Despite the 700 plus pages, “A Promised Land” is an easy read. Obama has a knack for writing: what he lacks in catchy punch lines in interviews, he more than compensates for in his writing with thoughtful and thorough analyses of historical contexts, his piercing observations of various political figures and world leaders, and his insightful albeit sometimes obsessive ruminations. His eloquent prose has a way of taking me right to the moment when his mother-in-law sat next to him watching the results of the 2008 election on TV, held his hand and said “it’s too much”, that sense of disbelief and swell of quiet pride she must have felt; that suspense out of a James Bond movie when he was attending a black tie state dinner while plotting the Gaddafi attack in his head; that loneliness he felt in the helicopter flying over the Statue of Christ the Redeemer when his daughters and Michelle were caught up in their own worlds oblivious to yet another complex decision he was chewing over.
I was experiencing history, the grandness of it all, along with the most powerful man in the world, in the most intimate way. And yet what struck me the most is just how normal Obama felt… a teenager who hardly knew his dad, but somehow found his path via books, growing up as an outsider (black kid in a white household and a US expat in a predominately Muslim Indonesia) and finally connected to the black community through Michelle, settling in the suburbs after law school, got married, bought his first house (only a few years earlier than we did and at about the same price), paying mortgages and busy juggling between a nascent career and the joy and challenges of parenthood… just the typical American middle class life. He is in fact so normal that his campaign manager David Axelrod almost turned him down because people who run for presidents are those who cannot be happy unless they become president. “I don’t think you’ll be unhappy if you never become president.”
That may be true, but Obama is definitely a man of ambition. His meteoric rise is no accident; it is the epitome of the right person in the right place at the right time. In fact, by the time Obama made the audacious decision to run for President, he realized he was no longer his individualistic self, but a symbol for change and channel for hope carried by historical currents so much so that Obama himself lamented “They had taken possession of my likeness and made it a vessel for a million different dreams.”
It was an impossibility he struggled with -- the curse of high expectations crashed against the reality of Washington. That sense of invincibility coming off of the most historical run quickly diminished when he realized the old honor system of relying on politicians’ good conscience and sense of duty is now replaced by the pure motivation of doing whatever it takes to win and keep your seats and the easiest way to accomplish that is to fight against your enemy regardless of what you believe in or what is the right thing to do. This is further exasperated by the fact that electing a black man into the White House has not only awakened hope in many, but also a deep rooted fear in others. You could feel that sense of optimism slipping away during the 1st two years of Obama’s presidency with more cursing, self-deprecating humor, self-doubt, indignity, frustration, somberness, and sometimes a quiet desperation of the enormous weight on his shoulder that he could not shake off.
I have never had any political ambitions, but having attended Beijing Foreign Studies University where many graduates became diplomats, the thought of being on the magnificent international stage sounded intriguing enough. Having read this book, there is no doubt in my mind that being a politician would absolutely be the worst job for me, because it requires endless compromises (“I didn’t like the deal. But in what was becoming a pattern, the alternatives were worse.”), deal making among powerful middle aged or senior men (yes, mostly men) who act like teenagers with their big ego and childish gestures (a picture that is too familiar to me in the corporate world and probably 100 times worse in politics), and “Sometimes you were just screwed, and the best you could do was have a stiff drink and light up a cigarette.” As powerful as the position may seem, most of the time you simply have to react to what is happening to you, instead of being able to plan out for a future you envision or aspire to. And any change that might happen will take years if not decades.
In fact, for those who voted for change, the Obama policies hardly did anything to move the gold post. Obama is a self-confessed reformist, not a revolutionary -- In the hurry to stabilize the economy during the 2008 housing crisis, he bailed out the banks as a quick fix rather than making the hard but necessary structural changes to disrupt the ever deepening divide between the ultra rich and the ultra poor. In the rare first two years when the Democrats controlled both the house and the senate, he opted for a healthcare reform that provides another patch to the existing broken system to woe for bipartisan votes… he never got any Republican support anyway. While he ran as the anti-war candidate, as president he relied on the generals to determine the US strategy in Afghanistan, and as much as he challenged and wore down the hawks, he was unable to extract himself and the US from the endless and meaningless wars.
Obama certainly did his best -- with an acute awareness that as the first African American president, his every move is under double scrutiny -- he achieved an administration that was completely free of scandals, transparent to its own detriment sometimes, and bold enough to tackle many difficult and controversial issues. We would never be able to tell where Obama fell short is a reflection of Obama as a leader given his upper-middle class upbringing (generally not fertile ground for audacious revolutions), or if these are the best pragmatic policies any president can strike under the circumstances; or even these are the right recipes for America despite their imperfections. That’s what Obama himself wonders in his infinite self questioning and self examination in this book. Sometimes it feels like he is laboring to justify his decisions to his critics or maybe just to himself – Yes, he tried, but is that good enough?
And that is the ultimate question, not just for Obama, but for anyone of us – is our life meaningful? Are we enough? We all have to find the answer to that question for ourselves, including Obama. But for me at least, Obama’s life is one not just to admire but one to envy as well— even though I would absolutely hate his job, the chance to fight for the promised land, however fragile that is and however hard it may be, is what keeps hope alive and us going.