USA TODAY International Edition
Obama defines legacy in memoir
“Whatever you do won’t be enough, I heard their voices say. Try anyway.”
That was Barack Obama musing in Oslo, Norway, the night after the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in which he was given the Nobel Peace Prize. He was reflecting on all the work still ahead of him, all the war and strife that still needed ending. But it could serve as the log line for the whole of the first volume of his presidential memoirs, “A Promised Land” ( Crown, 768 pp.), which finds the 59- year- old former president reflecting on the space between his presidential ambitions and the political reality that hampered them.
The book hits shelves just two weeks after his former vice president, Joe Biden, was voted to replace Donald Trump as president. There was no way for Obama to know that would be the case; depending on the results, “A Promised Land” would read to Obama’s supporters either like a paean to his democratic ideals, or an affirmation that they’re still achievable.
That Obama wasn’t able to achieve them in his time in office clearly weighs on him. The most powerful person on Earth was rarely able to get his way. For more than 700 pages detailing his political career up to the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden ( Obama has many strengths; brevity is not one of them), Obama shows just how painstakingly the political sausage was made – or, with a Republican majority in the Senate and House, more often wasn’t made.
“I had run to rebuild the American people’s trust – not just in the government, but in one another,” Obama writes. “If we trusted one another, democracy worked.”
What Obama is grappling with in “A Promised Land” is legacy, and what his will be given that he wasn’t able to achieve what he had hoped. By some of his own measuring sticks, his presidency falls short. But there’s one measuring stick yet to come.
Before Obama could convince the American people to trust him with the presidency, he had to convince his wife to let him run – and it wasn’t easy. Michelle Obama openly hated politics and the toll her husband’s ambitions took on their young family. Why, she wanted to know, did it have to be him?
“I know that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be president of the United states, the world will start looking at America differently,” he told her. “I know that kids all around this country – Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids who don’t fit in – they’ll see themselves differently, too, their horizons lifted, their possibilities expanded. And that alone … that would be worth it.”
That answer was what finally convinced Michelle.
And it won’t be until those children have all grown up that Obama will really be able to take the measure of his legacy.
Political life was hard on the Obamas' marriage
“It’s like you have a hole to fill," Michelle told Barack early in their marriage. “That’s why you can’t slow down.”
It’s no revelation that Michelle Obama is no fan of politics and that her husband’s political ambitions strained their marriage – she wrote as much in her massively best- selling 2018 memoir, “Becoming.”
But it’s still extraordinary for a president to show that same vulnerability and write candidly of marital tension and the toll the presidency takes on a family.
While theirs is by all indications a committed and successful partnership between intellectual equals, the Obamas struggled throughout Barack’s political career to find common ground. Running for and holding office means long hours, many of them spent away from home, leaving Michelle – who had a rewarding full- time career of her own – to manage all the parenting duties herself, sometimes for weeks at a time. The stress – emotional, logistical, financial – put a strain on their marriage, he wrote.
When Obama lobbied for Michelle’s blessing to run for U. S. Senate, she gave it grudgingly: “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.”
Her reaction when he floated the idea for running for president was predictably grim: “God, Barack … When is it going to be enough?”
“I was right to feel guilty,” Obama writes. “It’s hard to overstate the burden I placed on my family during those two years I ran for president – how much I relied on Michelle’s fortitude and parenting skills, and how much I depended on my daughters’ preternatural good cheer and maturity.”
The biggest sacrifice was the time Obama lost with Malia and Sasha during the formative years of their childhoods.
“As much as I believed in the importance of what I was doing, I knew I wouldn’t ever get that time back, and often found myself questioning the wisdom of the trade,” Obama writes.
Still, Michelle’s indifference to politics and general skepticism of pomp and pageantry served a vital role once they reached the White House: She kept her husband grounded.
When Obama got a phone call very early one October morning, Michelle roused from sleep to ask what it was about. “I’m getting the Nobel Peace Prize,” Obama told her.
“That’s wonderful, honey,” she said, and rolled over to get more sleep.
What happened to hope and change?
