Anything and everything related to the work of the USCIS was already slow, even before the pandemic. After the pandemic hit and my family ended up moving back to Korea somewhat unexpectedly, my dad’s application for a re-entry permit was further complicated, resulting in his last-minute, three-day trip to California, just to get his fingerprints taken. On his way back to Seoul, he bought me a couple books, one of which was President Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land.
Starting from before my family’s move to the U.S., to me, Obama represented the epitome of American ideals — mainly those of hope and diversity. My admiration for him grew even more during Tru*mp’s presidency, as I’d been forced to face my disillusionment with my previous perception of America and longed for a past when the POTUS was largely aligned with my own beliefs.
*cue Come Back, Barack by SNL*
While reading A Promised Land, I was once again inspired by his stories, leadership, and unwavering optimism — “the audacity of hope,” as he would say. Obama’s incredible writing made the 700-page memoir a relatively fast read for me, and another factor that made it fun to read was looking up the various speeches and people he mentions throughout the memoir (especially Michael McFaul, who gave a talk in my frosh dorm, and Jeremy Weinstein, one of my POLISCI 1 professors!). Watching his 2004 DNC speech on my iPhone in one hand and the book in my lap, I got teary-eyed and felt a weird sense of patriotism (which I am still reluctant to label as patriotism — although I do consider myself fortunate to be an American citizen, I am uncomfortable with the idea of taking pride in a national identity that I acquired just a little over a year ago. Not to sound all “imagine alll the peoplee…” but I don’t want to attach too much importance to a concept created and maintained by borders. Now I’m going on a tangent.)
Some of my favorite parts about the memoir come from his descriptions of his upbringing, his family life as a kid, father, and husband, his retrospective musings and the incredible self-awareness that shine through them, and the behind-the-scenes stories of meeting with foreign leaders, creating policies, and making high-stakes decisions. By nature of this being a memoir, Obama probably describes himself in a more positive light than a completely neutral and unbiased narrator would.
The authors of a Current Affairs article, “The Fraudulent Universalism of Barack Obama” described A Promised Land as “part memoir and part apologia” in which Obama doesn’t just recount the events throughout his term but also attempts to “explain why he made the choices that he did,” and it certainly did feel that way in some parts of the book. The Current Affairs authors also critiqued, “Notwithstanding its (mostly unconvincing) effort to appear self-critical and introspective, the book is as much a response to critics as a straightforward chronicle; a defense of a legacy, a record, and a political outlook whose detractors, on both left and right, have only grown more vociferous with the passage of time.”
I’m glad that I followed up my reading of A Promised Land with the Current Affairs article — otherwise, I might have continued to blindly and unequivocally idolize Obama (for a long time, I simply didn’t want to think about the ways in which he fell short in some of his policies —my willful ignorance allowed me to hold on to my idealized perception of the one POTUS I love). Even now, learning and unlearning about certain events and policies under the Obama administration is an ongoing process for me that makes me face uncomfortable truths, but I’d say that I’ve steered away from singing “Come Back, Barack” and towards qualified respect and admiration.
Now, the LSAT is in two days and I have some reviewing to do, so I will list some of my favorite quotes/moments from both the memoir itself and the Current Affairs article in bullet point form.
Quotes and Moments I Liked/Found Noteworthy from A Promised Land:
- “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 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.”
- “Why would I put her through this? Was it just vanity? Or perhaps something darker — a raw hunger, a blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service? Or was I still trying to prove myself worthy to a father who had abandoned me, live up to my mother’s starry-eyed expectations of her only son, and resolve whatever self-doubt remained from being born a child of mixed race? […] Maybe it was impossible to disentangle one’s motives.”
- “She [Toot] taught me to marry passion with reason, to not get overly excited when life was going well, and to not get too down when it went badly.”
- “The excitement was fun and at times deeply touching, but it was also a little unnerving. At some basic level people were no longer seeing me, I realized, with all my quirks and shortcomings. Instead, they had taken possession of my likeness and made it a vessel for a million different dreams.”
I empathized with his apprehension of the implications of him being a symbol, but as the Current Affairs authors point out, it is precisely the way in which Obama turned himself into a symbol of hope that successfully propelled his election: “Obama emphatically insists he was uncomfortable with those who expressed outsized hopes in him and discussed him in messianic terms, but admits that his campaign deliberately “helped to construct” this association in the public’s mind between the election of Barack Obama to the presidency and the fulfillment of America’s promise and the end to people’s troubles. The route to the “promised land” was through his presidency. It was hope itself, change itself. Elect me, he said, and we will end our divisions, part the seas, and move to a new stage of history. Say what you will, but this is a powerful piece of personal branding.”
- (in talking about the chefs, butlers and valets working at the White House who were mostly Black, Latino, or Asian American) “it was hard to miss in their racial makeup the vestiges of an earlier time, when social rank had clear demarcations and those who occupied the office of president felt most comfortable in their privacy when served by those they assumed were not their equals — and, therefore, could not judge them.”
