Book Summary: "A PROMISED Land" - Barack Obama
One must be pretty self-aware to write a candid autobiography—something politicians aren’t known for. Fortunately, President Obama isn’t like most politicians. A Promised Land is a refreshingly honest book. He isn’t trying to sell himself to you or claim he didn’t make mistakes. It’s a terrific read, no matter what your politics are.?
The volume chronicles the life of President Obama, concluding with the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. I found the sections regarding his early career particularly engaging. The author effectively articulates the challenges associated with entering the realm of politics. My admiration for President Obama was present before reading the book; however, my respect for him increased significantly following my engagement with the text.
Most people think of Obama as a natural politician because he’s so good at public speaking. But he didn’t enjoy campaigning like Bill Clinton and preferred sitting in policy briefings to shaking hands and kissing babies. He was incredibly uncomfortable with the adoration that he got in 2008, writing that he had to “constantly take stock to make sure I wasn’t buying into the hype and remind myself of the distance between the airbrushed image and the flawed, often uncertain person I was.”
I wish more politicians could write like Obama. A Promised Land almost reads like a novel because he’s so good at connecting each event into one big narrative. The book—the first of two planned volumes—covers some of his most significant accomplishments, including the 2009 stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act. Even though you already know that both bills have become law, his honest assessments turn them into compelling stories that keep you on the edge.
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Book publication date: November 2020.
Brief about the Author:
Barack Obama
Barack Obama Barack Obama served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, becoming the first African American to occupy this esteemed office. Before securing the presidency, he represented the state of Illinois in the United States Senate from 2005 to 2008. Notably, he was the third African American elected to the Senate since the conclusion of the Reconstruction era in 1877. In recognition of his remarkable endeavours to enhance international diplomacy and foster cooperation among nations, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
Barack Obama enrolled at Occidental College, located in the suburban region of Los Angeles, for two years before transferring to Columbia University in New York City. 1983 he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University.
Influenced by professors pushing him to take his studies more seriously, Obama experienced tremendous intellectual growth during college and a few years thereafter. He led a somewhat ascetic life and read works of literature and philosophy by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Toni Morrison.
After several years of commitment to his responsibilities as a writer and editor at Business International Corp., a research, publishing, and consulting firm in Manhattan, he accepted a position as a community organizer in the predominantly underprivileged Far South Side of Chicago in 1985.
He returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard University’s law school, where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer associate in 1989 at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, Obama met Chicago native Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer. The two married in 1992.
After receiving his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago, where he served as a community organizer and lectured in constitutional law at the University of Chicago before he was elected (1996) to the Illinois Senate as a member of the Democratic Party.
In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and became a prominent national political figure.
In 2008, Obama won an upset victory over former U.S. First Lady Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic presidential nominee. He easily defeated Republican candidate John McCain and became the first African American president. He sought to lead the country from its deepest economic recession since the Great Depression.
In 2009, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
In March 2009, Obama signed the sweeping health care reform he had championed, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
In 2012, he defeated Republican challenger Mitt Romney to win a second term.
In 2014, Obama announced the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba,
In 2016, he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba in more than 80 years.
A Promised Land:- Book Review
Exordium:
A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy.
In the compelling and eagerly awaited inaugural volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama narrates his remarkable journey from a young individual pursuing his identity to the leader of the free world. He provides a strikingly personal account of his political education and the significant milestones of the initial term of his historic presidency—a period characterized by profound transformation and turbulence.
President Obama guides readers through a compelling narrative that spans his initial political ambitions to the victory in the Iowa caucus, showcasing the effectiveness of grassroots activism. This journey culminated on the historic evening of November 4, 2008, when he was elected as the 44th president of the United States, marking a milestone as the first African American to assume the nation’s highest office.
Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the remarkable reach and limits of presidential power and singular insights into U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy dynamics. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, as well as to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.
A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that progress is always possible inside the great, ongoing American experiment.
This eloquently composed and impactful work encapsulates Barack Obama’s belief that democracy is not a bestowed privilege but rather a construct rooted in empathy and mutual understanding, cultivated collaboratively, day by day.
