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Barack Obama said the Trump administration’s foreign relations had inflicted ‘damage’ upon America, and that it would take time for the country’s reputation to be restored. Obama expressed confidence in a new Biden administration, but cautioned change would not happen immediately More
After reports first emerged on Sunday night that Antony Blinken would be US secretary of state in the Biden administration, one particular interview from his past began circulating on social media.It was a September 2016 conversation with Grover, a character from Sesame Street, on the subject of refugees, directed at American children who might have new classmates from faraway countries.“We all have something to learn and gain from one another even when it doesn’t seem at first like we have much in common,” Blinken told the fuzzy blue puppet.After four years of an administration that has separated migrant children from their parents and kept them in cages, Blinken’s arrival at the state department will mark a dramatic change, to say the least.While Mike Pompeo has remained a domestic politician throughout his tenure as secretary of state, giving the lion’s share of his interviews to conservative radio stations in the midwest, for example, Blinken is very much a born internationalist.He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and play football (soccer), and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles, love songs titled Lip Service and Patience, uploaded on Spotify.All those contacts and the urbane bilingual charm will be targeted at soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player. The foreign policy priorities in the first days of a Biden administration will be rejoining treaties and agreements that Donald Trump left.There is little doubt that Blinken will be on the same page as Joe Biden. He has been at the president-elect’s side for nearly two decades. After working in Bill Clinton’s national security council, he became Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser in the Senate in 2002, as staff director on the foreign relations committee, and worked on Biden’s failed presidential bid in 2008.After Obama picked Biden as vice-president, Blinken returned to the White House as his national security adviser. His face can be seen at the back of the room in the famous photograph of Obama officials monitoring the raid that killed Bin Laden. More
He’s back with a vengeance. After four years lying low as Donald Trump occupied the White House, Barack Obama is suddenly everywhere again – on TV, on radio, online and in bookshops.
The 44th US president’s memoir, A Promised Land, was published this week and, shifting nearly 890,000 copies in its first 24 hours, is likely to become the bestselling presidential memoir in modern American history. It topped his wife Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming, which sold 725,000 copies on day one.
As he promotes the 768-page tome, Obama is being asked what influence he and his allies may wield when his former deputy, Joe Biden, assumes the presidency in January. It is a double-edged sword. Biden knows that he will always be able to call on his old boss for advice – but he has big shoes to fill and could suffer by comparison.
“I’m certain Barack would be happy to react to any question or request Biden put to him,” said David Garrow, author of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. “But I wonder, having spent eight years as VP [vice-president], whether Biden would hesitate to rely on Barack in any meaningful way because of a feeling that it would be like relying on your older brother.” More
The streets of downtown Washington DC are lined with plywood. Shops, restaurants, banks, spas and gyms have all boarded up their windows. The capital looks like a city reeling from some economic calamity or preparing for a natural disaster. But behind the wooden screens, Washington’s swanky shops and expensive restaurants are still very much open. Little signs on the plywood boards direct customers to plywood doors and at tables, outside boarded-up restaurants, diners place their orders and drink their coffee. Despite outward appearances, it is business as usual in DC – or at least what passes for usual in 2020.
Most of the plywood boards went up towards the end of October, not in the wake of an economic crisis but out of fear of a looming political one. Business owners in Washington, like those in other US cities, came to the not unreasonable conclusion that violence and civil unrest might erupt in the aftermath of this month’s bitterly divisive elections. The unspoken presumption that in the United States, the world’s oldest democracy, elections will pass off peacefully has manifestly evaporated.
The fact that even two weeks after that poll – and despite appeals from the city’s leaders and offers of free disposal for the tons of wood – Washington’s walls of plywood remain largely in place is a testimony to the fact that the transition of power, just like the election, is proving uncertain and destabilising. I’ve been to many developing nations in which the wealthy and the connected bring down their shutters and abandon the cities at election time. I just never imagined anything similar taking place in the US.
Alongside images of bodies being loaded into makeshift Covid morgues, children weeping in cages and torchlit rallies by white supremacists, the boarded-up businesses of Washington DC in the autumn of 2020 is a sight that would have seemed unimaginable four years ago, utterly inconceivable a decade ago.
