March 25, 2021 21
than 12,000 Americans in 2010 or the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico the same year. In domestic
affairs, the most useful example for him
was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
took office when the US was gripped
by the Great Depression of the 1930s,
saved the system, and engineered a re-
turn to “pre- crisis normalcy”:
FDR understood that to be effec-
tive, governance couldn’t be so
antiseptic that it set aside the basic
stuff of politics: You had to sell
your program, reward supporters,
punch back against opponents, and
amplify the facts that helped your
cause while fudging the details that
didn’t. I found myself wondering
whether we’d somehow turned a
virtue into a vice; whether, trapped
in my own high- mindedness, I’d
failed to tell the American people
a story they could believe in; and
whether, having ceded the political
narrative to my critics, I was going
to be able to wrest it back.The story of his legislative and pol-
icy initiatives that Obama tells in A
Promised Land is one of aiming high,
issue after issue, and settling for what
he could get from the destructive par-
tisan politics he was dealt. He can feel
like the fisherman in Hemingway’s The
Old Man and the Sea, with the sharks
gnawing while he tries to get his catch
to shore. Obama’s doubts about the
wisdom of his circumspection and his
pursuit of cooperation with congressio-
nal Republicans have a lot to do with
how he looks back on his first term:
I confess that there have been
times during the course of writ-
ing this book, as I’ve reflected on
my presidency and all that’s hap-
pened since, when I’ve had to ask
myself whether I was too tempered
in speaking the truth when I saw
it, too cautious in either word or
deed, convinced as I was that by
appealing to what Lincoln called
the better angels of our nature I
stood a greater chance of leading
us in the direction of the America
we’ve been promised.He thinks sadly of the “awful cost”
of incremental change. “Not a single
House Republican would even consider
cosponsoring climate legislation.” For
some, a verdict has already settled over
Obama’s stewardship of the Republic:
he was a conscientious caretaker, but no
fire- eater. Theodore Roosevelt, Edward
Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton fought for
a national health plan, but Obama ac-
tually passed the legislation, and though
not what everyone wanted, Obamacare
is not incremental change. It made an
immediate difference to millions, while
the population still in need of coverage
crosses racial lines. This touches on a
problem of perception of failure among
some white Americans, which has to
do with the face of need being a black
face, historically, and therefore the re-
sistance, conscious and unconscious,
to having to be counted among the de-
prived, a nonwhite category.
Among the qualities the nation
misses in Barack Obama is his voice,
his civility of tone. He is very literary,
remembering his youthful discoveries
of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse,
Frantz Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks,
Michel Foucault and Virginia Woolf,
John le Carré and Toni Morrison, Saul
Bellow and Philip Roth, Reinhold
Niebuhr and the Persian poet Sa’adi.
“On any given day, under the high dome
of the capitol, you’d see a cross section
of America on full display, a Carl Sand-
burg poem come to life.” Obama prob-
ably knows a great deal of American
political philosophy. He has the gift of
being able to invest his written words
with the thrum of the spoken, making
it possible for him to appeal to a broad
audience without strain.
A Promised Land is long, serving sev-
eral purposes. Here is this big souvenir
of the first black presidency. Every day
brought reminders of how privileged he
and his staff were “to be playing a part
in writing history.” Obama takes you
all over the White House, never forget-
ting where he was:Although it’s not large, the Cab-
inet Room of the White House
is stately, with a rich red car-
pet adorned with gold stars, and
cream- colored walls with eagle-
shaped sconces. On the north side
of the room, marble busts of Wash-
ington and Franklin, sculpted in
the classical style, gaze out from
nooks on either side of a fireplace.
At the center of the room sits an
oval table made of gleaming ma-
hogany and surrounded by twenty
leather chairs, a small brass plaque
affixed to the back of each one sig-
nifying where the president, the
vice president, and various cabinet
members should sit. It’s a place for
sober deliberation, built to accom-
modate the weight of history.The residence, the Oval Office, the
colonnade where he was most able to
be alone with his thoughts, Air Force
One, the Situation Room:Thanks to the movies, I’d always
imagined the Sit Room as a cav-
ernous, futuristic space, ringed by
ceiling- high screens full of high-
resolution satellite and radar im-
ages and teeming with smartly
dressed personnel manning banks
of state- of- the- art gizmos and
gadgets.Instead, he found a nondescript con-
ference room on the first floor of
the West Wing. “But make no mis-
take, it was weird,” he says of his new
circumstances.
Obama’s memoir is also a letter
of thanks to friends, classmates, co-
workers, campaign staff, volunteers,
White House staff, Secret Service,
cabinet, elected officials, generals,
colleagues. He doesn’t merely men-
tion people, he describes them, pres-
ents everyone he had dealings with in
entertaining or insightful character
sketches. It suggests that his ability to
respond to American variousness is in
part a reflection of his literary imagi-
nation. During that first presidential
campaign, he began to see himself as a
vessel, a conduit for the stories of oth-
ers. He says his speeches became less
about his positions and more a chroni-
cle of the voices he heard. (It is possible
to lose count after fifteen of how many
times Obama says “folks.”) He tells us
that he does not believe in destiny, but
he accepts that you don’t choose the
time, it chooses you: “The country was
desperate for a new voice.”The understanding presence through-
out Obama’s narrative is the First Lady.