Part One | THE BET
Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come. It is not merely that this book avoids being ponderous, as might be expected, even forgiven, of a hefty memoir, but that it is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places, the detail granular and vivid. From Southeast Asia to a forgotten school in South Carolina, he evokes a sense of place with a light but sure hand. This is the first of two volumes, and it starts early in his life, charting his initial political campaigns, and ends with a meeting in Kentucky where he is introduced to the SEAL team involved in the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
His focus is more political than personal, but when he does write about his family, it is with a beauty close to nostalgia. Wriggling Malia into her first ballet tights. Baby Sasha’s laugh as he nibbles her feet. Michelle’s breath slows as she falls asleep against his shoulder. His mother is sucking ice cubes, her glands destroyed by cancer. The narrative is rooted in a storytelling tradition, with the accompanying tropes, as with the depiction of a staffer in his campaign for the Illinois State Senate, “taking a drag from her cigarette and blowing a thin plume of smoke to the ceiling.”
The dramatic tension in the story of his gate-crashing, with Hillary Clinton by his side, to force a meeting with China at a climate summit is as enjoyable as noir fiction; no wonder his aide Reggie Love tells him afterwards that it was some “gangster shit.” His language is unafraid of its imaginative richness. He is given a cross by a nun with a face as “grooved as a peach pit.” The White House groundskeepers are “the quiet priests of a good and solemn order.” He questions whether he is a “blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service.” His literary vision is romantic, with a current of almost melancholy. In Oslo, he looks outside to see a crowd of people holding candles, the flames flickering in the night, and one senses that this moves him more than the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony itself.
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Part Two | YES WE CAN
Obama’s thoughtfulness is evident to anyone who has observed his political career, but he lays himself open to self-questioning in this book. And what savage self-questioning. He considers whether his first desire to run for office was not so much about serving but about his ego, his self-indulgence, or his envy of those who were more successful. He writes that his motives for giving up community organizing and going to Harvard Law are “open to interpretation,” as though his ambition were inherently suspect. He wonders if he perhaps has a fundamental laziness. He acknowledges his shortcomings as a husband, mourns his mistakes, and broods still in his choice of words during the first Democratic primaries. It is fair to say this: not for Barack Obama, the unexamined life. But how much of this is a defensive crouch, a bid to put himself down before others can? Even this he contemplates when he writes about having “a deep self-consciousness. Sensitivity to rejection or looking stupid.”
His reluctance to glory in any of his achievements has a particular texture, the modesty of the Brilliant American Liberal, which is not so much false as it is familiar, like a much-practised pose. In response, it brings an urge to say, “Look, take some credit already!”
The infrequent occasion upon which he accepts credit, contending that his recovery efforts have enabled the American financial system to rebound more swiftly than any other nation faced with a comparable significant shock in history, resonates with an unusual discord. His self-evaluation remains critical even concerning his initial emergence of social consciousness during his adolescence. He judges his introspective political views maturely, characterizing them as self-righteous, earnest, and devoid of humour. However, this characterization is valid; it consistently prevails at that stage of life.
Part Three | RENEGADE
This tendency, darker than self-awareness but not as dark as self-loathing, seems to have fed in him something charitable, a wholesome humanity, a profound generosity; it is as though he is both freed and ennobled by having dealt himself the severest hand. And so he is lavish with forgiveness and praise, giving the benefit of the doubt even to those barely deserving. He makes heroes of people: Claire McCaskill voting her conscience for the Dream Act, Tim Geithner’s grace during the upheavals of the financial crash, and Chuck Hagel’s principled support of his foreign policy. His affection for his first-term inner circle — Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs, Rahm Emanuel — is moving, as is the work culture he creates, of not looking for scapegoats when things go wrong. He makes a point of regularly reading the letters of ordinary Americans not just to keep abreast of the electorate's concerns but to lift his spirits and suppress his doubts. On George W. Bush’s last day in the White House, Obama is angry to see protesters, thinking it “graceless and unnecessary” to protest a man in the final hours of his presidency. That is a lovely human response. However, being Barack Obama's self-indicter extraordinaire, he is quick to add that there is undoubtedly an element of self-interest in his position since he is now about to become president.
