Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Obama is certainly the best WRITER who has occupied the White House in memory. This book will be absolute “must reading” for students of politics, history, or just those of us who want to remember a pivotal era in this country’s history. He wrote in the Preface of this 2020 book, “I began writing this book shortly after the end of my presidency… I had a clear outline of the book in my head. First and foremost, I hoped to give an honest rendering of my time in office… Where possible, I wanted to offer readers a sense of what it’s like to BE the president of the United States… Finally, I wanted to tell a more personal story that might inspire young people considering a life of public service…” (Pg. xiii-xiv) He recounts, “my organizing years in Chicago… changed the arc of my life… I came to love the men and women I worked with… Through them, I resolved the lingering questions of my racial identity. For it turned out that there was no single way to be Black; just trying to be a good man was enough.” (Pg. 15) Then, “Michelle Lavaughn Robinson was already practicing law when we met. She was… an associate at … the Chicago-based firm where I worked the summer after my first year in law school… and I was smitten almost from the second I saw her…. We became friends as well as lovers.” (Pg. 20) After losing an election, he comments, “I was almost forty, broke, coming off a humiliating defeat and with my marriage strained [they had one daughter at this point]. I felt for perhaps the first time in my life that I had taken a wrong turn… I recognized that in running for Congress I’d been driven not by some selfless dream… but rather… to satisfy my ego… I had become the very thing that, as a younger man, I had warned myself against. I had become a politician---and not a very good one at that.” (Pg. 38) Soon, however, daughter Sasha joined sister Malia, and “we experienced that same blast of joy.” (Pg. 39) As he contemplated running for the U.S. Senate, he reflected, “As long as [we] … remained strangers to one another… It would always be too easy for politicians to feed the stereotypes that pitted Black against white, immigrant against native-born…If… a campaign could somehow challenge America’s reigning political assumptions about how divided we were… maybe it would be possible to build a new covenant between its citizens… Ultimately, wasn’t this what I was after---a politics that bridged America’s racial, ethnic, and religious divides.” (Pg. 41) But a media consultant told him, “Your idealism is stirring, Barack… but unless you raise five million bucks to get it on TV so people can hear it, you don’t stand a chance.” (Pg. 44) As the Iraq War raged, he mused, “the longer the war dragged on, the more our troops would become targets of an enemy they often could not see and did not understand… I couldn’t shake the thought of those [soldiers] paying the price for the arrogance of men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who rushed us into war on faulty information and refused, still, to fully consider the consequences.” (Pg. 64) He told Michelle of his thoughts about running for President, and she responded, “You mean YOU, Barack. Not WE. This is YOUR thing. I’ve supported you the whole time, because I believe in you, even though I HATE politics… And now, finally, we have some stability… and now you tell me you’re going to run for President?” (Pg. 70) Later, he adds, “If we won, it would mean that what had led me into politics wasn’t just a pipe dream, that the America I believed in was possible, that the democracy I believed in was within reach.” (Pg. 78) He explains, “I wanted to prove to Blacks, to whites---to Americans of all colors---that we could transcend the old logic, that we could rally a working majority around a progressive agenda, that we could place issues like inequality or lack of educational opportunity at the very center… I knew that in order to accomplish that, I needed to use language that spoke to all Americans and oropose policies that touched everyone… I needed to embrace white people as allies rather than as impediments to change... in terms of a broader struggle for a fair, just, and generous society. I understood the risks… It was a lot to ask of Black folks, requiring a mixture of optimism and strategic patience.” (Pg. 118-119) After the Rolling Stone article about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial sermons, “it felt as if a torpedo had blown through our hull… The image of Reverend Wright kept rolling across TV screens… and even [his Campaign Deputy] admitted we might not survive this… I may not have been in church for any of the sermons in question… But I knew all too well the occasional spasms of anger within the Black community---my community---that Reverend Wright was channeling. I DID know how differently Black and white folks still viewed issues of race… regardless of how much else they had in common.” (Pg. 140-141) But after Wright “pronounced America racist at its core… [and] the U.S. government was behind the AIDS epidemic… I unequivocally denounced and separated myself from Reverend Wright.” (Pg. 146-147) After he won the Democratic nomination, he looked at Joe Biden as Vice President: “we couldn’t have been more different, at least on paper… I found his occasional gaffes to be trivial compared to his strengths. On domestic issues, he was smart, practical, and did his homework. His expertise in foreign policy was broad and deep… he had impressed me with his skill and discipline as a debater and his comfort on a national stage. Most of all, Joe had heart… And he had endured unimaginable tragedy… tragedy and setbacks may have scarred him… but they hadn’t made him bitter or cynical… What mattered most, though, was what my gut told me---that Joe was decent, honest, and loyal. I believed that he cared about ordinary people, and that when things got rough, I could trust him. I wouldn’t be disappointed.” (Pg. 162-165) During the 2008 recession just weeks before the election, both candidates and Congressional leaders met with President Bush in the White House, to discuss the crisis and the TARP legislation being proposed. But despite several invitations, McCain “served up maybe two or three minutes of bromides… And that was it. No plan. No strategy… The room fell silent as McCain set down his note card… I almost felt sorry for him… Barney Frank… started taunting the Republicans, yelling repeatedly, ‘What’s your plan?’