Fareed Zakaria
The first time I met Barack Obama, he struck me as different from any other politician I had ever met. He was smart, well-read, affable and energetic, but that isn’t what made him stand out. It was the way he asked questions. Most politicians ask a question to answer it themselves. After giving you a brief opportunity to respond, they jump in, “Well, here’s what I think . . .,” and proceed to deliver some packaged piece of wisdom they have doubtless recited dozens of times. But Obama would ask a question to which he actually wanted an answer. He would listen and ask another question. He genuinely wanted to understand how someone else might view an issue.
That unusual politician comes through clearly in his new book, “A Promised Land.” It is well written, certainly the best-written presidential memoir I have read. Obama has an easy and stylish way with words. Describing walking through the West Colonnade of the White House, he says, “it was where each morning I felt the first slap of winter wind or pulse of summer heat.” Describing a helicopter ride, he writes, “I gazed out at the rolling Maryland landscape and the tidy neighbourhoods below, and then the Potomac, glistening beneath the fading sun.”
The most notable feature of the book, however, is Obama’s ability to see not just both sides of every issue but even to empathize with the side in vigorous opposition to his own. He writes that he could understand Hillary Clinton’s frustration, after a long climb to power, to be confronting an upstart challenger for the Democratic nomination. He understands the motivations of Republican leaders such as John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and provides a short history lesson: “American voters rarely reward the opposition for cooperating with the governing party.” He even has a “grudging respect” for the way the tea party gained passionate support and widespread news coverage.
This quality of fair-mindedness is admirable in anyone, especially one who has risen to the top of a cutthroat profession like politics. And it gave Obama considerable advantages in both domestic and foreign policy. He could see the world with different people’s eyes, which broadened his horizons and made him a better negotiator. But his memoir does have one gap, a lacuna in his vision, both as president and as a writer. He devotes little time in the book to the central political dynamic in his years in office — the rise of an enraged, utterly obstructionist, Manichean opposition to his presidency, and himself personally, that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump.
A reminder: Barack Obama was a moderate Democrat — “conservative in temperament,” he acknowledges — and governed as one. For his key economic advisers, he chose the most centrist, market-friendly experts of the party, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. He kept on Bush’s defence secretary and offered another key Cabinet job, commerce secretary, to Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. He sent in thousands more troops to Afghanistan and expanded drone warfare. And his health-care plan was modelled on the conservative Heritage Foundation’s old proposal, one that also served as the basis for Mitt Romney’s program when he was governor of Massachusetts.
This reign of moderation and compromise, however, elicited a reaction from the Republican Party that was furious and vengeful. Gregg, who initially accepted the job as commerce secretary, had to back down in the face of activist outrage that he was serving the enemy. Obama recounts the case of Charlie Crist, who as governor of Florida supported Obama’s stimulus, which the state desperately needed because its economy was in free fall. His two-second handshake and hug with Obama made him so toxic within the Republican Party that by 2010 he had to become an independent and later a Democrat.
Despite many compromises, Obama got not one Republican vote for his stimulus or health-care bills in the House of Representatives. And opposition to his policies was often couched in blatantly racist ways, such as posters denouncing Obamacare with caricatures of him as an African witch doctor with a bone stuck through his nose. The man who succeeded him in office, Trump, rose to political prominence by casting doubt on whether Obama was born in the United States.
Obama talks about these hysterical reactions to him intelligently but briefly, never offering deep analysis or passionate anger. He admits he wasn’t focused on the ominous undercurrents that were growing in strength. “My team and I were too busy,” he writes. But it might also be that it would take him into deep and dark waters that are so different from the hopeful, optimistic country he so plainly wants to believe in. America remains for him a promised land.
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