Had it been released freshly after Obama’s eight years in office, “A Promised Land” would be what most people think it is — a buzzworthy, stirring autobiography of a man who formerly helmed the White House. However, the unprecedented traumas of the past year, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the storming of Capitol Hill, have served as an illuminating indictment of American exceptionalism. Indeed, if the erratic pendulum swing of the sequential Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies is any indication, the United States remains in a state of confused sociopolitical flux. In this conflict-ridden climate, Obama’s memoir expands in scope from a personal account to an essential historical text.
Though the former POTUS trains his gaze forward, “A Promised Land” is equally valuable in a retrospective context — one cannot help but place Obama’s political tenets in conversation with Trump’s presidential legacy. Trump acted on impulse; Obama exercised restraint. Trump capitalized on animosity; Obama underscored the necessity of mutual discourse. The memoir’s recurrent emphasis on diplomacy and compromise serves as an implicit response to the tribalistic rhetoric of the Trump era.
Barack Obama is one of Capitol Hill’s most iconic personalities, that rare breed of politician who has both a silver tongue and an intellect to match. He is not, however, admired by all. If anything, his centrist views and willingness to reach across the political aisle have generated a good deal of Democratic brow-raising in past years. Before Trump’s inauguration in 2016, talk of bipartisanship and American cohesion often seemed hackneyed and idealistic.
The divisiveness of Trump’s presidency, however, has reaffirmed the importance of collaborative politics. The homogeneity and distrust that marked Trump’s administration have thrown into sharp relief what Americans once perceived as a given — a leader who at least acknowledges, challenging though it may be, the importance of cooperation. In a post-Trump America still reeling from violence and partisanship, Obama’s call for a patchwork wholeness presents its own radical potential.
At certain moments, Obama’s ruminations on “unity” — that essential yet too often defanged political slogan — come across as moralizing and heavy-handed. It does not help that, in his first days of office, President Biden has somehow already managed to overuse the term to vapid effect. Even so, reflecting on his Illinois Senate run, Obama notes, “My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of these disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state.”
Though these broader reflections are valuable, the memoir’s most stirring accounts of togetherness emerge in passages that draw power from Obama’s intimate accounts of camaraderie and shared purpose. The former president recalls a “physical feeling, a current of emotion” that bridged him and his audience during good nights on the campaign trail. Reveling in the memory of the connection, he claims, “your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking because for an instant, you feel them deeply; you can see them whole.” His deft transition from “I” to “you” lends a cinematic immediacy to the text. In “A Promised Land,” Obama does not simply relay a neutral account of his political ascent. He allows readers a privileged glimpse into private revelations — including the enthralling connection he felt with audiences — that contribute nuance and dimension to his journey.
The Honolulu native’s account of his winding path to the White House is so achingly familiar — so rich with humanity and introspective largeness — because, counterintuitively, the story is not his alone. It is the shared story of vastly different people cohered by a singular, if at first unfocused, conviction to advance an idea larger than themselves.
Over the course of the memoir, the former commander-in-chief delivers countless character studies of ordinary people essential to his presidential journey. The idiosyncratic charms of those who accompanied him on the campaign trail — from body man Reggie’s inability to choose between a deep-fried Twinkie and Snickers bar at the Iowa State Fair to supporter Edith Child’s campaign rallying cry “Fired up! Ready to go!” — permeate Obama’s dense account with warmth and familiarity. As the text progresses, these particular anecdotes converge and gain momentum. Readers experience in real-time the aggregate power of these individual encounters as though witnessing the campaign coalesce into its full form.
Much of Obama’s identity has been reduced to an amalgam of conflicting halves — president and husband, public and private, White and Black. The complicated, liminal spaces between these identities lend rich material for introspection, an opportunity the political leader takes in characteristic stride. Indeed, as a college student at Columbia University in the City of New York, he recalls running counter to the jaded political assessments of his peers, admitting that, despite its flaws, “the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me.” As a young man, Obama’s feverish political hunger belied a more personal desire — a desire to co-create an “America that could explain me.”
Arguably, though, the memoir is at its best when Obama lays bare his fraught inner contemplations. Though much of his prose is imbued with a subtext of steady optimism, some of the memoir’s most illuminating moments occur in situations when his faith — in both his nation and himself — momentarily falters, revealing darker undertones of self-doubt, cynicism, and disenchantment. When he transitions from community-based organizing in Chicago to Harvard Law School, Obama concedes he took into account the “narrower questions” of his personal ambitions. Years later, as the possibility of a 2008 presidency gradually crystallized, he wakes up from a dream, realizing that his “fear came from the realization that I could win.” By demonstrating the tension between his personal aspirations and the public good, Obama portrays the moral ambivalence intrinsic both to him and, in some way or another, the lives of his fellow Americans.
Through Obama’s self-aware prose, “A Promised Land” illuminates a common truth: In this day and age, it is challenging — and for some, impossible — to disassociate the personal from the political. For many Americans, political involvement is not merely an intellectual exercise — it is the surest way to advocate for the structural support necessary to preserve their safety and dignity. Through detailing the hyperawareness of his dual identity, his purported “otherness,” Obama limns the intrinsic interplay between the personal and the political.
“A Promised Land” is one of those rare texts that gracefully moves toward timelessness. In relaying his experiences, the former president turns his gaze from his own story to those of readers themselves. The volume is not merely a memoir — it is the translation of one man’s uncompromising conviction to his readership, his fellow Americans. Antithetical to Obama’s political aspirations of mutuality and partnership, Trump’s presidency has affirmed that even the most fundamental democratic principles must not be taken for granted.
What sort of “land” America will become remains to be seen and debated, built and written, Obama contends as he concludes the first volume of The Presidential Memoirs. Through conferring this dual burden and responsibility to those who will listen, the former president calls attention to the urgent work that must be done — the fraught beauty and enduring humanity of the American democratic project.
