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A review by elerireads
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
3.0
So my main recurring thought throughout this was just that The West Wing was incredibly accurate. There were so many incidents he described that were eerily similar to West Wing scenes/episodes - even just the overall tenor of the writing? (I'd be vaguely interested to know if Obama had watched it!) Anyway if I didn't already go around recommending The West Wing to everyone, I would now! Probs not the thing that should have struck me most but there it is....
Aside from Obama's writing and his own experience, this was very interesting for me to read just on the basis of the events he was describing. Obama's presidency, especially the first term, falls into a bit of a temporal gap in my knowledge because I was only very vaguely aware of current affairs at the time (I wasn't exactly a particularly engaged 10-14 year old), but it doesn't feel like History To Learn About, because I lived through it? (I feel shamefully ignorant about the Arab Spring in particular - my sole recollection is that Libya got a less cool-looking flag) So this was a useful blank-filing exercise if nothing else, and also of course interesting to get the decision-making perspective.
I have mixed feelings about Obama's writing itself and the way he presented his experiences. It was simple and clear with a very friendly (?) tone, so it never felt dense to get through. This is going to sound like a bit of ridiculous stating the obvious here, but to me there was a big divide between the way he wrote about himself pre- and post-election. The pre-election stuff felt like a lot of critical self-reflection - a lot of tortured waffling on about mistakes he made and things he should have done better etc. At points it got quite tedious (it occurred to me that it sounded very like the twaddle that would come out if I ever tried to write about myself). By contrast, the tone of all the writing about his presidency was incredibly defensive, which is obviously understandable, but defensiveness is a big pet peeve of mine so it really grated on me after a while. Every time he mentioned coming under criticism for anything or not managing something perfectly it would be immediately followed by something in the vein of "Of course this was all while fighting two wars, trying to prevent economic catastrophe and trying to get enough votes on a healthcare bill to avoid a filibuster". I know the whole point of the book was to show what it was actually like to be POTUS so it's useful to remind us that all of these things were happening at once, and I'm sure it must be incredibly frustrating to feel like people don't understand/acknowledge how many things you're trying to juggle. But. After the first few times, it started to feel like making excuses, and you're not going to get my sympathy/admiration for that because it's kind of what you signed up for when you ran for president. The friendly tone also got a bit irritating once he got onto some of the serious topics. Sometimes it felt a bit condescending and like he was making light of things?
The one thing that drove me nuts was his description of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. So dismissive and patronising of other world leaders ("for what felt like an hour, I let them vent"). Even through his rose-tinted depiction of it, I saw his behaviour there as a prime example of the US throwing its weight around and bullying other countries to get exactly what they wanted. Obviously I'm probably biased because climate stuff is like My Whole Life at the moment and this was one of the few events that I did know a lot about, having read multiple accounts placing a huge amount of the blame on the US and Obama specifically! Regardless, it was pretty roundly viewed as a disaster by most people, so it was quite frankly astonishing that Obama's tone afterwards was ... smug? self-congratulatory? He genuinely seemed to be claiming to have paved the way for the Paris Agreement! That he had the gall to joke about it being "some real gangster shit" afterwards just showed so little self-awareness and made me furious (I had to stop reading and do a bit of rage-pacing to calm down before I could carry on).
Aside from Obama's writing and his own experience, this was very interesting for me to read just on the basis of the events he was describing. Obama's presidency, especially the first term, falls into a bit of a temporal gap in my knowledge because I was only very vaguely aware of current affairs at the time (I wasn't exactly a particularly engaged 10-14 year old), but it doesn't feel like History To Learn About, because I lived through it? (I feel shamefully ignorant about the Arab Spring in particular - my sole recollection is that Libya got a less cool-looking flag) So this was a useful blank-filing exercise if nothing else, and also of course interesting to get the decision-making perspective.
I have mixed feelings about Obama's writing itself and the way he presented his experiences. It was simple and clear with a very friendly (?) tone, so it never felt dense to get through. This is going to sound like a bit of ridiculous stating the obvious here, but to me there was a big divide between the way he wrote about himself pre- and post-election. The pre-election stuff felt like a lot of critical self-reflection - a lot of tortured waffling on about mistakes he made and things he should have done better etc. At points it got quite tedious (it occurred to me that it sounded very like the twaddle that would come out if I ever tried to write about myself). By contrast, the tone of all the writing about his presidency was incredibly defensive, which is obviously understandable, but defensiveness is a big pet peeve of mine so it really grated on me after a while. Every time he mentioned coming under criticism for anything or not managing something perfectly it would be immediately followed by something in the vein of "Of course this was all while fighting two wars, trying to prevent economic catastrophe and trying to get enough votes on a healthcare bill to avoid a filibuster". I know the whole point of the book was to show what it was actually like to be POTUS so it's useful to remind us that all of these things were happening at once, and I'm sure it must be incredibly frustrating to feel like people don't understand/acknowledge how many things you're trying to juggle. But. After the first few times, it started to feel like making excuses, and you're not going to get my sympathy/admiration for that because it's kind of what you signed up for when you ran for president. The friendly tone also got a bit irritating once he got onto some of the serious topics. Sometimes it felt a bit condescending and like he was making light of things?
The one thing that drove me nuts was his description of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. So dismissive and patronising of other world leaders ("for what felt like an hour, I let them vent"). Even through his rose-tinted depiction of it, I saw his behaviour there as a prime example of the US throwing its weight around and bullying other countries to get exactly what they wanted. Obviously I'm probably biased because climate stuff is like My Whole Life at the moment and this was one of the few events that I did know a lot about, having read multiple accounts placing a huge amount of the blame on the US and Obama specifically! Regardless, it was pretty roundly viewed as a disaster by most people, so it was quite frankly astonishing that Obama's tone afterwards was ... smug? self-congratulatory? He genuinely seemed to be claiming to have paved the way for the Paris Agreement! That he had the gall to joke about it being "some real gangster shit" afterwards just showed so little self-awareness and made me furious (I had to stop reading and do a bit of rage-pacing to calm down before I could carry on).