Popular President scripts a winner,

KP Nayar

This is not an accidental presidential memoir. Like most events in Barack Obama’s life, the release of ‘A Promised Land’ was timed to perfection. Published just under four years after Obama left the White House, the United States of America is a very different country from what the author handed charge to his maverick successor, the outgoing President Donald Trump.

Obama came to office in January 2009 with an approval rating of 67 per cent. He left office without much dent in how Americans viewed his performance as President: an impressive 59 per cent compared to 34 per cent for his immediate predecessor George W Bush, but lower than Bill Clinton’s 66 per cent. Since then, Trump has vilified Obama, blamed much of America’s ills on its 44th President and calculatedly trampled on Obama’s legacy to make him look bad in the run-up to this November’s elections.

If ‘A Promised Land’ had been published a year or two ago, many readers the world over may not have given this exceptionally well-written book the attention and praise that it deserves. This is despite an average of polls from 2019 to 2020, showing Obama’s popularity at 55 per cent in the weeks and months leading up to the release of the memoir, catapulting him to the centrestage of American politics all over again, in the same way Bill Clinton was the most popular Democratic campaigner for Obama in his re-election bid in 2012. Obama was, no doubt, the kingmaker without whose help the throne of US presidency would have slipped away from Joe Biden.

It was Obama’s timely intervention which rescued Biden’s primary campaign from the abyss it was falling into before the critical, influentially African-American, South Carolina Democratic primary on the last day of February this year. It was Obama’s eleventh hour oratory which turned the tide for Biden in some battleground states. ‘A Promised Land’ is now reaping the sale and readership benefits of Obama’s resurrected and unconventional relevance in American politics. Unconventional, because until now, former Presidents rarely, if at all, criticised their successors in public.

In India, a grave injustice has been done to this outstanding work of writing by overshadowing its vast and varied contents with Obama’s observations about Rahul Gandhi and some other Indian leaders. Read against the backdrop of the insights which the memoir offers and their historical contexts, its lucid, novel-like style and, above all, the book’s contemporary relevance, these observations are irrelevant. As someone who covered the entirety of Obama’s career in nationwide public office, I can say with certainty that Obama was never swept off his feet by India or Indians. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush and Clinton, Indians were unable to manipulate Obama, howsoever much they tried. Which makes his observations about Indian leaders in his memoir all the more inconsequential.

Those who study this memoir to better understand the Obama years in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or to look for clues into the future under his Vice President, will not be disappointed. Scattered on the pages are episodes from Obama’s life which foretold what is happening in the US now: the racial riots of this year, the widening inequality and the decay of its political apparatus. Hope is the pervasive feeling in the book, reinforced by anecdotes from every facet of the author’s life: from the disappointments of a teenager who found himself “in a series of affectionate, but chaste, friendships”, to eventually winning the heart of his life partner Michelle. “I was smitten almost from the second I saw her,” recalls the author.

As a Community Organiser in Chicago, Obama’s first job, “I saw the transformation that took place when citizens held their leaders and institutions to account even on something as small as putting in a STOP sign on a busy corner or getting more police patrols. I noticed how people stood up a little straighter, saw themselves differently, when they learned that their voices mattered.”

Yet, he realised the limitations of that job. “I might have managed to reshape a neighbourhood or a portion of the city.” For this young man of 22, this was not enough. It was that desire to do more, and his undying faith in “the idea of America, the promise of America” which took him on a rather short road to the most powerful office in the world, the presidency, at the age of 47.

Reading the author’s latest bestseller, I better understood why his second book, published two years before Obama’s election as President was titled ‘The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream’. It also explains why Obama’s campaign slogan was ‘Yes We Can’, which was turned into a hit song in his campaign year by will.i.am.

Obama has promised the readers a second volume.