Imperial Steward: Barack Obama’s ‘The Promised Land’

“Fired up! Ready to go!”

“Either grab a drink and sit down with us or get the fuck out of here.”

“Rarely does a week go by when I don’t run into somebody—a friend, a supporter, an acquaintance, or a total stranger—who insists that from the first time they met me or heard me speak on TV, they knew I’d be president. They tell me this with affection, conviction, and a certain amount of pride in their political acumen, talent-spotting, or soothsaying. Sometimes they will cloak it in religious terms. God had a plan for you, they’ll tell me. I’ll smile and say that I wish they had told me this back when I was thinking about running; it would have saved me a lot of stress and self-doubt. The truth is, I’ve never been a big believer in destiny. I worry that it encourages resignation in the down-and-out and complacency among the powerful. I suspect that God’s plan, whatever it is, works on a scale too large to admit our mortal tribulations; that in a single lifetime, accidents and happenstance determine more than we care to admit; and that the best we can do is to try to align ourselves with what we feel is right and construct some meaning out of our confusion, and with grace and nerve play at each moment the hand that we’re dealt.”

So The Promised Land is pretty much a play-by-play account of the following:

• Barack Obama’s rise to the Oval Office (much of which was also covered in Becoming, and with more flair).
• The big flagship policy battles (particularly with the Senate) and general Main Events of his first 3 years including…
• The fallout of TARP and formation of Dodd-Frank to combat the financial crisis.
• The incendiary plans and mechanisms for Iraq withdrawal and Afghanistan escalation.
• The glacial and brutal march towards Obamacare (the 2009 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was the first Senate vote to take place on Christmas Eve since 1895 just a month before it was torpedoed by the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat that would later become Elizabeth Warren’s).
• The H1N1 scare and pandemic preparations (surreal reading in the midst of one’s fourth national lockdown).
• Justice Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court and Justice Sotomayor’s fairly smooth but still racially charged confirmation, then Justice Kagan’s confirmation a year later.
• The insanity of the James Crowley incident (in which an officer arrested Black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr after a neighbour reported him for looking like he was breaking in to his literal own home, forcing Obama to eventually have to invite both of them to a “beer summit” with him and Biden to smoothen the incident, but which remained the most significant and enduring loss of support among white voters of his presidency).
• The Tea Party summer.
• The pursuit of sanctions against Iran and high-stakes diplomatic manoeuvring with Russia and China.
• The long road towards climate change reform (which of course Trump tried his utmost best to torpedo – thankfully Trump’s utmost best is as long-lasting as the candy floss that viral raccoon obliviously dipped in a pond).
• The financial collapse of Greece and the ensuing Eurozone crisis.
• The Deepwater Horizon disaster and MMS/BP/Halliburton unholy trinity (familiar territory for Sorkin stans).
• The vicious body blow of the 2010 mid-term elections (in which 63 seats were lost in the House – the largest shift since 1948 in the wake of the New Deal and FDR’s death).
• The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (mind-boggling it was so recent).
• The Dream Act (which granted undocumented immigrant children a path to citizenship).
• The Arab Spring and his tentative diplomatic efforts with Egypt’s President Mubarak urging him privately and then publicly to step down in an interventionist moonshot to usher in democracy throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
• The escalations in Syria and then Libya.
• The egregious role of the media in the rise of Trump on the wings of birtherism.
• And the era-defining success of Operation Neptune Spear to eliminate Osama bin Laden in a secret compound in eastern Pakistan.

Highlights/thoughts/comments/favourite fact-finds:

