Barack Obama, as expected, has a lot to say.
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Online Editor
“A Promised Land,” the first of two autobiographies covering the Barack Obama Administration and the man himself, is 768 pages long, and its timeline only covers events up until the death of Osama Bin Laden. But despite the incredible length, the former President manages to do something else that is incredible: make every sentence feel important.
Throughout the massive recounting of his beginnings in politics and the majority of his first term in the White House, Obama never loses the reader’s attention. He talks in detail about his upbringing and his mother, the harsh and often repetitive grind of politics in Springfield, Illinois where he began his political rise, and beginning in Chapter 10, the first few years of his time as President.
What stands out is how content Obama seems with what we accomplished, despite the incredible opposition to his policies for seemingly no reason at all. While he definitely has choice words for people like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Sarah Palin, they don’t seem to be rooted in so much in their political standings as they are rooted in who they are as individual people. And he has plenty of nice things to say about many others, including many Republicans. It’s his comments about Palin, however, that really stand out when reflecting on the events since his presidency, noting that the type of following she culminated led directly to a shift in the ideology of the Republican Party and led directly to the rise of President Donald Trump.
What also stands out is just how unplanned his political career seemed to come together, almost by pure luck and sheer chance. Obama recounts multiple times just how much his wife Michelle does not like politics, and Obama comes across as someone who would be just as happy if he never stepped into a political battleground. He comes across as someone who wanted the political positions that he held not for the sake of having power, but with the intent of doing some good for the American citizens.
Obama had stumbles, some of which are discussed in this novel (such as his struggle to combat the fallout of the 2008 economic crisis), as well as his honest self-reflection on his shortcomings. More are likely to be discussed in the next book that he writes, as there were plenty of major events that took place during his second term. But for now, Obama’s first presidential volume is more than enough to hold readers over. It’s also one of the better presidential memoirs to date.
