Review: A Promised Land

I've had a quote from Obama on my Facebook profile for about four years. I’ve even quoted it at team building discussions at work when asked what’s my motto or mantra:

“I don’t believe in apocalyptic until the apocalypse comes.”

He said it as a response to the election of President Trump. Four years later, after the election of Trump, and almost exactly one year into an actual apocalypse, the quote still rings in my ears as I read this massive first volume of his memoirs. Did Obama have faith in the ever-delayed apocalypse because he was the one doing the delaying? Did he know that the wards he put on the nation would be the first and primary target of his predecessor? Who knows? We’ll find out in volume two.

Volume One covers Obama’s life between his time at Columbia (the source of memes in his quest to get laid) and the waning years of his first term. He gets the motivation out of the way fairly quickly: after a “late” blooming, Obama found that his calling in life was to try to help people. Getting into politics was the necessary condition of that calling.

The major two sections of this book are then in two pieces. First is the Ascent, as Obama goes from state senator to President in less than a decade. Second is the Turmoil, as Obama handles crisis after crisis set off by Moloch and President Bush. These sections are intensely entertaining and incredibly page turning.

During the Ascent, Obama has to negotiate his rise in Chicago and come to grips with the hard realities of compromise-based governing. State and local politics are games. They’re business. His ideals are dashed and thrown. He chases them upwards. When he gets to the next level, he finds the same thing, but this time he has a national audience. Obama at this point has figured out that he has pure, raw charisma- the type of charisma you find in an asteroid of pure gold. Yet, the Senate is as hard to create impact as the Illinois senate. His ideals are dashed and thrown. He chases them upwards.

He becomes President.

The Turmoil itself spans my time in high school. Everything he describes I remember having a perspective, but they don’t feel like my memories… I was a Republican back then! Yet, reading Obama explain crisis after crisis stirs those memories. The economy was falling into utter collapse. The ACA was being fought over and compromised on. Our imperialist wars dragged on. Obama goes over each of these, explains what happens, describes where he was with Sasha or Malia when Ax said something funny. Each chapter goes by like an episode…

… because they _are_ episodes. Because this entire goddamned book is a Sorkian drama, a treatment for a new series of the West Wing.

The pilot starts out simple enough: it starts with the end of Obama’s presidency. It’s an hour long affair on HBO Max. The last shot is the President writing in his notebook, “What the hell happened.”

The first season tells the story of his rise from the announcement to V-day. It tells the stories of his other elections with an assortment of flashbacks. The dialog is crisp. It’s more like Veep at this point, but less harsh. The story is hope, with the demon of realpolitick always in the dark, close by.

The second season is maybe 15 episodes. It goes methodically policy by policy, crisis by crisis, sometimes interweaving arcs together. The main cast- the Obamas, Axelrod, Rahm- all have perfect lookalikes. We throw in a few other characters who are made up interns that explain what Obama wants to explain to the audience in this book, “Politics is really fucking hard and comprimise has to be made to push progress even an inch.” The interns or staffers or whatever also fuck. It’s HBO Max after all.

Of course, the second to last episode is the megaloss of the midterms. The last episode is the death of Bin Laden.

This TV show might even have Key and Peele show up. We might reimagine Obama’s Anger Translator as a historical fact. One of the most repeated phrases in the book is “What I wanted to say was…” as the President grapples with the fact that his speeches and thoughts were constricted by political expediency. When pushed about the culpability of the Deep Horizon Oil spill, for example, he claims to basically have wanted to say, “Fuck y’all for using so much goddamned oil.”

The book is entertaining, and it is a useful reminder to the centre-left of how we got to now (the apocalypse). We are coming 12 years off of the deepest recession in a century, still in the middle of the longest wars our country has ever fought, and the safeguards against disease and disaster that Obama set out to create almost 12 years ago have been broken. We have to fix these problems with a broken government- a government that is broken in part because of a fiercely racist response _to_ Obama. That’s okay though! Because, yes, we can do it! The apocalypse hasn’t come yet.