And yet, for all his ruthless self-assessment, there is very little of what the best memoirs bring: true self-revelation. So much is still at a polished remove. It is as if, because he is leery of exaggerated emotion, emotion itself is tamped down. He writes exhaustively about the nuts and bolts of passing his landmark Affordable Care Act, but without interiority. “I love that woman,” he says of Nancy Pelosi after a phone conversation about the only way to bypass a Republican filibuster in the Senate — by passing the Senate version of the bill in the House. But we do not get anywhere near a measure of what emotional or even intellectual price he has paid for the many malicious Republican roadblocks which made that phone conversation necessary in the first place. “If I sometimes grew despondent, even angry, over the amount of misinformation that had flooded the airwaves, I was grateful for my team’s willingness to push harder and not give up,” he writes. And one immediately thinks: if?
Part Four | THE GOOD FIGHT
The determined and deliberate Republican opposition to Obama feels astonishingly reckless in retrospect — members of Congress oppose bills they haven’t thoroughly read merely because they are Obama’s bills. It does not matter to them what the consequences might be for the country.
One cannot help wondering if Obama imagined his administration would have been without the Republican rancour.
What if the billionaire conservative ideologues David and Charles Koch had not organized their controversially titled gathering of some of the wealthiest conservative individuals in America with the sole objective of strategizing on how to oppose President Obama? What if the Republican antagonism had not influenced the media's and the public's perception of his administration? The fact that President Obama himself employs the term “Obamacare"— originally a pejorative designation used by conservatives for the Affordable Care Act— reveals the extent to which the accurate stakeholders shaped the discourse during his tenure.
When he writes about realizing that it was not merely his policies that the Tea Party had demonized, his sentences are still, personally, edged with an elusive quality, something detached and impenetrable.
Part Five | THE WORLD AS IT IS
With foreign policy, he is less guarded. He even manages a kind of poetic jingoism, where nearly every criticism of the United States is the mere preface to an elegant and spirited defence. In this sense, Barack Obama defies the stereotype of the American Liberal for whom American failure on the world stage is not the starter course but the main. He is a true disciple of American exceptionalism. That America is not merely feared but also respected is, he argues, proof that it has done something right even in its imperfectness. “Those who complained about America’s role in the world still relied on us to keep the system afloat,” he writes, a reactionary position as if it were innately contradictory to question America’s outsize role and also expect America to do well at the job it chose to give itself.
The highlight of the political memoir is the gossipy bit, the minor detail that surprises or upends what we imagine we know. That rousing rallying cry of the Obama campaign, “Yes We Can”? It was Axelrod’s idea, which Obama thought corny until Michelle said it wasn’t sappy. Think of the iconic image of Jesse Jackson crying on the night Obama won the presidency. Here, we learn that Jackson’s support for Obama’s presidential campaign was “more grudging” than the enthusiastic support of his son Jesse Jackson Jr. And how odd it is that the first family pays out of pocket for food and toilet paper. Who would have thought that it would be generals rather than civilians who counselled Obama for more restraint in using force throughout the eight years of his presidency? Or is he a slow walker, with what Michelle called a Hawaiian walk, after so many images of him nimbly bounding up plane steps, striding across the White House lawn? Or, given his image of tireless discipline, he is “messy” in that childlike, absent-minded way that only men manage to be, knowing that someone will see to the mess—someone usually a woman.
Part Six | IN THE BARREL
His remarkable resilience characterizes his affectionate friendship with Michelle. He recognizes her sacrifices on his behalf and the demands of his political life on her. Upon their initial encounter, she presents herself as "tailored and precise, devoted to her career and adhering to established protocols, with no tolerance for frivolity." Additionally, she serves, albeit briefly, as his mentor.