• The moving account of his mother, who died from cancer before he won the presidency, but who seismically shaped his values and beliefs – same for his grandmother, who passed away in Hawaii in the final days of the campaign, in stark contrast to the conspicuous absence of his Kenyan father, who remained/remains largely estranged.
• He was a huge bookworm in childhood and mispronounced words well into his 20s because he’d always encountered them through reading (relatable content pitching me back to one of my most mortifying linguistic faux pas, when I mispronounced adage like corsage instead of bandage during a school debate).
• The fascinating overview of the early storm petrels flying in the face of the 2008 financial crisis – the softening Chicago real estate market and a Wall Street friend explaining that the high risk mortgages concealed within low risk securities were why he was taking a short betting position as he was convinced the house of cards was about to fall.
• It was utterly exhausting (though always riveting) reading about all the implacable early intransigence from McConnell even while they had the House majority due to the gargantuan influence of the Kochs fastidiously leveraging their network.
• Loved the initial hot takes on all the G20 leaders in 2009.
• The Massachusetts Senate seat disaster leading to the axing of the public option and endless cage fights in both the House and Senate during the Sisyphean fight for healthcare, which remains as bemusing now as it was back then when we’d discuss the various headlines that found their way to my economics class in Scotland – even more bemusing after watching how Trump tried to gut it, rescinding the federal tax penalty for violating the individual mandate and thus raising a through-the-looking-glass literal question mark over whether it was/is still constitutional. US healthcare debates are always a baffling clusterfuck from the POV of those who live with the simple, sacrosanct fact of the NHS, but reading about the passage of ACA is even more anthropologically interesting (as well as the usual blend of appalling, enraging, depressing etc) given the traction Sanders and AOC seem to have galvanised with Medicare-for-all/a single-payer system particularly since 2018.
• It was very interesting to hear a US president express quite frankly any frustration with the military, especially re the enormous pressure exerted on him by the JCS and DOD to send tens of thousands more soldiers into Afghanistan, bait-and-switching him by agreeing to a reduced number in his first few months in office, and working the Washington Post to lambast his demand for debate, for every angle and voice of authority to be heard and considered. This feels like one of if not the most radical quote in the book, particularly for the comment on the media:

“The episode illustrated just how accustomed the military had become to getting whatever it wanted during the Bush years, and the degree to which basic policy decisions—about war and peace, but also about America’s budget priorities, diplomatic goals, and the possible trade-offs between security and other values—had been steadily farmed out to the Pentagon and the CIA. It was easy to see the factors behind this: the impulse after 9/11 to do whatever it took to stop the terrorists and the reluctance of the White House to ask any tough questions that might get in the way; a military forced to clean up the mess that resulted from the decision to invade Iraq; a public that rightly saw the military as more competent and trustworthy than the civilians who were supposed to make policy; a Congress that was chiefly interested in avoiding responsibility for hard foreign policy problems; and a press corps that could be overly deferential to anyone with stars on their shoulders”.

• To continue the list… the diplomacy with Russia over Iran, around which he muses how a nation who had produced Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, who had a long history of civil unrest, a nation of farmers fighting for freedom against authoritarian leaders, shares more with the US than what divides them. The problem was/is Putin.

“Few, if any, young Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans looked to Russia for inspiration in the fight to reform their societies, or felt their imaginations stirred by Russian movies or music, or dreamed of studying there, much less immigrating. Shorn of its ideological underpinnings, the once-shiny promise of workers uniting to throw off their chains, Putin’s Russia came off as insular and suspicious of outsiders—to be feared, perhaps, but not emulated.”

• Sasha striding through the red-carpeted halls of the Kremlin, hands deep in the pockets of her tan trench coat like “a pint-size secret agent”.
• His hot take first meetings with Medvedev (who worried about his son’s school experience), Putin (“strangely familiar”, like a Chicago ward boss, “except with nukes and a UN Security Council veto”), and the “somewhat tragic figure” of Gorbachev.
• His first impressions of the UN, bearing in mind how his mother had described it to him as a child: “I imagined the goings-on at the UN to be like an episode of Star Trek, with Americans, Russians, Scots, Africans, and Vulcans exploring the stars together”.
• His discussions of English literature with the Japanese Empress Michiko and how she told him that her love of music and poetry had kept loneliness at bay throughout her long life…
• The all-out assault to get people to even start to take climate change seriously and how the Recovery Act saved and turbocharged America’s wind and solar industry.
• The stand-off with Chinese Premier Wen, who had hidden away with the South African, Indian, and Brazilian leaders at the UN plotting to announce it was the US who was holding up a climate deal. When his staff discovered Wen was still in the building and with only an hour or so before Airforce One had to “wheels up” to stay ahead of a mighty snowstorm rolling in over the Atlantic, Obama turned to Hillary and was like “when was the last time you crashed a party”… and so they literally set off with their entourage, stormed in to this secret meeting, and he launched into an impassioned speech on climate and courage and collective action, after which the Chinese environmental minister leapt up and started yelling in Mandarin. But then Wen ordered the translator not to relay his words, saying they weren’t important, and asked Obama to go through the language of the agreement, so Obama pulled out the crumpled document in his pocket and jotted down amendments with a ballpoint pen for the next 30 minutes…
• The veneration of and commitment to the arts, both personally (with dinner parties the Obamas would host in the residence every few months with writers, artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs i.e. “the great thinkers”, from Toni Morrison reminiscing about her friendship with James Baldwin to Meryl Streep leaning over to softly recite a poem in Mandarin), and publicly (with the infamous televised concerts featuring performances in every genre by seasoned legends and rising stars alike, from Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney to Mayda del Valle and Lin-Manuel Miranda in the poetry slam evening that introduced the world to Hamilton).
• And finally, his enraged rant on what he wanted to say in response to the Deepwater spill… rather than what he actually said.

