Recent Reading: A Promised Land

I finished Barack Obama's book A Promised Land recently. 

Overall, I enjoyed the book and thought it was worth my time. But let me start with my criticism of the book -- it is too long and detailed. President Obama sometimes lapses into what I think of as his Professor Obama persona and gives a lot more background and detail than is really necessary to understand the point he is trying to make, at least in my opinion. The book could have been 100 pages shorter.

Having described my one criticism of the book, let me now move on to say that I really enjoyed the book. I believe that every president in my lifetime has written at least one memoir, with some being better than others. A Promised Land, which covers Obama's life through his first term as president -- with most of the text devoted to the presidency, is a good book because Obama goes into great detail describing the many challenges he faced as president, and he also describes, in great detail, how he and his staff made decisions.

The people that Obama turns to for advice as president in the book most often include:

• Valerie Jarret who came from Chicago city government where she had hired and been a mentor to Michelle Obama and, later, Barack Obama. She was assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs.
• Rahm Emanuel was a tough talking former member of the house of representatives who was Obama's first chief of staff. He later became mayor of Chicago.
• David Axelrod was the chief strategist for the campaign and, later, became senior advisor to the president.
  
• Ben Rhodes earned an MFA in creative writing, but switched careers from fiction writing to public service after the 2001 attacks. He was Obama's deputy national security advisor.
  
• Samantha Power served as special assistant to the president. Her main focus was the prevention of genocides.
  
• Jon Favreau was Obama's director of speechwriting.

A Promised Land brings you behind the scenes for many important events in American history from 2008 through 2012. Here is a description of a discussion about a response to the financial crisis at the George W. Bush White House from the fall of 2008:

As the discussion wore one, it became increasingly apparent that none of the Republican leaders were familiar with the latest version of the TARP legislation -- or for that matter the nature of their own proposed changes. They were simple trying to avoid taking a tough vote. After listening to several minutes of wrangling back and forth, I jumped in again. "Mr. President," I said, "I'd still like to hear what Senator McCain has to say." Once again, everyone turned to McCain. This time he studied a small note card in his hand, muttered something I couldn't make out, and then served up maybe two or three minutes of bromides -- about how talks seemed to be making progress, how it was important to give [minority leader John] Boehner room to move his caucus to yes. And that was it. No plan. No strategy. Not even a smidgen of a suggestion as to how the different positions might be bridged. The room fell silent as McCain set down his note card, his eyes downcast, like a batter who knows he's just whiffed at the plate. I almost felt sorry for him; for his team to have encouraged such a high-stakes move and then sent their candidate into the meeting unprepared was political malpractice.

When reporters got wind of his performance that day, the coverage would not be kind. The more immediate effect of John's weirdness, though, was to set off a a Cabinet Room free-for-all. [Speaker] Nancy [Pelosi] and Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, started arguing over who deserved credit for the the stronger taxpayer protections in the most recent version of the legislation. Barney Frank, the tough and quick-witted Democrat from Massachusetts who knew his stuff and had probably worked harder than anyone to help [Treasury Secretary Hank] Paulson get TARP across the finish line, started taunting the Republicans, yelling repeatedly, "What's you plan? What's your plan?" Faces reddened; voices rose; people talked over one another. And all the while, McCain remained silent, stewing in his chair. It got so bad that finally President Bush rose to his feet. "I've obviously lost control of this meeting," he said. "We're finished." With that, he wheeled around and charged out the south door. The entire scene left me stunned.

Republicans, at least as Obama tells it, had only one agenda -- making his agenda fail. Consider this story about the debate over what became the Affordable Care Act:

Frank Luntz, a well-known Republican strategist, had circulated a memo stating that after market-testing no fewer than forty anti-reform massages, he'd concluded that invoking a "government takeover" was the best way to discredit the healthcare legislation. From that point on, conservatives followed the script, repeating the phrase like an incantation.

There are many instances in the book where Obama describes Republicans in congress as being more interested in gaining seats in the next election than in achieving something for the American people. At one point, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel says of Senate minority leader, Addison McConnell, "he's feeling pretty full of himself. He thinks obstruction is working."

Let me end this review by quoting Obama's metaphor for being president:

When someone asks me to describe what it feels like to be the president of the United States, I often think about that stretch of time spent sitting helplessly at the state dinner in Chile, contemplating the knife's edge between perceived success and potential catastrophe -- in this case, the drift of a soldier's parachute over a faraway desert in the middle of the night. It wasn't simply that each decision I made was essentially a high-stakes wager; it was the fact that unlike in poker, where a player expects and can afford to lose a few big hands even on the way to a winning night, a single mishap would cost a life, and overwhelm -- both in the political press and in my own hart -- whatever broader objective I might have achieved.