Barack Obama

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      Barack Obama: ‘Donald Trump and I tell very different stories about America’

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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

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      Obama’s A Promised Land on track to become best selling presidential memoir

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      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

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      in US Politics

      Obama hails arrival of a more 'caring government' as memoir launches – video

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      In an interview marking the launch of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will help lead the US back to the ‘competent, caring government we so badly need’. 
      He lamented the standard of governance over the past four years, saying Biden and Harris will ‘level set’ and show that the presidency will not label journalists ‘enemies of the state’ or ‘routinely lie’  
      A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – memoir of a president
      Obama scolds ‘petulant’ Trump but reveals conservative sympathies More

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      in US Politics

      A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – memoir of a president

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      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.
      Somewhere at the top of a long list of contrasts is their grasp of language and facts. On the eve of the book’s publication, Trump has been emitting staccato tweets about winning an election he has decisively lost, a claim formally labelled within 10 minutes as disinformation. At the other end of the scale, Obama’s A Promised Land is 701 pages of elegantly written narrative, contemplation and introspection, in which he frequently burrows down into his own motivations.
      Obama makes clear he believes the whiplash from the 44th to 45th president is no accident. On the contrary, the mere fact that an accomplished, intelligent, scandal-free black man inhabited the White House was enough to trigger his antithesis.

      It is not the theme of the book by any means, but beneath the chronology of the Obama years, the inherited economic crisis, the fight over affordable healthcare and the rethinking of the US’s place in the world, racist resentment lurks below, and its orange embodiment rises into sharper focus with each chapter.
      In the preface, Obama says he set out to tell the story of his presidency in 500 pages and finish within a year. But an additional three years and 200 pages later, he has managed only some of the journey.
      A Promised Land takes us from childhood to the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, delving into certain events and decisions with a degree of detail that may lead some readers to wonder if there might be a sweet spot between Trump’s presidency by blurt and Obama’s earnest prolixity, between total denial of mistakes and the protracted re-examination of each one. (A second volume is in the works, delivery date uncertain.) More

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      in US Politics

      What led to Trump and what will follow Biden | Letters

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      George Monbiot (The US was lucky to get Trump – Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat, 11 November) is probably right about Barack Obama paving the way for Donald Trump, because the former failed to tackle big business. I would go even further and say that Tony Blair, another “breath of fresh air” at the time with his Tory-lite policies, more or less paved the way for our Trump – in the form of Brexit.Both politicians had a clear electoral mandate to bring about fundamental changes to their societies: in Blair’s case, to change our parliamentary institutions, as, when it came to corralling business, the UK was very much, and still is, a bit-part player. In the end, his successor handed over a poisoned chalice to the Tory/Lib Dem coalition to attempt to clean up the mess and, after its failure, to face the consequences. Joe Biden, besides confronting neoliberalism, needs to do to his country’s political system what Blair failed to do to his. John MarriottNorth Hykeham, Lincolnshire• George Monbiot paints a bleak prospect for the US and, by implication, the rest of the free world. He writes at length about the failure of Barack Obama to change the basic course of social and economic conditions during his eight years in office. He also comments on how important it is that Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia to avoid a Republican-led upper house. Surely it was exactly this that stopped Obama at every turn – the fact that during his presidency he was cursed with a hostile and belligerent Senate.The 2008 global financial crisis was one of his darkest moments, and I believe it was Gordon Brown who took charge of the initial recovery worldwide. Most politicians realised that it was senior bank staff who were responsible for the disaster. But as the old adage says, “If you owe the bank £100 then you have a problem, but if you owe the bank £10,000,000 then the bank has a problem.” They were just too big and important to be allowed to fail. What didn’t happen, but should have, was that no bankers were exposed and prosecuted. Both Obama and Brown must bear some of the criticism. Richard YoellBromham, Bedfordshire• I am appalled by the advocation of “tub-thumping left populism” as a way forward for the US. We have seen enough of tub-thumping populism (whether of the left or right) in the world during the last 100 years to know where it leads – to mass civil unrest, police brutality, military intervention, civil war, governments shutting down parliaments and locking up (or kidnapping and murdering) political opponents. In short, to unbridled anarchy, tyranny and mayhem. So thanks, but no thanks! For all its faults and weaknesses, I’ll stick with democracy based on free and fair elections, even if it doesn’t always lead us to the ideal society that we may yearn to see realised.Philip StenningEccleshall, Staffordshire• George Monbiot overlooks the way in which the neoliberal doctrine of “making wealth before welfare” has been massively overturned by the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the primacy of health over economics has been forced on even the most ardent neoliberal regimes, not least in the UK. This will certainly leave an indelible mark on the post-pandemic era. Unlike the disastrous neoliberal response to the 2008 crash, this time we are seeing the start of a possible end of its dominance as the prevailing ideology of our times, for the first time since the Thatcher-Reagan years.Adam HartGorran Haven, Cornwall More