Before his 2004 US Senate campaign,
she told him, “This is it, Barack. One
last time. But don’t expect me to do
any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn’t
even count on my vote.” He says she is
the person most able to tell him what’s
what, to get him to stay real. Michelle
Robinson Obama revealed in her au-
tobiography, Becoming (2018), the
price in self- suppression she paid to
do her duty with such good grace. The
Obamas married in 1992 and had two
daughters whom the press left alone,
“an act of basic decency that I deeply
appreciated,” the former president
notes. The girls grew up lovely, as black
grandmothers used to say, in the White
House, playing like Caroline Kennedy
inside the Resolute desk.
Dreams from My Father (1995) is
Obama’s coming- of- age memoir; The
Audacity of Hope (2006) his campaign
manifesto. A Promised Land is polit-
ical history, his detailed record of his
administration’s progress. He is mod-
est. If he praises a speech, it will be one
that someone else wrote. He stresses
the importance of team effort and con-
sultation, and shares with us seemingly
every step of trying to get a piece of leg-
islation passed, mindful of the people
who have invested time, emotion, and
thought into it:That was another lesson the presi-
dency was teaching me: Sometimes
it didn’t matter how good your pro -
cess was. Sometimes you were just
screwed, and the best you could do
was have a stiff drink—and light
up a cigarette.He laughs at the carefully rationed
smokes he permitted himself in the
White House colonnade, hidden from
his daughters. Then he had to quit and
furtively take up nicotine gum.It was always Moral Monday in Obama
City. Not a whiff of corruption, during
all those years, from the basketball-
playing policy wonk working on the
reduction and someday elimination
of nuclear weapons. The habitually
powerful in their inherited insolence
resented the changed air blowing
from Obama’s Oval Office. It was bad
enough that a black man was in charge
of the money and of federal patronage.
His upbringing with his white mother
and white grandparents made it im-
possible for him to believe that “white
people were irremediably racist.” Yet
he knows that women and people of
color often have the goalposts moved
on them at a critical point in the game.
In 2009 Harvard professor Henry
Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a
heated exchange with a white police of-
ficer responding to a breaking and en-
tering call from a neighbor of Gates’s.
Obama said in passing that the police
had “acted stupidly.” Police unions and
enough of white America exploded
with indignation, leading to the “dam-
age control” of the “Beer Summit” in
the White House garden between Gates
and the arresting officer, with Obama
in shirtsleeves, mediating:It was my first indicator of how the
issue of Black folks and the po-
lice was more polarizing than just
about any other subject in Ameri-can life. It seemed to tap into some
of the deepest undercurrents of our
nation’s psyche, touching on the
rawest of nerves, perhaps because it
reminded all of us, Black and white
alike, that the basis of our nation’s
social order had never been sim-
ply about consent; that it was also
about centuries of state- sponsored
violence by whites against Black
and brown people, and that who
controlled legally sanctioned vi-
olence, how it was wielded and
against whom, still mattered in the
recesses of our tribal minds much
more than we cared to admit.It is not a surprise that a young
working- class white police officer
handcuffed a black tenured professor
who was giving him a tongue- lashing
he hadn’t the wit to deal with. But it is
still a surprise that the polls said “the
Gates affair caused a huge drop in my
support among white voters, bigger
than would come from any single event
during the eight years of my presidency.
It was support that I’d never completely
get back.” To try to prove a black pres-
ident could be the president of every-
one, Obama was obliged to exhibit the
restraint of a constitutional monarch.
The murders of Trayvon Martin
and Michael Brown wait for Obama’s
second volume, but he saw in his first
presidential campaign signals of the
moral collapse to come. For starters,
vice- presidential candidate Sarah Pal-
in’s “incoherence didn’t matter to the
vast majority of Republicans; in fact,
anytime she crumbled under question-
ing by a journalist, they seemed to view
it as proof of a liberal conspiracy.” He
is disdainful of the hypocrisy of the Re-
publicans who complained about fall-
ing standards in society but shrugged
off Palin’s ignorance. She had good
instincts and therefore didn’t need to
have basic knowledge about govern-
ment or foreign policy.
Obama won the election; the Tea
Party got going by throwing itself into
opposition to his health care proposals.
Its members heckled representatives,
disrupted meetings. Obama points out
that there was nothing new in the Tea
Party manifesto. It was anti- taxation,
depicting federal government as having
been taken over by selfish liberal elites.
Obama also notes that the Tea Party
was not a spontaneous, grassroots
movement but had been constructed
initially by Americans for Prosper-
ity, an organization bankrolled by the
Koch brothers. However, it quickly
came to represent what Obama calls
a populist surge within the Republi-
can Party. He says that a part of him
understood the anger of white workers
at the stagnation they’d experienced
for decades, the feeling that things
were being done for other groups while
they were neglected. He even says that
he had to admire the speed with which
the Tea Party mobilized, but he was not
prepared for the violence of the rheto-
ric unleashed against him, a Muslim
born in Kenya, it was claimed.Then came his first White House
Press Corps dinner. He and the First
Lady “motorcaded” over to the Wash-
ington Hilton, where the president
paid Trump back for “birtherism,” the
race baiting that Trump and Murdoch-
shaped news businesses exploited for
ratings. The “conspiratorial musings”