In America, elections are supposed to be peaceful and defeated presidents are supposed to concede. And convention demands that former presidents spend an unspecified number of years in the political shadows, leaving the succeeding administration to govern free from any back-seat presidential driving or hectoring from the wings. It is widely presumed that when Donald Trump is finally prised from the Oval Office, he will disregard that convention of US presidential politics, just as he has disregarded most of the others. By contrast, adherence to the convention is why Barack Obama has been largely, though not entirely, silent for the past four years.
In the same week that city leaders were attempting to cajole reluctant business owners to take down their fortifications, the former president made his return, appearing on screens across the world to promote the publication of A Promised Land, the first volume of his presidential memoirs, a book that reportedly sold 890,000 copies on the day of release.
Across 768 detailed and often densely argued pages, Obama’s presidential memoir does what such books are supposed to do – reveal the thinking and the personalities behind the big decisions. But A Promised Land is also a meditation on Obama’s faith in what he calls “the possibility of America”.
His long absence, and the timing of his return, at the rump end of the Trump presidency, makes it impossible to avoid comparing Obama and his successor. Never has the gulf between America’s 44th and 45th presidents been more stark and manifest. In A Promised Land, Obama describes President Trump as “someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for”, but Obama’s return to the television studios focuses attention on the differences between the character of the two men as much as the political gulf between them.
To many, the renewed exposure to the former president has the feel of a “return to normality”, a nostalgic glimpse at what US presidents and US politics were once like. After four years of all-caps and presidential tweets, Obama’s long, purposeful sentences and literary references are something Americans have grown unaccustomed to. In the interview I conducted with the former president for the BBC, he referred to or paraphrased Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and F Scott Fitzgerald; the last reference sailed over my head and was only brought to my attention later by the literary and humanities scholar Sarah Churchwell.
After a presidency like no other, after a corrosively acrimonious election and in the midst of a transition still being obstructed by the incumbent, Obama seems almost like a time-travelling visitor from an earlier age, a man whose antiquated customs and old-fashioned sense of propriety remind us of how things were once done and how far we have wandered. The Obama of 2020 speaks, at times, with a slight tone of controlled exasperation. He has the air of a disappointed parent surveying the damage wreaked by a raucous teenage party that took place while he was out of town.
It perhaps should come as little surprise that a man famed for his oratory can deploy words as effectively on the page as from the podium. What is unexpected in A Promised Land is not its literary elegance but the former president’s candour. It is Obama himself who makes the case against his own faith in America and his belief in progress.
He writes of how the sight of a black man in the Oval Office inspired an “almost visceral reaction”, a fanatical opposition to his presidency and his person. He acknowledges that the presence of an African American first family in the White House unleashed a blizzard of hatred, much of it directed at Michelle Obama, unveiling the true burning intensity of American racism. In interviews since the book was published, he has acknowledged the crisis facing US democracy, dangerously undermined by the ongoing struggle “to distinguish what is true from what is false”.
Yet the “possibility of America”, Obama’s conviction that the United States is a nation capable of doing what he believes “no other nation has ever done” and find a way to “actually live up to the meaning of our creed” – remains undimmed. The question in 2020 is whether that faith is justified or dangerously misplaced.
