A review by pascalthehoff
A Promised Land by Barack Obama

informative medium-paced

5.0

More than anything else about Obama, this book hammers home how fundamentally broken the US two-party system is.

Governing the US is not so much a process of governing as it is a process of struggling to find loopholes in a system between two dogmatically hardened fronts. And this is true of even the most well-meaning candidates.

But has Barack Obama been a good, well-meaning US president? I think so, yes. If only for the fact that he passed the low bar of actually caring about his country and all the people in it.

That sense of genuine good intentions comes across very well in this book. And I don't think even a man as rhetorically gifted as Barack Obama could credibly fake that for more than 700 pages.

In fact, he surprised me with very thorough and self-critical explanations of typical "Obama could have done more / could have done things differently" issues. Never in an apologetic way, but openly stating where and why he fell short. Through his own fault or not.

Still, it is important to read this book with a critical eye - just like any autobiography. Obama is not immune to getting caught up in certain US propaganda values of freedom, world policing, certain aspects of market liberalism, etc.

What's interesting, however, is the nuance and clarity that can be gained from this book on certain issues. For example, Obama seemed genuinely interested in de-escalating the war on terror, but also quickly came to grips with the complex mechanisms that kept him from simply abandoning it altogether, while at the same time acknowledging a certain validity of US involvement in that conflict.

Or there is one of his prouder early moments on the global stage: He essentially strong-armed the BRICS into a disadvantageous climate deal behind closed doors. An impromptu pressure tactic that paved the way for any global climate agreement to pass at all. Obama basically acted as a (biased) mediator between the dominant expectations of the Global North and the valid, but ultimately muted, expectations of the Global South.

So there is a lot of black and white, with Obama sometimes being more proud of the black side than he perhaps should be. But you can also see why even somewhat tainted successes are such a hard-won victory in our rigid systems, both nationally and globally.

Last but not least, one must never forget what Obama meant as a symbol: The first Black President of the United States, and a younger candidate who at least tried to challenge the highly conservative status quo. The ecstasy of this cultural event in itself comes across in the book, even if there may be better works on this specific aspect and its aftermath.