A Promised Land by Barack Obama

A Promise Land by Barack Obama

I listened to all twenty-one hours of Barack Obama reading the first volume of his presidential memoirs which covers begins with his childhood and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The first part of the book devotes a lot of time to Obama’s desire to make an impact, his frustration that each move he makes to try to have it ends up feeling fruitless, and how his increasing ambition takes a toll on his relationship with his wife and children. This culminates with his run for the presidency.

The second part of the book largely takes the form of Obama run through a laundry list of various incidents and situations that he dealt with during his first term in office from Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, birtherism, and so on and on.

Each incident is recounted through a series of anecdotes, check-ins with how his family seems to be doing, descriptions unrelated events happening around the same time (presumably meant to give “a day in the life of the President” feel to things), and insights into Obama’s thinking during the time period.

While he doesn’t explicitly state this anywhere, one gets the sense as these recounting add up that Obama felt a consistent sense of frustration with the lack of good options available to him and the unfairness of his critics. The circumstance of the financial crisis boxed in what options were reasonably available to him, the Republicans growing obstructionism and nativism (driven by its voters in response to the election of a Black President) made the kind of bi-partisan politics that he wanted to practice and ran on impossible to achieve largely, and undoing the unilateral quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan created by the Bush administration (along with the sense of unquestioned authority that the administration had fostered in the military and intelligence communities after 9-11) proved more difficult than he imagined.

I have always appreciated Obama’s persistent sense of optimism, good humor, and pragmatic approach to politics and policy. While his legacy is not without its blemishes, I did find it helpful to review it from his perspective and with the considerations of the multiple messes that he inherited, much as Biden has inherited a number of messes from the Trump Era.

I especially appreciated the way that this memoir persistently humanizes the players involved with crafting and negotiating legislation and running the federal government and military. Remembering the human, the imperfect, in those even in places of power is something that is not easy.