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      in US Politics

      Obama scolds 'petulant' Trump but reveals conservative sympathies

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      In an interview with the Atlantic to mark publication of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama ponders Joe Biden’s chances of working with Republicans in Congress, comes close to admitting to being a never-Trump conservative himself – and compares America under Trump to Central Asia under Genghis Khan.
      “If we were going to have a rightwing populist in this country,” Obama says, “I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”
      Trump is refusing to admit defeat by Biden, despite a 5.5m deficit in the popular vote and an electoral college loss by 306-232, the margin by which he beat Hillary Clinton.
      “For all the differences between myself and George W Bush,” Obama said, “he and his administration could not have been more gracious and intentional about ensuring a smooth handoff. One of the really distressing things about the current situation is the amount of time that is being lost because of Donald Trump’s petulance and the unwillingness of other Republicans to call him on it.”
      On Sunday night, Trump tweeted: “I WON THE ELECTION!” Twitter gave the message a label: “Official sources called this election differently.”
      The president’s current petulance might be increased by how Obama compares him to “the classic male hero in American culture” – and finds him distinctly wanting. Trump is, after all, a president who plays the song Macho Man at his rallies.
      “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic. “The John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the 30s and 40s and before that.
      “There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully – in fact, he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich – the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”
      Most give Trump no chance of success in his lawsuits in battleground states, based on groundless claims of election fraud. But depending on the results of two runoffs in Georgia, the Senate looks set to stay in Republican hands. Biden may have to try to work with Mitch McConnell, the hardline Republican senate majority leader who has propped up Trump in office.
      Obama said: “Mitch McConnell is not buddy-buddy with anyone. I’m enjoying reading now about how Joe Biden and Mitch have been friends for a long time. They’ve known each other for a long time. I have quotes from Biden about his interactions with Mitch McConnell.
      “The issue with Republicans is not that I didn’t court them enough. We would invite them to everything: movie nights, state dinners, Camp David, you name it. The issue was not a lack of schmoozing. The issue was that they found it politically advantageous to demonize me and the Democratic party.”

      How friendly Democrats should be to the Never Trumpers, conservatives from the Lincoln Project to the Bulwark and beyond, is another key issue. Told by Goldberg that “a colleague of mine says that in some ways you’re a never-Trump conservative”, Obama said the characterization was “not quite right”, but reached again for mid-20th-century male archetypes Republicans revere.
      “I understand that,” he said. “There’s this sense of probity, honesty, responsibility, of homespun values, that I admire. That’s the Kansas side of me. My grandmother’s a stand-in for that.
      “The folks we celebrate at Normandy, including my Uncle Charlie, who was a member of one of the units that liberated parts of Buchenwald, those were men who, whatever their limits, whatever their constraints in terms of their emotions because of what they were told they could and couldn’t feel and be as men, however their relationship with women was skewed by all this – they sacrificed for others.
      “And they never bragged, and certainly they would never make cheating others or taking advantage of them a calling card.”
      “… You mentioned earlier that I’m in some ways a never-Trump conservative. That’s not quite right, but what is true is that temperamentally I am sympathetic to a certain strain of conservatism in the sense that I’m not just a materialist. I’m not an economic determinist. I think it’s important, but I think there are things other than stuff and money and income – the religious critique of modern society, that we’ve lost that sense of community.”
      The depth of Obama’s answer reflected the many differences between him and Trump – and the sheer size of his book. A Promised Land runs to 751 pages, many filled with rumination on historical progress, centrally Martin Luther King Jr’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.
      Genghis Khan came up in response to a questions about a visit to the Pyramids. The Mongol warlord would “slowly boil you in oil and peel off your skin”, Obama said. But “compare the degree of brutality and venality and corruption and just sheer folly that you see across human history with how things are now. It’s not even close.”
      “This was not meant to be commentary on the Trump presidency – not directly, at least,” Goldberg wrote. “In any case, Obama has more respect for Genghis Khan than he has for Donald Trump.” More

