Obama is both a political and literary genius
Former US President Barack Obama's new book A Promised Land.
Last Tuesday afternoon, I had the indescribable pleasure of securing a copy of the memoir of President Barack Obama, A Promised Land.
At the time of writing this column, I was barely past the 100th page and well into part two, which gets into the nuts and bolts of the presidential campaign that led to his historic win in 2008. In spite of this, there is a lot to share.
Consider this a provisional book review.
A lot of thought has gone into putting together A Promised Land, the first volume of the two-part memoirs. It makes for a riveting read and is truly unputdownable. This book is largely a political treatise, outlining the zigs and zags of Obama’s political journey from an obsessive student at Occidental College to the first black editor of Harvard’s Law Review, to a state senator, a US senator and President.
Political odyssey
It is easy to focus on President’s Obama’s famous, gripping speeches, the high life in the bubble and the history he made. However, he takes his readers into the inner sanctum of his political odyssey, and provides an honest reckoning of the smaller, mundane and less glamorous moments that led up to the glory.
And this is what I am truly enjoying about the book: President Obama’s humanity, his mistakes and miscalculations, the failures that shaped the man, the marital strain of the political life.
The knowledge that President Obama’s life, though extraordinary, is not devoid of pain (abandonment by his father at a young age and the loss of his mother), strain (Michelle’s initial opposition to his presidential bid) and failure (the disastrous campaign caused him to lose his bid for Congress).
In this book, we see President Obama’s early campaign days, when he was running for state senate, nobody knew his name and people would slam their doors in his face during campaigns.
Total failure
We see a young Obama, in his late thirties, feeling like a total failure after the 2000 Democratic National Convention, when he couldn’t even afford a taxi to the convention from the airport because he had maxed out his credit card.
Little did he know that four years later he would give a phenomenal speech that would catapult him to the global stage and, four years after that, he would be accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
We witness firsthand the grind of an 18-month rigorous presidential campaign, the calls he had to make to beg strangers for campaign dollars. We see the strain this had on his family, the stretches of time he had to spend away from them and the importance of a dedicated and loyal team.
But the most important lesson I am gleaning from the memoirs is the need for resilience. It is the unseen thread running throughout those superbly written sentences – and the life of one of the greatest modern-day legends. No need to mention how I’ll be spending the weekend.
