Vol. 1 of Obama’s new memoir sets stage for alternative facts
Volume 1 of much-anticipated memoir sets stage for looming dark vision that was coming
Former U.S. president Barack Obama wants you to know that he still believes in America. Believing in America, he also believes in such patriotic American staples as democracy, opportunity, good government and the rule of the law.
You can expect platitudes from a politician, but in the case of the first volume of Obama’s White House memoirs, “A Promised Land,” they come with a greater sense of urgency than most. Not just because he was succeeded by someone who seemed opposed to all of those core beliefs and values, someone enabled by a Republican wrecking crew whose guiding political purpose has become the “dismantling of the administrative state,” as Trump’s one-time adviser Steve Bannon called it, but because across the world there is a growing public disillusionment with democracy, putting that form of government at real risk.
As you should also expect from a book like this, Obama is very much concerned with presenting his legacy in the best possible light. What this means is that, while admitting he often fell short in achieving his goals when it came to fighting the good fight against obstructionist Republicans on issues such as health-care reform and environmental protection, this was, he says, largely due to the real limits his power had in “the world as it is.”
Time and again, but especially when faced with falling poll numbers, he upbraids himself for becoming “trapped in my own high-mindedness” and not being able to communicate just how good a job he was really doing. “We’re on the right side of this stuff,” he complains to his closest political confidant, David Axelrod, while working on the Affordable Care Act. “We just have to explain it better to voters.”
But this doesn’t sound right. Obama was a brilliant communicator. The problem he faced was an electorate that had self-selected into different realities. This was brought home to him by the resiliency of the “birther” claims about his not being born in the United States.
Birtherism, he knew, was propelled by news networks that had so blurred the line between news and entertainment in their drive for ratings that they “eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim.” He publicly complained about the need to stop taking such “silliness” seriously, but didn’t appreciate just how little effect such an appeal would have. This was not due to any failure to communicate on his part. The birthers simply believed in alternative facts.
As the author of two previous memoirs, Obama is a practised, observant writer with an important story to tell. One thing you should not expect, however, are any great revelations, inside scoops or dramatic fireworks. “No-drama Obama” doesn’t roll that way. Still, you don’t have to read far between the lines to pick up what he really thinks of some of the personalities he had to deal with. One can tell he has genuine respect for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, but thought French president Nicolas Sarkozy a lightweight and Sen. Lindsey Graham a weasel.
Stephen Harper, our former Canadian prime minister, is only mentioned in passing. This country did not seem to
occupy much, if any, of Obama’s attention; at least it doesn’t in this memoir.
The story concludes in this volume with the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and the figure of Donald Trump as a sinister shadow waiting in the wings, trafficking in a currency of spectacle and conspiracy theory that “seemed to gain more purchase with each passing day.” Obama says he could feel where this was going: “I knew that the passions he was tapping, the dark, alternative vision he was promoting and legitimizing, were something I’d likely be contending with for the remainder of my presidency.”
Whether in conscious response to this or not, Obama presents himself throughout as the anti-Trump: a family man, self-reflective, empathetic, thickskinned and in love with the work of being president while not caring for the pomp and pageantry a bit.
Most of all, however, he describes himself as a believer in “a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone.” At the end of the book, describing his address to a college graduation class, he realizes that as a young man “I’d seized on that idea and clung to it for dear life. For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.”
He’d soon have plenty of reasons for doubt. But we’ll have to wait for the sequel to get his response to where America’s dark passions were heading.
is a frequent contributor to the Star’s books pages