but Trump is not the focus of this book, nor
should he be. The 45th president appears
largely by implication and by contrast, as
when Obama regards Sarah Palin’s 2008
vice-presidential nomination as a forerunner
of the forces overtaking the Republican Party,
and when he details the process for meetings
and policy rollouts in his administration.
“Every document issued was fact-checked,
every person who showed up for a meeting
was vetted, every event was planned to the
minute, and every policy announcement was
carefully scrubbed to make sure it was
achievable,” he writes. Today, that reads like a
dispatch from a different world.
Obama also revisits his famous 2004
Democratic National Convention speech in
Boston, another call to create an America
aligned with what is best in us. That night, he
saw a country that was not red or blue, Black
or White, but united. Once again, though, he
looks back with ambivalence. “I’d intended it
more as a statement of aspiration than a
description of reality,” Obama now explains.
“But it was an aspiration I believed in and a
reality I strove for.”
Those two impulses — hope tempered by
caution, caution streaked with hope — cap-
ture the promise of “A Promised Land.”
Twitter: @CarlosLozadaWPCarlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The
Washington Post and the author of “What Were
We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the
Tr ump Era.”himself into moderation, even though the
very reason he’d left behind other roles — as a
community organizer, lawyer, state senator
and U.S. senator — was dissatisfaction with
the limits they imposed on him. “My heart
was now chained to strategic considerations
and tactical analysis, my convictions subject
to counterintuitive arguments... in the most
powerful office on earth, I had less freedom
to say what I meant and act on what I felt
than I’d had as a senator — or as an ordinary
citizen.”
But if you keep encountering the same
discontent, the same restlessness, wherever
you go, no matter the job, maybe it’s you. In “A
Promised Land,” Obama’s on-the-other-
handedness is his default setting. He worries
about politicians redirecting White frustra-
tions against racial minorities, yet he sympa-
thizes with those frustrations. He under-
stands the tea party anger, though he consid-
ers it misdirected. He affirms that the
regulatory state that conservatives so decry
has made American lives “a hell of a lot
better,” then adds the obligatory caveat:
“That’s not to say that every criticism of
federal regulation was bogus.” It’s a tic of
temperament but also of design. As early as
his college years, Obama cultivated the habit
of questioning his assumptions, which he
thinks “inoculated” him against the revolu-
tionary zeal of the Reagan-era left. The
vaccination has lasted.O
bama writes with the knowledge and
weight of history, an occupational
hazard of the presidency (though evi-
dently not for all presidents). He constantly
references other presidents — by my count, at
least 20 of them appear in “A Promised Land”
— pondering how Abraham Lincoln consoled
so many wounded soldiers or how Franklin
Roosevelt explained his policies during the
Depression.
He is a talented writer — and not just for a
politician — but he overdoes the history
lessons at times. Obama introduces virtually
every decision or conflict with some dutiful
background or policy overview, a habit that
can make for tedious reading. “Though I
hadn’t majored in economics, I was familiar
enough with John Maynard Keynes, one of
the giants of modern economics,” he explains
in a discussion of the stimulus debates.
“Since Marbury v. Madison.. .” he intones
when describing Supreme Court appoint-
ments. “Since the time of the czars, historians
had noted.. .” he lectures when musing on
Russia’s fatalism. I normally take notes whilepolitics and his speeches, which, as he puts it,
“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.” Yet it is
also a function of Obama’s innate caution, of
his skepticism — hopeful slogans notwith-
standing — of dramatic change.
In domestic policy and foreign affairs, in
debates over culture and race, Obama splits
differences, clings to the middle ground and
trusts in process as much as principle. The
first few months of his presidency “revealed a
basic strand of my political character,” he
writes. It turns out he is not a “revolutionary
soul” but a reformist one, “conservative in
temperament if not in vision.” Behind those
dreams, the audacity and all that promise is a
stubborn streak of moderation.O
bama says he wants to give readers “a
sense of what it’s like to be t he
president... to pull back the curtain”
on the day-to-day, and he succeeds in small
and big ways. Readers witness a 20-minute
tutorial he receives on proper military salute
etiquette (“Elbow a little farther out, sir....
Fingers tighter, sir”), learn Obama’s tips for
surviving international summits (“You sit
there, fighting off jet lag and doing your best
to look interested”) and brace themselves
when the president asks King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia how he keeps up with a dozen
wives. (His Majesty’s answer: “Very badly....
It’s more complicated than Middle East
politics.”) And I’ll never forget his first night
in the White House when, not knowing what
else to do, he walked around turning off
lights before finally going to bed. Such a dad
move.
