By Michael J BrownA
mong the reviews of Barack
Obama’s new memoir, A
Promised Land, a theme has
emerged: Obama thinks
too much. That Obama thinks is no
surprise to anyone following his career
or holding this book, which weighs in
at 768 pages. But how does he think too
much?
For some, Obama’s mind is
exhausting because it is exhaustive.
The “degree of detail” with which the
president revisits policy debates might,
Julian Borger speculates, leave readers
searching for “a sweet spot between
Trump’s presidency by blurt and
Obama’s earnest prolixity.”
Reviewers not wearied by Obama’s
thinking are concerned with it.
Obama’s “prose is freighted with
uncertainty,” writes Eli Stokols.
Readers encounter “an acutely
self-aware individual.” Jennifer
Szalai describes “700 pages that
are as deliberative, measured and
methodical as the author himself.”
The towering text signals “faith on the
part of the former president – that
if he just describes his thinking in
suffi cient detail, and clearly lays out
the constellation of obstacles and
constraints he faced, any reasonable
American would have to understand
why he governed as he did.”
But in 2020 we know how that
book ends. Donald Trump became
president, and this year – in spite of
it all – he garnered nearly 74 million
votes. Obama’s faith in words, in
explanations, in all that thinking, may
seem misplaced. What if, instead of
being thoughtful, Obama had been
more forceful?
When Obama was president,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would say
in exasperation to her friend, “You’re
doing an Obama. Take a damn stand.”
This friend “saw 73 sides of everyissue, 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.”
In A Promised Land, “ Barack Obama
does an Obama”; he “turn(s) to see
every angle.” As Nate Marshall puts it,
Obama “never kicked that tendency
to off er four perspectives rather than
one response.” This toggling among
perspectives was, Szalai writes,
Obama’s process: “Decisions that
were made after taking into account a
variety of perspectives reassured him
that he wasn’t blinkered by his own.”
The passive voice there sounds telling.
When you take every perspective, doyou lose your own? When you adopt so
many vantage points do you still stand
for – or even in – one yourself?
Accounting for every perspective
includes one’s critics. The doubt then
comes from inside the building. Obama
“acknowledges his shortcomings as
a husband, he mourns his mistakes
and broods still on his choice of words
during the fi rst Democratic primaries,”
Adichie observes. “How much of this is
a defensive crouch, a bid to put himself
down before others can?” Sensing pain,
we may escape it by fl ying upward into
abstractions or downward into minutiae.
Obama does both. His mind and its
“proclivity towards over-consideringevery detail” is, Marshall writes,
“Obama’s primary defensive tool.”
If too much thinking is a defence
mechanism, it’s also an evasive
manoeuvre. These reviewers are not
the fi rst to see in Obama the evasion
of emotion – an evasion tactically
necessary for a Black man in the
United States, born of intellectual
detachment, or both. “So much is
still at a polished remove,” Adichie
writes. “It is as if, because he is leery of
exaggerated emotion, emotion itself is
tamped down.”
Marshall, more cutting, suggests
that Obama evades political
commitment. While promoting publicservice, Obama “has never been clear,
to himself or to us, on what values he
meant us to be in service of.” Marshall
requires of Obama not thought but
clarity. These reviews call into question
whether thinking – of the inveterate,
ranging, refl exive kind that Obama
almost alone represents in public life –
ever leads to clarity.
Marshall identifi es as a disillusioned
Obama supporter – a college student
from the heady days of 2008. For him,
in the end, Obama “the man, like the
book, like the movement, carried
no meaningful slogans or central
principles.” It was sound but no fury;
“it all meant something, but what itmeant we could not say.”
Slogans are important in American
politics, as any MAGA-merch peddler
might attest. Central principles are
too. But so are exemplars, whose way
of being in this world prefi gures what
a better world might be like. Their
persons are signifi cant; their presence
is a principle.
And what was Obama’s example?
He was not only defensive; he was
vulnerable. He was not only analytical;
he was careful – full of care. That much
thought, that much concern, that
much care may well be immobilising.
But it is not passivity.
We see the world diff erently now
than we did in 2008. The MAGA-verse
has bulldozed, bullied and belittled.
Why wouldn’t we who oppose it want
a bulldozer of our own? Instead of
bulldozing the most vulnerable, those we
love, those who have been bulldozed for
generations, our bulldozer would plow
through all the brutality, the inequity,
the injustice that are painfully, urgently
clear. Right now.
Obama wasn’t a bulldozer. Obama
thought too deeply and perhaps too
much. Obama cried.
But when I think not about the earth
I want to move but the earth I want to
inhabit – when I think, in other words,
not about the land as it is but about a
promised land – I see Obama. He is the
kind of person who lives there.
In the closing months of 2020, the
undertone of these reviews reverberates.
What if Obama had been more
combative, more certain and more angry
at it all? In other words, what if Obama
had been more like the rest of us?
Maybe, though, there is a further
question: What if the rest of us had
been more like Obama?O Michael J Brown is assistant
professor of history at Rochester
Institute of Technology and author of
Hope and Scorn: Eggheads, Experts,
and Elites in American Politics.COMMENT
Friday, November 27, 2020 15
Trump faces critical choice
about his political future
By Victor Davis HansonD
onald Trump is nearing a
crossroads.