She is the reason, along with his grandmother and mother, remarkable and unusual women both, that he seems so genuinely alert to misogyny. He articulates the burdens women face, the double standards and unfairness, and the contradictory impulses of a sexist world with fluidity and fluency that can oddly lead to a kind of resentment.
It is like a beleaguered new mother in middle-class America, overwhelmed and leaking milk, who looks at her patient, helpful husband. It feels a burst of rage because she wants not his empathy but a new world in which it is redundant. Here, at last, is a man who gets it, yet that he so perfectly gets it feels like an affront. Is it a clever metaphorical take on gender role reversal that he frequently describes the physical looks of men and not of women? We are told of the handsomeness of men like Charlie Crist and Rahm Emanuel but not the beauty of women, except for one or two instances, as in the case of Sonia Gandhi.
Part Seven | ON THE HIGH WIRE
Obama risks a lot to run for the U.S. Senate — Michelle objects because she likes their privacy and because they have little savings, which would further shrink if he stopped practising law — and puts in much effort, and yet there is a sense that was he to lose, he would not be crushed. “I don’t think you’ll be unhappy if you never become president,” Axe tells him during the campaign. Perhaps it is that he wants to be president but does not need to be, that he is interested in power not for power’s sake but for what he might achieve with it, and that he would take any route that might bring about change, even if it did not involve accruing personal power.
This might be why, after eight years as president, he still comes across as an outsider, writing about the political process as though he were not participating in it but merely looking in. His jaded description of the State of the Union address — its ritualised drama, no bipartisan clapping except for any mention of troops overseas — has an undercurrent of ironic humour, but one with a broken heart at its centre. He wishes things were different. He hopes that Senate confirmations were not made difficult merely to embarrass the administration in power, that issues important to ordinary citizens were not overlooked because they do not have expensive lobbyists roaming the halls of Congress on their behalf, that senators were not bullied into voting a certain way, as Olympia Snowe was by Mitch McConnell when he threatened to strip her of her committee ranking post unless she backed away from supporting Obama’s bill.
So prominent is Obama’s longing for a different way that he admires the friendship across party lines of the old bulls of the Senate — Kennedy, Orrin Hatch, John Warner — which is lacking in the younger generation of senators whom he describes as having the “sharper ideological edge that had come to characterize the House of Representatives after the Gingrich era.” Bipartisanship is vital to him — he wanted Bob Gates in his administration to help push against his own biases — and there is a lingering sense that he thinks as much, if not more, of those he has not won over as of those he has.
Epilogue:
The book captures how complex the job of running the country is. You’re constantly shifting gears, even more than a CEO does. As president, your day is all about making monumental decisions affecting many people’s lives and livelihoods, and you must focus on many problems at once. Obama says he found it challenging to stay focused and not get pulled into different crises all the time. Toward the end of the book, he recalls flying to Alabama to survey the damage from a deadly tornado right after giving the green light for the bin Laden raid. His ability to approach such radically different situations with equal attention and care impressed me.
Obama clarifies that the positives of the job—especially the opportunity to improve lives—outweigh the negatives. But overall, the memoir left me with a surprisingly melancholy impression of what being the president is like. “Sometimes I’d fantasize about walking out the east door and down the driveway, past the guardhouse and wrought-iron gates, to lose myself in crowded streets and reenter the life I’d once known,” he writes.
A Promised Land is ultimately a story about how the presidency defines the lives of those wrapped up in it. “For all its power and pomp,” Obama says, “the presidency is still just a job, and our federal government is a human enterprise like any other.” I can’t wait for another peek behind the curtain when the second book comes out.
Learning:
A Promised Land is twice the length of a standard memoir. I read this book in December 2020 to review it. It is now November 2021, a full year after its release, because I could not figure out how to convert my notes into something legible. The futility of my efforts is in the writing; I began segmenting the chapters into seven parts to which they belong but gave up on that. Instead, I hope that this review's length conveys with accuracy that Obama needed an editor, not two volumes for two terms.
Frankly, besides the look of the slipcover on the bookshelf to impress friends, I would not recommend this text to read. Its ungainly length suggests that its intended audience favours listening to audiobooks while halfway paying attention.