But most illuminating is why Obama, after
winning his U.S. Senate seat from Illinois,
aspired to the presidency at all. “God, Barack... when is it going to be enough?” Michelle
Obama reproaches early on. His own intro-
spection is hardly more charitable. “Was it
just vanity?” he wonders. “Or perhaps some-
thing darker — a raw hunger, a blind
ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of
service?” He eventually reached a series of
justifications: to inspire a new kind of
politics; to bridge the country’s divides; and
to expand the horizons of young people of
color who would be inspired to see him take
the oath.
Such self-aware symbolism, so powerful in
the emotion of a historic campaign, can
become a hindrance once poetry gives way to
prose. “They had taken possession of my
likeness and made it a vessel for a million
different dreams,” he writes. “I knew a time
would come when I would disappoint them.”
Black activists and intellectuals — never sure
he would win, anyway — wanted him to take
“the most uncompromising positions” on
issues such as affirmative action and repara-
tions, Obama recalls. And he knows he
disappointed many when he did not mete out
“Old Testament justice,” as one senior official
described it, in response to bankers’ mis-
deeds in the mortgage crisis. “I wonder
whether I should have been bolder in those
early months, willing to exact more economic
pain in the short term in pursuit of a
permanently altered and more just economic
order,” Obama writes.
But the wondering does not last long. If he
had to do it all over again, “I can’t say I would
make different choices,” he decides. Return-
ing to a state of “pre-crisis normalcy” would
be good enough.
This practicality recurs throughout “A
Promised Land.” When an adviser suggests
that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright should not
deliver a public invocation at his 2008
campaign kickoff, Obama is frustrated by the
need to soften blunt racial truths for White
audiences, but he concludes that “as a matter
of practical politics” the adviser was right.
During the push for heath-care reform, he
wants to get tough on the pharmaceutical
and insurance industries but decides that, “as
a practical matter,” a conciliatory approach is
best. Same when he appeases some conserva-
tive Democrats by agreeing to strip the public
option out of the health-care proposal. “It
wasn’t the first time I’d chosen practicality
over pique,” he confides.
Obama tends to see all sides of everything.
On foreign policy, he admits that he was
never quite the “starry-eyed idealist” he
seemed during the presidential campaign
and that he owed as much to the realist
worldview, believing in restraint, wary of
unforeseen consequences, cognizant of the
limits of America’s ability to remake the
world. The splits among his foreign policy
team — young idealists such as Ben Rhodes
and Samantha Power, cautious veterans such
as Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton — reflected
Obama’s own ambivalence. On the Arab
Spring, for instance, “I shared both the hopes
of younger advisors and the fears of my older
ones,” he writes.
In this book, you often see Obama talking
LOZADA FROM B1In his memoir,
Obama keeps
his subject
at a distance
WAYNE BREZINKA FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTA PROMISED
LAND
By Barack
Obama.
Crown.
751 pp. $45I read; here, I wanted to grab a red pen and
slash out lines. For Obama, just about every
moment is a teachable one.
He also gives detailed shout-outs to count-
less aides and staffers — an admirable quality
in a manager, less so in the author of a
751-page book. He boasts that his first
presidential campaign sought to “challenge
the Washington playbook and tell hardtruths,” sentiments that are themselves
straight out of the Washington playbook. (It’s
the audacity of trope.) And he can overapply
the writerly gloss, as when he looks back on
Election Day in 2008: “Across the country
millions of strangers step behind a black
curtain to register their policy preferences
and private instincts, as some mysterious
collective alchemy determines the country’s
fate — and your own.” (Alternatively: “People
voted.”)
Obama’s erudition is most powerful not
when he squeezes in more history but when
he distills it. His recollection of a speech at
West Point leads to a perfect, one-paragraph
digression on the heroism and folly of
America’s wars, whether the Civil War, World
War II or Vietnam. “Glory and tragedy,
courage and stupidity — one set of truths
didn’t negate the other,” he writes simply.
Just as he does not outright condemn
American military action (he was, after all, a
president who personally approved drone
strikes against terrorist targets), neither does
he decry America as a land of prejudice,
beyond redemption. “The conviction that
racism wasn’t inevitable may also explain my
willingness to defend the American idea:
what the country was, and what it could
become,” he recalls.
And here we may get to the heart not just
of the American idea but of Obama’s idea,“A Promised Land” is less
a personal memoir than an
unusual sort of history, one
recounted by the man at
the center of it, a man who
seems always to be observing
himself in action.