… It got so bad that finally President Bush rose to his feet… and charged out the south door. The entire scene left me stunned.” (Pg. 188-189) He adds, “I was no longer the underdog. The race was now mine to lose.” (Pg. 191) When he met President Bush at the White House after the election, “President Bush would end up doing all he could to make the eleven weeks between my election and his departure go smoothly… I promised myself that when the time came, I would treat my successor the same way.” (Pg. 207) He says of Michelle, “Her overriding focus was on our daughters… It’s not as if I didn’t share Michelle’s stress. Malia and, especially, Sasha were so young in 2008, all pigtails and braids, missing teeth and round cheeks. How would the White House shape their childhoods?... But as had been true during so much of the last ten years, the day-to-day burden of parenting rested largely on Michelle, As she watched how… the vortex of work pulled me in… the prospect of loneliness settled on her like a cloud. All of which helps explain why Michelle asked her mom to come live with us in the White House.” (Pg. 222) As they try to address the fiscal crisis, “Just one thing was missing: Republican support. From the start, none of us had been particularly optimistic about getting a big chunk of Republican votes, especially in the aftermath of billions already spent on financial rescue… Nevertheless… I had told my team to ramp up our Republican outreach. Not just for show, I said; make a serious effort.. for me, reaching out to Republican members wasn’t just tactical… Yet with each passing day, the prospect of Republican cooperation appeared more and more like a distant miracle… It was the opening salvo in a battle plan that [Republicans]… would deploy with impressive discipline for the next eight years: a refusal to work with me or members of my administration, regardless of … the consequences for the country.” (Pg. 255-258) He observes, “we generally understood the advantages of a society that at least tried to offer a fair shake to everyone and built a floor beneath which nobody could sink. Maintaining this social compact, though, required trust. It required that we see ourselves as bound together… each member worthy of concern… Over the years, that trust proved difficult to sustain. In particular, the fault line of race strained it mightily. Accepting that African-Americans and other minority groups might need extra help from the government… required a level of empathy …that many white voters found difficult to muster… And harder economic times strained civic trust.” (Pg. 275-276) He recalls, “I made a point of being at the dinner table by six-thirty each night, even if it meant that later I need to go back downstairs to the Oval Office. What a joy that was, listening to Malia and Sasha … narrating a world of friend drama, quirky teachers, jerky boys, silly jokes… and endless questions… I found myself replenished---my mind cleansed and my heart cured of whatever damage a day spent pondering the world and its intractable problems may have done.” (Pg. 289) He also admits, “I was still smoking five (or six or seven) cigarettes a day. It was the lone vice that had carried over from the rebel days of my youth.” (Pg. 290) After the economy recovered, he wondered, “whether I should have been bolder in those early months, willing to exact more economic pain in the short term in pursuit of a permanently altered and more just economic order.” (Pg. 305) He recalls how reading ‘thank you’ letters from a private citizen would encourage him at this time: “I couldn’t expect people to understand how much their voices actually meant to me---how they had sustained my spirit and beat back whispering doubts on those late, solitary nights.” (Pg. 306) He admits, “”[I was] able to see my country through the eyes of others… That dual vision, as much as my skin color, distinguished me from previous presidents… [But] having the son of a black African with a Muslim name and socialist ideas ensconced in the White House with the full force of the U.S. government in his command was precisely the thing they wanted to be defended against.” (Pg. 310) His attention turned to health care: “Passing a health care bill wouldn’t bring my mom back… But it would save SOMEBODY’S mom out there, somewhere down the line. And that was worth fighting for.” (Pg. 379) But the Tea Party movement “was focused on stopping the abomination they dubbed ‘Obamacare,’ which they insisted would introduce a socialistic, oppressive new order to America… Still, there was no denying that the Tea Party represented a genuine populist surge within the Republican Party.” (Pg. 403-404) He admits, “our administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress could rightly claim to have gotten more done, to have delivered more significant legislation that made a real impact on the lives of the American people, than any single session of Congress in the past forty years.” (Pg. 590) After the disastrous midterm elections of 2010, “I’d woken up the next morning with a mix of weariness, hurt, anger, and shame… The truth was, I DIDN’T regret paving the way for twenty million people to get health insurance. Nor did I regret the Recovery Act…. I didn’t regret how we’d handled the financial crisis… And I sure as hell wasn’t sorry that I’d proposed a climate change bill and pushed for immigration reform. I was just mad that I hadn’t gotten either item through Congress---mainly because, on my very first day in office, I hadn’t had the foresight to tell Harry Reid and the rest of the Senate Democrats to revise the chamber rules and get rid of the filibuster vote once and for all… It just proved that… I’d failed to rally the nation… behind what I knew to be right. Which to me was just as damning.” (Pg. 594) He laments, “Is that, I wondered, what my presidency was now reduced to? Fighting rearguard actions to keep the Republicans from sabotaging the American economy and undoing whatever I’d done? Could I really hope to find common ground with a party that increasingly seemed to consider opposition to me to be its unifying principle, the objective that superseded all others?... Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and thus was an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.” (Pg. 672-673) He recalls, “I had to decide whether or not to authorize a raid deep inside Pakistan to go after a target we believed to be Osama bin Laden---and whatever else happened, I was likely to end up a one-term president if I got it wrong.” (Pg. 675) After bin Laden was killed “all of us in the White House could feel a palpable shift in the country’s mood in the days immediately following… For the first and only time in my presidency we didn’t have to sell what we’d done. We didn’t have to fend off Republican attacks or answer questions from key constituencies that we’d compromised some core principle… we’d dealt [al-Qaeda] a decisive blow, moving it closer to strategic defeat. Even our harshest critics had to acknowledge that the operation had been an unequivocal success.” (Pg. 697-698)