Jens Liljestrand reviews Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs

REVIEW. Hit me like a ray of sunshine, sing Beyoncé and suddenly I remember one of the most beautiful images of the memoirs that I just read. The scene there Barack Obama describes the secret of the Oval Office, the iconic working room of the President of the United States in the White House. The room is not very big, a desk, two sofas, a carpet with a sinister eagle. But space, Obama writes, “flows with light.”

“Cloudless days flow through the huge windows at the southern and eastern ends, so that each object gets a golden glow, first fine-grained, then speckled as the afternoon sun sets.”

Beyoncé continues:

Baby I can feel your halo

Pray that it doesn’t fade

The song is “Halo” and can be found on the playlist that Barack Obama has put together before the release of the book “A Promised Land”, the first volume of two of his long-awaited presidential memoirs.

The launch could hardly have been better timed. All eyes are currently on the White House, there is Donald trump At the time of writing this article he appears to have entrenched himself and by all possible means is trying to annul the presidential election that he lost on November 3. “Trump is intensifying his attack on American democracy,” proclaimed CNN in a headline reminiscent of a coup.

Barack Obama himself, possibly without knowing it, gives a key to the current situation in his country already in the first paragraph of the book, in the preface where he describes how he began to write the book immediately after Trump took office in January 2017 .

“We were exhausted both physically and mentally, not only from the hard work of the last eight years, but also from the incomprehensibility of the fact that a man who was the exact opposite of everything we stood for had been chosen as my successor.”

The keyword is incomprehensible. Barack Obama does not understand how it happened. All the hopes, all the hard work, all the good intentions.

It must be said immediately: as memoirs, “A Promised Land” is as masterfully executed as one might expect. Obama’s writing began in 1995 with “Dreams of My Father” and a continued literary career is already in the binoculars when he plans to run for Senate a few years later. Upcoming book income is even an argument when he has to persuade his wife Michelle let him invest in national politics: “if I become more famous, I can write another book, and it will sell well, then it will cover the expenses.”

Stimulus packages and health care reform are being pushed forward with mild violence and many compromises, but otherwise most are stranded.

“A Promised Land” follows Obama from his youth in Hawaii through education, early career, and family training to the astonishing first steps on the political path to the White House. Most of the book is devoted to his tenure until the attack on Usama bin ladino in May 2011.

The fact that the memoirs end there is perhaps a way to leave the reader with a sense of confidence, as the successful operation in Pakistan appears to have been Obama’s only tumultuous political triumph during these years. Everything else appears mainly as thankless and destructive work, where all attempts at social development were worn out by both cynical Republicans and disappointed left-wing politicians. Stimulus packages and health reform are being pushed forward with mild violence and many compromises, but otherwise most are stranded.

Stylistically, Obama has two modes, possibly shaped by his long academic career; Let’s call them the teacher and the student. The professor sees the world from above and is eloquent and unofficial, talks at length about principles and ideas. The student, instead, is a besserwisser basketball player who sees everything from the side, who smokes and drinks martinis and how the cliche of a hipster begins with beekeeping in the White House garden to eventually be able to start making his own. beer (!). During tedious moves with the Pentagon, he mostly sits and scribbles in his notebook: “abstract patterns, sometimes human faces or beach scenes.”

Like all students, he loves cartoons; France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy It is one Toulouse Lautrecfigure (“he was 165 centimeters tall but had inserts on his shoes to make him look taller”), Vladimir Putin powerful but discreet (“with fine rat-colored hair, prominent nose, and bright, attentive eyes”), David cameron the informal snob studied (“at every international summit, the first thing he did was remove his jacket and tie”), while the Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen reduced to a banal petty official at the Copenhagen climate summit (“sweaty blond hair dull as if he had just gone to a wrestling match”).

What reconciles these two perspectives to some extent is the Obama family man, the father who constantly longs for home to play and cuddle with his wife and the two girls and loves to share the limelight with them. Only occasionally does he get sentimental, like when he remembers how Paul MCCARTNEYAs one of a long list of visiting celebrities, he held a “serenade” for his wife and performed the Beatles song “Michelle.”

But what is truly sentimental about “An Engaged Land” is summed up in its title. The words “I have seen the promised land” appear, of course, in Martin Luther King, Jr: s famous speech the day before his assassination, which in turn is based on the story of Moses in the desert. The interweaving of the Old Testament and identity politics is the cornerstone of Obama’s demagoguery, but as messianic self-image constantly collides with political reality, the book increasingly becomes a litany of injustices that are, again. , incomprehensible.

To Obama, he seriously doesn’t seem to understand that nearly half of Americans don’t want universal health insurance, reasonable gun laws, or working migration, or climate policy at all. Just as he doesn’t understand the seriousness of the bizarre accusation that he was not born in the United States and therefore not a legitimate president, an illusion that, at the end of the book, is no less than Donald Trump, begins to spread from very effectively (a parallel to what we experience today when Trump is about to permanently undermine the legitimacy of his successor Joe biden).

Somewhere in the middle of the mix, the groaning electric guitar is heard in slow blues.

The book makes me understand what Obama himself never seems to fully understand: why so many Americans hated him and still hate him, not just for racist reasons, but purely factual as well. The lasting impression of “A Promised Land” is of an extraordinarily talented but basically naive man who seriously overestimates both his own leadership and his country’s willingness to be led.

I listen to the playlist as I type, it’s soul, rock and r’n’b, it’s all from Sade Y Eminem to Miles Davis Y Frank Sinatra, is the soundtrack of a great contemporary document, but also of a private story about love and bitterness, about high-flying plans and broken dreams.

Somewhere in the middle of the mix, the groaning electric guitar is heard in slow blues. Is BB King who sings “The emotion is gone”. I think I know why.

Jens Liljestrand is deputy cultural director of Expressen