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      in Elections

      Barack Obama rules out role in Biden cabinet – 'Michelle would leave me'

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      [embedded content]
      Barack Obama would not take a position in Joe Biden’s cabinet if the president-elect offered it – because if he did, he fears, Michelle Obama would leave him.
      The 44th president made the remark in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, two days ahead of publication of his memoir, A Promised Land. He was due to speak to CBS again, for 60 Minutes, on Sunday night.
      Biden, Obama’s vice-president from 2009 to 2017, is preparing to become the 46th president in January, having defeated Donald Trump at the polls.
      Asked how he will help Biden, Obama said: “He doesn’t need my advice, and I will help him in any ways that I can. Now, I’m not planning to suddenly work on the White House staff or something.”
      Susan Rice and Michelle Flournoy are among Obama administration veterans reportedly being considered for key posts under Biden.
      Asked if he would consider a cabinet position, Obama said: “There are some things I would not be doing because Michelle would leave me. She’d be like, what? You’re doing what?”
      The Obamas have enough to occupy their time as it is, not least through establishing a charitable foundation and fulfilling a production deal with Netflix.
      In his book, Obama considers what his meteoric rise to the US Senate and then the White House meant for his marriage to Michelle and family life with their daughters, Sasha and Malia.
      “My career in politics, with its prolonged absences, had made it even tougher” for his wife to pursue her own law career, he writes. “More than once Michelle had decided not to pursue an opportunity that excited her but would have demanded too much time away from the girls.
      “… With my election [as president] she’d been forced to give up a job with real impact for a role [as first lady] that – in its original design, at least – was far too small for her gifts.”
      The Obamas’ literary gifts have at least paid off. A Promised Land is part of a reported $65m deal with Penguin Random House that also covered Becoming, Michelle Obama’s memoir, released in 2018, and which has sold more than 10m copies. The former president is expected to produce a second volume.
      He also discussed the first with Oprah Winfrey, for Apple TV in an interview scheduled to broadcast in full on Tuesday.
      In a released clip, Obama told Winfrey he and Michelle “went through our rough patches in the White House, as she’s written about, she’s talked about. But I tell you that the thing that I think we were good about was talking stuff through, never losing fundamental love and respect for each other, and prioritising our kids.”
      Though Trump shows no sign of willingly giving up power, his memoirs are already the subject of speculation – and a rumoured $100m price tag.
      Another passage of Obama’s CBS interview might have had resonance for the current president, had he been watching.
      Obama discussed what it is like to have the luxurious trappings of office, in this instance the presidential motorcade, inevitably taken away.
      “I’m driving along,” Obama said, laughing. “I’m still not driving, but [I’m] in the car. I’m in the car in the backseat and I’m looking at my iPad or something. And suddenly, we stop and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ There’s a red light. There’s a car right next to us. Some kids are eating a burrito or something in the backseat.
      “Back to life.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trumpism will persist until we rekindle faith in people’s ability to reshape the world | Jeff Sparrow