“It was as if having ascended the face of a big mountain, I now found myself looking out over a series of successively more perilous peaks, while realising I had twisted an ankle, bad weather was coming, and I’d used up half my supplies. I didn’t share these feelings with anyone on my team; they were frazzled enough as it was. Suck it up, I told myself, tighten your laces, cut your rations, keep moving.”

I particularly love this quote given my favourite from Becoming was:

“This was my pivot point, my moment of self-arrest. Like a climber about to slip off an icy peak, I drove my axe into the ground.”

A family evidently fond of their mountaineering metaphors.

I docked a star because there’s virtually no mention of drone strikes (just one aside when lamenting the criticism he fielded over his pursuit of Al-Qaeda despite hundreds of civilian casualties in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan across his two terms), and as a book it has several structural shortcomings…

It’s unlikely to hold the attention of anyone who doesn’t already have a prodigious interest in US politics and the inner workings of Washington as well as at least a degree of familiarity with how it all works and who’s who, so in that regard there’s a pretty hefty barrier to entry. Michelle Obama’s book is thus much more commercial, being both shorter and crafted around a crystal-clear narrative core: the chronology of her experience as a Harvard lawyer-cum-First Lady but above all the recurring philosophical question of what makes a meaningful life.

Her husband’s memoir is far more a dry record of every twist and turn of his presidency, which will surely be henceforth invaluable for students of the era but won’t necessarily enthral every reader, even the most die-hard non-fiction connoisseurs. It suffers from being seemingly unedited, which is understandable and not inherently a bad thing for this particular book and what it’s trying to do – frankly no red pen could have made it a gripping read, so it’s quite simply gargantuan… and is only the first of two volumes… The ending is also rather abrupt, as he returns to DC following the whirlwind of Neptune Spear, and so it’s near impossible to talk definitively about this volume without its other half.

However, as someone who is unhealthily obsessed with US government, an economics junkie and policy wonk, a West Wing superstan, and a former resident of Virginia and neighbour of DC, with a sister who holds dual citizenship and can thus vote in US presidential elections, I found it endlessly fascinating, especially parsing the political stenography and steganography, the biased lens through which he explains and elucidates events from his perspective, never veering into the outright defensive or hyperbolic but often striking a somewhat placatory tone around the most retrospectively contentious hallmarks of his tenure.

I found it increasingly difficult though to fault his general approach to both the construction and the analysis of the narrative. It’s relentlessly introspective, informed, measured, and compassionate, and he doesn’t shy away from critiquing his own decisions or articulating regrets and ongoing moral and existential quandaries.

This reading experience was exponentially heightened by inhaling it in the direct wake of the torturous rollercoaster that was the 2020 presidential election, going back to watch all the speeches referenced on YouTube (as I did with Becoming), and bingeing AOC interviews (just, you know, for the serotonin boost). Indeed, I turned the final page the morning after a violent attempted coup and domestic terror attack on the Capitol incited by the outgoing president.

Absolute scenes.

Ultimately, for me, perhaps Obama’s greatest strength as a leader, drawing on his background as lawyer and lecturer and channelling always the implacable forces of empathy and reason his mother and grandmother had instilled in him, was in his relentless resolve to listen to every possible angle of an argument, to discuss, debate, and decide based on facts, evidence, truth, reasoning, and an existentially fraught but ever-present and deeply embedded moral compass as a citizen, father, husband, and human. This ability to admit ignorance, to listen, and to alter course, is maybe the most crucial mechanism of deductive reasoning anyone in a position of authority can exercise. We’ve all seen the chaos that ensues when it’s absent.

It’s a beast of a book. As the next steward of an imperial operation he was never going to radically upheave the system (interesting analysis of this by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on the 19/01/21 Black Myths podcast). What lingers most above all though in this declaration of hope (perhaps more audacious than it’s ever been) and invitation for young people “to once again remake the world” is a profound sense of his deep and genuine reverence for peace, pluralism, and participation.

“I recognise that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start. And I confess that there have been times during the course of writing this book, as I’ve reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as 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. I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all humankind.”