* David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster. His latest book is Black and British: A Short, Essential History More
More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”I did now. More
The former US president recalls the excitement of the 2008 night he was elected, in a passage from A Promised Land
Interview: Obama talks Trump, Biden, golf and conspiracy theories
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If you’re a former US president, there’s one guaranteed way to be remembered fondly – make sure you’re followed by a truly awful successor. It certainly worked for Barack Obama: you only had to mention his name these last four years to send millions of Americans (and others) into a reverie of nostalgic longing. The gulf in calibre between Donald Trump and his predecessor was so wide that each day Trump sat in the Oval Office, Obama’s reputation shone a little brighter.Not that he needed the comparison. Even before Trump took office, Obama left the White House with unusually high approval ratings: 59% of Americans thought well of him, according to Gallup – and that figure has held ever since. Outside the US, Obama recently displaced Bill Gates as the world’s most admired man, according to YouGov, which is handy as Obama is married to the world’s most admired woman.If you had to construct the unTrump, Barack Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral and well-read; deliberative; self-critical to the point of self-doubt; a faithful husband and conspicuously devoted father. He was a chief executive whose team was so functional that, over the course of eight years, there was scarcely a leak; not a single person was forced to resign in disgrace, let alone face legal proceedings. The closest the Obama White House got to scandal was when he wore a pale “tan” suit in 2014, a look some considered unpresidential. Not for nothing did they call him “no drama Obama”.If you had to construct the unTrump, Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral, well-read and self-criticalThere is much to criticise in his record, whether it be a covert drone war that saw 10 times the number of strikes as were authorised under George W Bush, resulting in the loss of as many as 800 civilian lives in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen – or a failure to enforce his supposed “red line” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, a failure that Bashar al-Assad seemed to read as a licence to keep killing his own people. You can criticise Obama for failing to do enough for small-town and postindustrial America, so that people who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. Still, and even taking all that into account, from the vantage point of 2020 the Obama presidency looks like a calm, flat sea before the roiling tempest of Trump.The outgoing president features only a little in Obama’s 751-page memoir, A Promised Land, which covers the period from the author’s entry into politics – winning a seat in the state senate of Illinois in 1995 – until the moment that may have ensured his re-election: the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. A second volume will address the rest. The book is written in the same voice that made Dreams From My Father a bestseller, letting the reader in on the author’s inner monologue – as Obama observes his own life as it plays out, questioning his motivations, noticing his hypocrisies.Trump’s cameo role is that of villain, the lead proponent of “birtherism”, spreading the racist smear that Obama was not really born in the US, “a conspiracy theory he almost certainly knew to be false,” Obama writes. Trump also makes an appearance as the butt of Obama’s jokes on the fateful night in 2011 when, delivering the traditional comic turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president mocked Trump as a man whose idea of an important decision was choosing between the boys’ and girls’ teams on Celebrity Apprentice. Was it that humiliation that stung Trump into seeking the presidency, just to get even? More
Barack Obama’s new book A Promised Land has sold nearly 890,000 copies in the US and Canada in its first 24 hours, putting it on track to become the best selling presidential memoir in modern history.The first-day sales, which set a record for Penguin Random House, includes pre-orders, e-books and audio.“We are thrilled with the first day sales,” said David Drake, publisher of the Penguin Random House imprint Crown. “They reflect the widespread excitement that readers have for President Obama’s highly anticipated and extraordinarily written book.”The only book by a former White House resident to come close to that sales figure was Michelle Obama’s own memoir Becoming, which sold 725,000 copies in North America its first day and has topped 10m worldwide since its release in 2018.As of midday Wednesday, A Promised Land was No 1 on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, said that the superstore chain easily sold more than 50,000 copies its first day and hoped to reach half a million within 10 days.By comparison, Bill Clinton’s My Life sold about 400,000 copies in North America its first day and George W Bush’s Decision Points approximately 220,000, with sales for each memoir currently between 3.5m and 4m copies. The fastest selling book in memory remains JK Rowling’s seventh and final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which came out in 2007 and sold more than 8m copies within 24 hours.Obama’s 768-page memoir was released just two weeks after election day and has already made headlines for its account of the former president’s time in the White House, key moments in his presidency – such as the fight over the Affordable Care Act and the killing of Osama bin Laden – and his reflections on the rise of Trump.“To read Barack Obama’s autobiography in the last, snarling days of Donald Trump is to stare into an abyss between two opposite ends of humanity, and wonder once again at how the same country came to choose two such disparate men,” wrote the Guardian’s Julian Borger in his recent review.Obama himself acknowledges that he didn’t intend for the book, the first of two planned volumes, to arrive so close to a presidential election or to take nearly four years after he left the White House.In the introduction, dated August 2020, Obama writes that “the book kept growing in length and scope” as he found more words were needed. He was also working under conditions he “didn’t fully anticipate”, from the pandemic to the Black Lives Matters protests, to, “most troubling of all”, how the country’s “democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis”.Obama has already written two acclaimed, million-selling works, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. More