The word “Hope” became synonymous with Obama’s candidacy in large part because of a clever poster design. The red, beige and blue stencil portrait of Obama, designed by artist Shepard
Fairey and emblazoned with the word “Hope,” quickly became ubiquitous, and was endlessly parodied and imitated in pop culture.
But hope wasn’t a tagline for Obama, as he writes it, but a life’s mission, the end goal of his presidential run. “I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me,” Obama writes, “how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up.” His was to be a kinder politician, one that built bridges instead of burned them.
In the early days of his presidential campaign, in his Iowa office, there was a motto displayed on every wall: “RESPECT. EMPOWER. INCLUDE.” When a new organizer made a joke about ” hating pantsuits,” a not- so- subtle dig at Hillary Clinton, Paul Tewes, Obama's Iowa campaign director, openly admonished him in front of the other organizers; that simply wasn’t how they were going to do things.
So… what happened?
Mitch McConnell, that’s what. The then- Senate Minority Leader from Kentucky was seemingly singularly focused on one goal: making Obama a one- term president. Though McConnell failed in that regard, he succeeded in executing what Obama argues was a Republican strategy of obstruction, refus
ing to engage in bipartisan politics and hobbling many of Obama’s legislative efforts.
Obama’s portrayal of McConnell is damning: “As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends even in his own caucus; nor did he appear to have any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign finance reform,” Obama writes.
He had to have an inkling of what he was in for. “Joe ( Biden) told me of one run- in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring,” Obama writes. “When Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, ‘ You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.’”
Racism raised the fear of assassination
Obama walks the same tightrope in “A Promised Land” that he walked in his presidency, handling issues of racism with a gentle touch even though he no longer needs to fear scaring away white voters – a real concern during both of his presidential campaigns.
Obama’s evenhandedness can be as frustrating as it is endearing. He doesn’t condemn so much as try to understand protesters outside campaign events hoisting Confederate flags, telling him to “go home.”
“I wasn’t running against Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or even the Republicans,” he writes of the Democratic primary. “I was running against the implacable weight of the past; the inertia, fatalism, and fear it produced.”
While campaigning, Michelle was approached by a Black woman who suggested losing an election would be better than losing a husband, “the implication being that if I was elected, I was sure to be shot,” he writes.
It wasn’t an unfounded concern. In May 2007, just a few months after his campaign began and over a full year before Obama would clinch the Democratic nomination, Obama was assigned Secret Service protection, far earlier than was customary. “The number of threats directed my way exceeded anything the Secret Service had ever seen before,” he writes.
Obama places the blame for Donald Trump on the media
“We’re better than this.”
Those were Obama’s words to the press, carried by all the national networks as he spoke them from the podium in the White House briefing room, responding forcefully to the unfounded conspiracy theory that his American birth certificate was a forgery.
Donald Trump doesn’t have a big footprint in “A Promised Land”; during Obama’s first term, Trump was mostly known for telling contestants “You’re fired!” on the NBC reality TV show “The Apprentice.” He was, in Obama’s estimation, not much more than a “carnival barker.” “Maybe because I didn’t watch much television, I found it hard to take him too seriously,” he writes.
Trump will inevitably dominate much of the second volume of Obama’s presidential memoirs. But here, Obama directs most of his condemnation not at Trump himself but at the media for providing the oxygen that turned a spark into a raging inferno.
The birther movement, as it would come to be known – the racist belief that Obama was not an American citizen and therefore an illegitimate president despite all evidence to the contrary – gained traction when Trump started publicly questioning Obama’s origin.
Media outlets eagerly offered Trump megaphones through which to shout the conspiracy theory. And not just the expected Fox News, “a network whose power and profits had been built around stoking the same racial fears and resentments,” Obama writes. Trump also appeared on ABC’s “The View,” NBC’s “Today” show and CNN.
Obama writes, “For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”
It’s possible the birther movement would never have reached such a fever pitch – and Trump would never have entertained the presidency – if Obama had hired the real estate mogul. Obama writes that during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, Trump called a White House official to suggest he be put in charge of plugging the well that was spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. When that farfetched idea didn’t sell, Trump shifted gears, offering to build “a beautiful ballroom” on White House grounds.
They never took him up on the offer.