Early reviewer’s of Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land”, his memoir of the first two years of his Presidency, found the book to be candid because Obama mused on his uncertainties about his personal and political decisions. Actually, Obama is not at all forthright in this book. He plays it very close to the vest, a kind of victory lap where he thanks all the people that helped him on his ascent to the Presidency and never clearly says what was his motivation to drive towards the Presidency. He acts as if it happened to him, arriving at the point that his speech at Kerry’s nomination in 2004 that gave him an opportunity to be in the spotlight and for people to see him as having a voice, and then coming to understand that the United States Senate was too narrow a place in which to enact public policy, and then finally deciding to run so that some little Black boy would see that he could emulate Obama. That rings false in that Obama seems to have had political ambitions from the start, he an up-and-comer in the Illinois Senate, just waiting to make his move. His greatest candor is his life long apology for how politics had made Michelle's life more difficult, as if becoming President were not a worthwhile achievement and as if she could not have known early on that he was ambitious. Harry Truman was not ambitious, but Obama certainly was. Why else had he insisted on being only a part time professor of the University of Chicago Law School? Obama, in his memoir, does not explain himself.
Obama lets himself go only as to people with whom he has contempt or at least about people who have significant limitations and flaws. While extolling John McCain as a brave and straightforward man, Obama does seem that McCain is seriously lacking in that McCain was overwhelmed by his inability to make sense of what to do with the collapse of the lower than prime rate mortgage crisis. McCain was not an economist, but neither was Obama, and yet Obama presents himself as a steady hand who, like other Harvard Law graduates, feels able to master whatever it is that has to be mastered. He talks about finance to the financial best and seems able to mix it up with them. So Obama is letting on that he is very smart, and people have thought him so for a very long time. Being President is what he is comfortable doing, whatever are its challenges, as if that was what he knew he was destined to be, not a litigator or a law professor, but a politician who only gets to be considered respectable if politicians make it up to the Senate, the rest of them just shuffling through their occupation as time servers. So Obama passed over being important for the more arduous trip to become very, very important.
Obama stays close to his vest in this way as well: he doesn’t reveal much that goes on behind the scenes. What he says about being President is pretty much the same you would find from reading the reports of the New York Times on what happened in the White House. Even his characterizations of the important people around him are no different from those we learn from the press and public interviews. Larry Summers is disheveled and insensitive to people's opinions. Nancy Pelosi is a very shrewd operator; Joe Biden can be garrulous; Mitch McConnell is not interested in policy at all, only getting an advantage. These are the people he will have to deal with and he figures how he will manage them, if he can.
What Obama offers instead are his carefully stated observations about politics and the presidency, much like someone giving a set of lectures about them, and his deliberate and measured observations turn out to be very unsettling if you have ears to hear, one about domestic policy, where he is puzzled and disappointed and perhaps alarmed about the state of affairs, and foreign policy, which is unsettling for reasons I do not think he was aware.
As to domestic policy: Obama muses about the reasons that the Recovery Act, larger in total, he says, than all of the New Deal. and passed within a month of his becoming President, was so troubling. The House had passed it without a single Republican vote and the four so-called “moderate” Republicsn Senators had gained a number of special concessions so as to support it. Why were the Republicans so obdurate about a proposal that economic and other experts both Democratic and Republican had said was essential for keeping America from tanking? Obama uses the usual liberal platitudes: the Koch brothers, right wing radio and politicians that don’t really care to do good things so long as they are well financed and so get reelected. In other words, Obama, like other people, are mystified by their opponents. That is a conventional point of view but one which I challenge precisely because the following administration, Trump’s, carried on the exact set of policies, only adding on flair and animus. It can’t just be that the opposition is superficial in its limited self interest. I would suggest that the Republicans believe what they say when they want limited self government except as to give the rich what they want and so are slathered with the Republican sentiments--not even something as clear as a ideology-- that regards law and order as bad only when minority groups are on edge, and that Republicans also believe in blockading whatever it is that is regards as progress, while looking away at Russian underhanded cooperation with Obama's successor. In that view, Republicans have ceased to be a functioning party and so ex-Republicans, the never Trump crowd, may create a new one or help to usher in a post Trump GOP, around Christie and Rubio, not McConnell, who has too long to be a Trump enabler to be regarded as a legitimate leader of the post Trump Republicans. Or so we shall see.