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      About 70% of Republicans apparently believe the 2020 presidential election to have been neither free nor fair.That’s a big chunk of voters rejecting, on entirely bogus grounds, the legitimacy of the new president.And it’s not the first time either.From 2011, Donald Trump engendered support for his own tilt at the White House by questioning the legality of the Obama presidency. He built his political career upon the embrace of “birtherism”, a racist conspiracy that emerged during the election of 2008.Back then, rightwing blogs and talk radio shows claimed Obama was not a “natural-born citizen of the US”, and thus ineligible for office under Article Two of the constitution.A Harris Poll in 2010 found an astonishing 25% of respondents questioned Obama’s right to serve, as the birthers tried to persuade electoral college voters, the supreme court and members of the college to block his certification.More than any other figure, Trump brought that rejection of Obama’s legitimacy into the mainstream.“If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility …” he told NBC’s Today Show in 2011, “then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”For the Tea Party movement and the Republican fringe, birtherism underpinned a rightwing conviction that Obama’s presidency represented a kind of coup.You don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential electionsMind you, after the 2016 election, a significant proportion of Democrats thought the same about Trump’s victory.As David Greenberg notes, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and John Lewis were among those who publicly labelled Trump “illegitimate”, elected only as the result of Russian meddling. Some Democrats blamed Vladimir Putin for the WikiLeaks release of the Podesta emails or suggested Russian social bots fixed the outcome; others falsely claimed that voting booths had been rigged or that Trump was in fact a “Manchurian candidate” employed in Putin’s service.For such people, Trump wasn’t merely an odious, rightwing demagogue. He was also an impostor, whose presence in the Oval Office signified systemic institutional failure.The refusal by Trump’s supporters to accept the 2020 result as genuine didn’t then come entirely from nowhere. Indeed, it’s been a long time since partisans of a defeated presidential candidate haven’t denounced the process that allowed their opponent to win.Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.For years, surveys have revealed a massive and ongoing decline in trust in basic institutions, including those associated with democracy.In early 2020, for instance, the communications firm Edelman polled 34,000 people in 28 countries for its Trust Barometer report. It found a tremendous decrease in the public’s respect for institutions, with almost everywhere “government and media … perceived as both incompetent and unethical”.Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed believed the media to be “contaminated with untrustworthy information” and 66% did not expect government leaders “to successfully address our country’s challenges”.Even in Australia, one of the wealthiest and most secure nations in the world, more than half of people polled saw the system as failing them, and a large majority no longer possessed confidence in the media.We might think this cynicism would favour progressives, given the left’s longstanding critique of institutional power.But it’s not as simple as that.Obama won office because George W Bush had plunged America into permanent, unpopular wars. Trump triumphed in 2016 because he faced a weak opponent; he lost in 2020 when his response to Covid-19 revealed his utter ineptitude.In other words, you don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential elections. You can understand the outcomes easily enough in terms of decisions by voters.But only if you acknowledge voters’ ability to make such decisions.Conspiracy theories proceed on an entirely different basis. They present ordinary people as gulls, the perpetual dupes of power; they suggest events unfold, always and everywhere, according to the will of hidden string pullers.Rather than asking why their candidate didn’t appeal to electors, the conspiracist looks for external manipulation – implicitly accepting that only the elite can make history.In different circumstances, a widespread cynicism about the existing institutions might propel a movement to deepen and widen participation in political affairs. Right now, however, it seems to be linked to a prevailing pessimism about democratic agency, one that can all too easily provide openings for authoritarian demagogues.Joe Biden takes office as the embodiment of American business-as-usual. Despite polling far more votes than Trump, he remains the ultimate insider, associated with many of the most consistently hated policies in recent years (from the Iraq war, which he championed, to mass incarceration, which he helped initiate).Not surprisingly, if you survey rightwing social media, you can see the new argument cohering at a frightening speed, with more and more accounts claiming that Biden was illegitimately foisted on honest Americans by a nefarious elite. Far-right agitators, many of whom had long since given up on Trump, have embraced the #stopthesteal campaign with enthusiasm, with the upcoming Million Maga march potentially bringing together motley white nationalist and fascist groups in what looks very much like an attempted reprise of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.Just as Trump’s rise inspired imitators elsewhere, we should expect the right’s narrative to spread internationally. Already, baseless allegations of electoral fraud have been echoed by Australian politicians – and it’s still early days yet.Trump might be gone but, until we can rekindle faith in ordinary people’s ability to reshape the world, Trumpism will remain very much with us. More