- “My emphasis on process was born of necessity. What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already. Instead, I was constantly dealing with probabilities […] In such circumstances, chasing after the perfect solution led to paralysis.”
- “As is usually the case when I’m angry, I didn’t raise my voice.”
Say what you will about Obama, his charisma, civility, and equanimity are some of his traits that I think everyone can find admirable and should learn from.
- “To be known. To be heard. To have one’s unique identity recognized and seen as worthy. It was a universal human desire, I thought, as true for nations and peoples as it was for individuals.”
- “I was learning yet another difficult lesson about the presidency: that my heart was now chained to strategic considerations and tactical analysis, my convictions subject to counterintuitive arguments; that in the most powerful office on earth, I had less freedom to say what I meant and act on what I felt than I’d had as a senator — or as an ordinary citizen”
- “Still, for both policy and political reasons, I felt that progressives couldn’t afford to ignore economics. Those of us who believed in the government’s ability to solve big problems had an obligation to pay attention to the real-world impact of our decisions and not just trust in the goodness of our intentions.”
Reading this for some reason made me feel proud to be a Public Policy major and reminded me why I chose to study Public Policy instead of just Economics or just Political Science.
- On the realities of working in the White House: “Everybody was sleep-deprived, perpetually. Rarely did senior staffers put in less than a twelve-hour day, and almost all of them came in for at least part of each weekend […] Those staffers lucky enough to have partners often relied on an overburdened and lonely spouse, creating the kinds of chronic domestic tensions that Michelle and I were more than familiar with. People missed their children’s soccer games and dance recitals […] Folks knew what they signed up for when joining an administration. “Work-life balance” wasn’t part of the deal”
A somber reminder that you can’t have it all. :/
- “I tried to be generous in my praise, measured in my criticism.”
An important quality of a leader.
Now…
Quotes from “The Fraudulent Universalism of Barack Obama” that Made Me Think Twice:
- “Again and again these questions pile up, their tone always pensive, probing, and self-critical. A Promised Land is effective in large part because it feels authentic and true, as if Obama is offering a thoughtful examination of his motives, successes, and failures. The capacity to engage in self-criticism, even of the harshest kind, makes it seem like he is being straight with us and offering up an objective reading of events. Thus when Obama fails to convincingly answer his own questions or begins to distort the truth in ways that seem deliberate, it begins to seem that his authenticity may be a performance, a calculated act rather than genuine soul-bearing.”
I’d like to believe that his self-criticism isn’t entirely performative, but the authors have a point in mentioning its possibility.
- “Some issues, such as his pro-privatization education “reforms,” or the drone strikes on civilian populations criticized by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, or mass deportation, are barely touched on in the book, perhaps because they were clear matters of policy choice and thus fit awkwardly with its wider effort to portray Obama as someone whose disappointing compromises were imposed upon him by circumstance.”
Of course, it would have been impossible for Obama to include every single domestic and international issue in his memoir. But he had a choice, and what he chose to leave out says as much about himself and his presidency as what he chose to include in his memoir.
- “It is the case, then, that Obama may not have had as much room to maneuver simply by virtue of the fact that in a racist country, he was under an impossible level of scrutiny. But this doesn’t explain why after leaving office, when he is free to speak his mind, Obama appears to partly blame Gates for his own arrest. It does not explain why he declines the opportunity to fully expose the racist attacks on Wright for what they were. As we have written before, Obama’s post-presidency can resolve definitively the question of who he really is and what he wants, because the constraints that were on him as a president have been removed.”
- “But Obama is, as always, the prisoner of etiquette and norms. He knows what the Iraq war was, but cannot call his predecessor a criminal. He knew the CIA tortured people, but would not prosecute its malefactors. He knew the financial crisis would destroy millions of livelihoods and make the rich even richer, but rejected popular demands for activist government. Being the kind of president some progressives hoped and believed he would be would have required him to militate against an order he committed to defend decades ago. It also would have required the abandonment of his “everything to everyone” aspiration and necessitated the discarding of his own carefully-crafted universalist identity.”
Hence the authors’ claim that his universalism is “fraudulent.”
“Obama still insists he is with everyone, that his team is America. But there is no such thing as not taking sides.”
With all that I’ve read and said here, I’m excited for the second volume of his memoir. Hopefully by then, I will have read and learned more about the various domestic and foreign policies of his presidency to be able to make my own judgment about what he chose to leave out, what he chose to include, and how he chose to describe his time as POTUS.
Third-grade-me wanted to be the president — I don’t exactly know why but I think it had something to do with reuniting the Koreas. While reading A Promised Land taught me a lot about Obama’s leadership, it further confirmed college-junior-me’s aversion to a career in politics.
Fuck Republicans. Especially Mitch McConnell.