Those who allege that he
has endangered the tradition
of smooth presidential transitions by
not conceding immediately after the
media declared him the loser suff er
amnesia.
When Trump was elected in 2016,
the Washington establishment lost its
collective mind. The top echelon of
the FBI and CIA were still spreading
a fraudulent Christopher Steele
dossier paid for by the campaign of
his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the
Democratic National Committee.
Shortly before Trump’s
inauguration, President Barack Obama
called Vice President Joe Biden,
national security adviser Susan Rice,
Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates
and FBI Director James Comey into
the Oval Offi ce. The purpose of the
meeting was reportedly to collate
progress reports about how best to
continue government surveillance of
Trump’s designated national security
adviser, Michael Flynn, and thereby
disrupt the transition.
Flynn’s name was soon unmasked,
apparently by Obama administration
offi cials, and then illegally leaked to
the press.
The harassment during the
transition became thematic for
Trump’s next four years, which saw
false evidence submitted to federal
courts and other classifi ed documents
illegally leaked.
No prior president has faced
such hysterical opposition bent on
removing him from offi ce by a special
prosecutor, concocted charges that
he should be deposed under the 25th
Amendment, and, fi nally, a failed
attempt at removal via impeachment.
The president’s private phone calls
to foreign leaders were leaked. Media
darlings and anonymous opponents
within the government boasted
of sabotaging Trump’s initiatives.
Washington analysts and retired
military offi cers hyped coup scenarios
about how best to use force to remove
him from offi ce.
So it is a bit rich for the media to
now warn of Trump’s dangers to
the spirit of smooth presidential
transitions. Such protocols were
deliberately rendered null and void in
2016.
But all that is past. What matters
now are the interests of the country
fi rst and Trump’s constituents second.
So Trump has a number of pathways.
One is to keep addressing legitimate
reports of voter irregularities. He cancontinue to ask the courts to set aside
any illegal votes that do not conform
to state voting laws. His supporters
demand and deserve no less than the
investigation of all charges of serial
voting impropriety.
But Trump within days will have
to prove that any such crimes and
lapses warped state counts enough
to have wrongly elected Joe Biden
president. Trump realistically has
perhaps a week or so left to make his
case or concede.
Then, to maintain the Senate
majority for Republicans and to
save the very rules and protocols of
the Senate, the Supreme Court and
Constitution, Trump will have to
barnstorm Georgia. His challenge will
be to enthuse his conservative base
to re-elect the state’s two incumbent
senators, David Perdue and Kelly
Loeffl er.
After that?
Trump’s “Make America Great
Again” agenda will be codifi ed as
his party’s own. He has a year or
more to decide whether he wishes
to play kingmaker among would-
be Republican congressional and
presidential candidates or run himself
for a second term. The two options are
ultimately not mutually exclusive.
By then there is some chance thatthe country will have been turned
off by a hard-left shift by Biden,
surrogate to the Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez wing of his party. Such
extremism caused Democrats to lose
House seats in 2020.
Trump can bask in a successful fi rst
term that remade the Republican Party
into a multiracial coalition of the broad
middle class. His Middle East and
China resets will unlikely be altered by
future presidents.
Trump fi nally did close the border
to illegal immigration. His initiatives
to revitalise America’s interior ended
the notion that industrial decline was
inevitable rather than a silly choice.
But Trump’s other alternative is
bleaker. Currently, Trump-affi liated
lawyers claim they can prove their
bombshell allegations of historic
voting fraud by leftists and foreign
interests. They further claim that
Trump was robbed not of a close
election but of a veritable landslide,
constituting the greatest scandal in US
history.
But so far none of these advocates
have produced the requisite
whistleblowers, computer data or
forensic evidence to prove their
astounding charges. If they do not
produce it in a few days, and if Trump
pivots to put his fate in their hands,then the pilloried Republicans may
well lose the Senate races in Georgia.
And with that historic setback
he would endanger his legacy, his
infl uence and perhaps a crack at a
second presidential term.
In blunter terms, Trump may be
forced to choose within days whether
he wishes to emulate Andrew Jackson,
the aggrieved victim of the crooked
bargain of 1824 that denied him
victory in that year’s presidential
election. Jackson stormed back in 1828
to an overwhelming populist victory
fuelled by a righteously aggrieved
following.
Otherwise, Trump would risk
being reduced to the status of sore
presidential losers like Al Gore and
Hillary Clinton. For all their media
accolades, Gore and Clinton never
really accepted their losses in 2000
and 2016, respectively. Despite their
supposed magnanimity, Gore and
Clinton turned ever more bitter, shrill
and conspiratorial – and ended up
caricatured and largely irrelevant.O Victor Davis Hanson is a
classicist and historian at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and
the author of The Second World Wars:
How the First Global Confl ict Was
Fought and Won, from Basic Books.Thoughts on Obama, the great over-thinker
PENSIVE: Former president Barack Obama wasn’t a bulldozer. He thought too deeply and perhaps too much, says the writer.TIME TO CALL: US President Donald Trump realistically has perhaps a week or so left to make his case or concede.fWARNING
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