20 The New York Review
A Gift for the Long Game
Darryl Pinckney
A Promised Land
by Barack Obama.
Crown, 751 pp., $45.
Barack Obama’s first presidential cam-
paign had the atmosphere of a social
movement. In his memoir A Prom-
ised Land, the forty- fourth president
of the United States says he found in-
spiration in the early suffragists, labor
organizers, Gandhi, Lech WałĊsa, and
the African National Congress; in the
civil rights movement of Dr. King,
John Lewis, and Fannie Lou Hamer;
and in the values of Ann Dunham, his
mother, an anthropologist. The radical
expectations of many followed Presi-
dent Obama to Washington, supported
by the assumption that his being black
was in itself an expression of profound
change.
Obama observes that his political ed-
ucation had “inoculated” him against
“revolutionary formulas.” He came to
public service through community ac-
tivism. After university, he worked as
an organizer in the mid- 1980s in Chi-
cago with “a group of churches that
were trying to stabilize communities
racked by steel plant closures.” This ap-
proach to social change was not going
to be enough for him, “a reformer,
conservative in temperament if not in
vision.” His rise within the Democratic
Party he finds hard to explain, the con-
junction of ambition, nerve, other peo-
ples’ mistakes, timing, opportunity,
self- doubt, deeper self- belief. The Illi-
nois state senate led to the US Senate
and to his defining moment as keynote
speaker at the Democratic National
Convention in 2004. Along the way he,
like Lincoln, lost a congressional race:
I suppose there are useful lessons
to draw from that first campaign
[for the state senate in 1996]. I
learned to respect the nuts and
bolts of politics, the attention to
detail required, the daily grind
that might prove the difference be-
tween winning and losing. It con-
firmed, too, what I already knew
about myself: that whatever pref-
erences I had for fair play, I didn’t
like to lose.He tells us when a passing feeling of
helplessness or bitterness gets to him,
not unrelated to wondering if he is
doing the right thing in the middle of
the relentless multitasking the presi-
dency demanded of him. The transpar-
ency is completely charming, as if the
advantage of being a total square, i.e.,
the most famous man in the world, is
that you can tell everyone anything, or
anyone everything, or seem to have.
Every prince wears a mask:
I was almost forty [after losing the
primary for a congressional seat in
2000], broke, coming off a humili-
ating defeat and with my marriage
strained. I felt for perhaps the first
time in my life that I had taken a
wrong turn; that whatever reser-
voirs of energy and optimism I
thought I had, whatever potential
I’d always banked on, had been
used up on a fool’s errand. Worse,
I recognized that in running forCongress I’d been driven not by
some selfless dream of changing
the world, but rather by the need
to justify the choices I had already
made, or to satisfy my ego, or to
quell my envy of those who had
achieved what I had not.He had the wings for the journey to
the White House. Victorious as many
African- Americans felt in 2008, they
didn’t mind laughing out loud that it
took an economic meltdown to put the
first black man in the Oval Office. Al-
ready as president- elect, Obama was
working to save the banking system
and financial markets and reform the
credit card industry: “We were the fire
department.” He got little thanks for it,
certainly not from the “high rollers in
wood- paneled boardrooms” whom he
bailed out or the federal government
couldn’t go after because of various
financial regulations: “Their oblivi-
ousness drove me nuts.” For not seiz-
ing the moment to subdue financial
institutions or to assert federal power
over corporations, to bring about a day
of reckoning, he lost the Zuccotti Park
wing of “Yes We Can”:To this day, I survey reports of
America’s escalating inequal-
ity, its reduced upward mobility
and still- stagnant wages, with all
the consequent anger and distor-
tions such trends stir in our de-
mocracy, and 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.On the global stage, President
Obama projected the image that intel-
ligence had taken over United States
affairs, and that good governance
could happen if only his opponents,
foreign and domestic, would give peace
a chance. As impatient as he’d been to
see if he could get there, he discovered
once installed that he had a talent for
the long game. It made compromise in
both foreign and domestic initiatives
less onerous for him to accept than
congressional Democrats and some in
his administration maybe would have
wanted: “Now that they were in con-
trol, they were in no mood to see me
offer concessions to their former tor-mentors.” He would deliberate for so
long over his options in Syria, for in-
stance, that he appeared to do nothing.
That disaster was only just beginning
to unfold in his first term, but he recog-
nized the “limited influence” of the US:In the conduct of foreign policy,
I had to constantly balance com-
peting interests, interests shaped
by the choices of the previous ad-
ministration and the contingencies
of the moment; and just because I
couldn’t in every instance elevate
our human rights agenda over
other considerations didn’t mean
that I shouldn’t try to do what I
could, when I could, to advance
what I considered to be America’s
highest values.When he bowed to the emperor and
empress of Japan, he was denounced by
conservatives back home for being dis-
respectful to the memory of World War
II veterans: “I wondered when exactly
such a sizable portion of the American
Right had become so frightened and in-
secure that they’d completely lost their
minds.” His visits to the war wounded
at Walter Reed and Bethesda military
hospitals brought to his mind Lincoln
wandering through infirmaries during
the Civil War. He felt his responsibili-
ties so keenly—winding down combat
operations in Iraq, stepping up a “nec-
essary and just” US engagement in Af-
ghanistan as post–September 11 policy.
Obama as president had his Quiet
American’s faith in US exceptionalism:This much was true, though: At
the dawn of the twenty- first cen-
tury, the United States could legiti-
mately claim that the international
order we had forged and the prin-
ciples we had promoted—a Pax
Americana—had helped bring
about a world in which billions of
people were freer, more secure,
and more prosperous than before.At the same time, he was not threat-
ened by decolonization. Other coun-
tries remained respectful of American
power, he observes, but the West was
no longer the center for them. Former
colonies and once- subjugated coun-
tries considered themselves the equals
of their former occupiers. Moreover,
China’s economic success had made
“authoritarian capitalism” a “plausible
alternative” to Western liberalism in
the minds of young people throughout
the developing world. The American
way had to become desirable again,
a renewed dream. Obama speaks of
somehow saving and draining of hate
the young people in troubled places
recruited to terrorism. He saw closing
the military prison at Guantánamo Bay
as an important step in fixing Ameri-
ca’s counterterrorism efforts, even if he
could not manage to do so.
Obama mistrusted the “easy an-
swers.” The surprises and tough de-
cisions all came in waves, he says: the
financial crisis, the ongoing catastrophe
in Iraq, the drone strikes against al-
Qaeda, having to deploy more battal-
ions in Afghanistan, having to contain
the H1N1 pandemic that killed moreBarack Obama, Grayslake, Illinois, 2004 ; photograph by Phil McAuliffe,
from the exhibition ‘Phil McAuliffe: Witness,’ on view at Gallery 270,
Westwood, New Jersey, through March 14, 2021Phil^McAuliffe/Gallery^270