Obama puts aside his view on political right wing chattering to take up a more pessimistic view. Obama repeatedly muses that the people on Wall Street were not at all troubled by the fact that the economy had tanked because of the subprime mortgages that they had fostered. They were not responsible, they thought, for having crippled the economy. They thought that they were just allowing the market to remain liquid, never mind that most people were being deceived. They shouldn't be punished and here they were being castigated by Obama, however much there was no way to legally find people culpable or else to make the mortgage defaulters to be made at least partially whole. It was deeply unsettling to think that the fat cats were so unaware of or unwilling to act in the public interest. Obama did not use this example, but he might have mentioned that J. P. Morgan had tried to rescue the Great Depression by buying massive amounts of stock in 1929, just as he had done in a previous financial crisis. Conservatives have always thought that they owned the country and so would try to do things to keep it afloat, but this time the fat cats did not want to extend themselves and did not feel the responsibility. All that the Liberals could do was to make it work without also taking the drastic step of trying to restructure the economy in a more responsible way. There were other issues to deal with and only righting things back to the previous balance seemed the prudent thing to do.
The deep unrest that concerns the nature of the domestic economy has a similar unrest when it comes to making sense of foreign policy. Obama is what is often considered a responsible leader on foreign policy because he is a proceduralist in the making of foreign policy. He reads his briefings; he consults with a great many people who have a variety of points of view and expertise; asks pointed questions as they are informed by a familiarity with the issues (he was an international relations student as an undergraduate); and then offers a nuanced response in his decision. But foreign policy does not seem all that well honed in that the foreign policy apparatus is always surprised at what happens and that the judgments made by policy experts are just guesses about what to do. There had been a memo sent by top intelligence that Al Qaeda was up to something just before 9/11 and nothing happened because all the emergency directive did was warn rather than specify level of warning or what might happen, which was just about the same thing that happened before Pearl Harbor, Washington informing Hawaii that something might happen in the Pacific and so to be on the alert. Of what and when? Nothing operational, and so the dog barked every week or so and waited for it to happen. Intelligence and military readiness worked out with killing Osama Bin Laden, but it might have not worked out, as was Jimmy Carter’s effort to get the Iran hostages out through a military adventure, and all it meant was that a presidency could rise or fall on the basis of whether a helicopter got into trouble and survived it. No way to run a railroad.
Moreover, major policy changes don’t depend on deep insight but seem rather obvious, even to military people who want to stick with whatever they are doing. It was clear that Bush had decided to withdraw from Iraq and all Obama had to do was to follow suit. The military wanted to increase forces in Afghanistan, but military people like to put civilians on their heels when a new President takes over. The great vision of Obama about foreign policy is, as Obama said, not to do anything stupid, which is what Bush had done with Iraq. Major issues will present themselves. FDR waited and jostled for the Germans and Japanese to declare themselves. Korea was a no brainer even if Acheson pondered and JFK might have gotten himself and the country into a mighty mess by mishandling negotiations about Cuba and the Soviets. World War I had to support the British rather than the Germans. It doesn’t take all that pondering and expertise to see the ways things are drifting. Whether the Chinese become belligerent even despite Kissinger’s opening to the East, is anyone’s guess, however much the cogitation. Events will see, not the experts and the various committees and subcommittees in Foggy Bottom or elsewhere. So, Obama is telling us, stay out of foreign affairs, which moves on their own accord, even if there is a President like Trump, who doesn’t read and also swaggers, and still doesn’t do anything, because everything's in its place until something happens. But do a lot about domestic affairs, though it is a quandary how to make Republicans act sensibly. That is the state of the nation, and has been so for centuries. Revolutions and Civil Wars are rare.