Fool Me Twice

2,803 words

Barack Obama
A Promised Land
Crown Publishing, New York City, 2020

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth

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Full disclosure. I have only read the first half of the 768 pages of volume one of President Obama’s memoirs. I will write a second review when I finish it – maybe. I say “maybe” because making your way through a gazillion pages of Obama writing about his most favorite thing in the world, himself, is a truly punishing ordeal. So, I paused, needing a period of respite before plunging again into the remainder of this prolix, self-indulgent miasma which, to endure, promises even more gloom, but perhaps a bit more insight into the personality of a man consumed by racial resentment yet who was able to fool the American people into believing he was a “race healer.”

Obama’s attempt with A Promised Land to capture the unique character of his presidency and burnish his faltering legacy bears embarrassing resemblance to what has become of the Obama Presidential Center – a bloated, disfigured edifice ladened with self-referential geegaws. The dumping of vast amounts of “stuff” (verbiage in A Promised Land; concrete and bucks in the OPC) into both of these unprecedentedly prolonged projects – still unfinished – is Obama doing what he has always been about, trying to make something spectacular out of himself that has no connection to reality. In both we have him assembling the giant façade of “Obama the genius.”

Jennifer Szalai, in a New York Times review of the book writes: “At a time of grandiose mythologizing, he [Obama] marshals his considerable storytelling skills to demythologize himself.” I somehow missed the “skills” with which he does the “storytelling.”

Here is Obama on crystallizing his decision to run for U.S. Senate. “I experienced a great clarity—not so much that I would win, but that I could win, and that if I did win, I could have a big impact.”

Five “I’s’, no less, in this single sentence – moving from “great clarity” to “a big impact.” He’s eager to show that his impact was really going to be something special. There seems to be an immature, almost childish “Mommy, look at me!” showing off quality about it. Obama then resorts to a dorky sports simile, so hackneyed and overwrought, it would get him laughed right out of Creative Writing 101.

I could see it, feel it, like a running back who spots an opening at the line of scrimmage and knows that if he can get to that hole fast enough and break through, there will be nothing but open field between him and the end zone. (Barack Obama, A Promised Land, p. 42. Hereafter, APL.)

As far as “demythologizing himself,” well, maybe yes, maybe no. Szalai doesn’t say who was doing the “grand mythologizing.” But for those of us paying attention back in the early days (2008-2009) of Obama Mania, it is brutally obvious. Yes, a “grand mythologizing” was underway. It was a collusion between Obama himself and the supposed professional clear-eyed sceptics of the Fourth Estate who converted themselves into groupies and chased after a rock star calling himself “The One” and promising to “heal the planet.”

Ask yourself, honestly, after reading, below, this touching vignette in which he recalls kibitzing with his team about a run for the Presidency: is this Obama mythologizing or demythologizing himself?

‘But who knows?’” I said, looking around the table. ‘There’s no guarantee we can pull it off. Here’s one thing I know for sure, though. I know that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be president of the United States, the world will start looking at America differently. I know that kids all around this country—Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids who don’t fit in—they’ll see themselves differently, too, their horizons lifted, their possibilities expanded. And that alone…that would be worth it.’ The room was quiet. Marty smiled. Valerie was tearing up. I could see different members of the team conjuring it in their minds, the swearing in of the first African American president of the United States. (APL, pp. 77-78)

If I were a betting man, I’d wager a hefty sum that it bears all the dubious markings of being written by a slickster with a massive ego and a high aptitude for reinventing himself for maximum effect. I am guessing that he is “working” his memoir readers, post-Presidency, just like he did those white Americans in 2008 who sincerely wanted to vote for a black man just to prove that they were not “racists.” It had to be the right one, though, that made him “The One”: a young, wholesome, non-threatening sort, you know, one who enthused about “hope” and was doing it for “kids all around this country,” including the ones “who don’t fit in.”

With its finishing touches of contrived clairvoyance and the sound of angles softly singing “We shall overcome,” this heart-warming “recollection” registers very low on a believability scale. Seriously, if you believe anything like this ever happened with Valarie and the gang, then you’d believe the Nigerian Prince’s email that says he wants to put ten million dollars in your bank account.

Philip Terzian in a Wall Street Journal review writes that the book “[a]s a matter of substance tells us little that a newspaper reader wouldn’t already know,” adding that it “can get monotonous at times” and the “chapters unfold in a formulaic, curiously uniform, fashion.”

Oh yes, “monotonous” most of the time, and excruciatingly “formulaic” with nothing important revealed in the trivia-stuffed pages that, as Terzian notes, we didn’t already know from other sources. For some strange reason, Obama thought it was essential to report the hair color and/or texture of most of the people in his professional encounters.

• Chinese president Hu Jintao – “a nondescript man in his mid-sixties with a mane of jet-black hair.” Don’t Chinese usually have jet-black hair.
• Michael McFaul – “a wide smile and a blond mop of hair.”
• Dmitry Medvedev – “a small man, dark-haired and affable.”
• Václav Havel – “rusty-blond hair, and a trim moustache.”
• John Brennan – “thinning gray hair, a bad hip.”

Just a small sample of the overload of useless, distracting details that added to the burdensome length of the book.

The worst part of the read, however, is page after tedious page of Obama’s congenital, persistent proclivity to remind the poor reader how smart and gifted he is, and how lucky the American people were that he appeared at those perilous times to rescue them. “The country was desperate for a new voice.” (APL, 68)

The ex-president never risks the appearance of modesty.

After only a year in the U.S. Senate:

If I’d been on the edge of feeling content, thinking I was in the right job, doing the right thing at an acceptable pace, Katrina and my Iraq visit put a stop to all that. Change needed to come faster—and I was going to have to decide what role I would play in bringing it about. (APL, 64)

Catch that? Obama is letting us know that he is driven by a sense of moral urgency that surpasses most mortals. “Change needed to come faster.” Why hadn’t others figured that out? Why didn’t they do something? Not high minded and competent enough. The sage Obama is not content with being just a U.S. senator (only a year in, even), and the world is not changing to fit his ambitious schedule. He, of course, was the guy with the vast experience (non-existent), the skill set (from being a “community organizer”) to bring it about, “faster.” Having to “decide” about what “role I would play in bringing it about” is completely disingenuous: he had already decided. His never-having-a-real-job uniqueness, he apparently concluded, meant he could skip the usual preliminaries and start out at the top. In case you have never heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I offer you Barack Hussein Obama: The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.

Just to let the reader know, that the world at this time was getting ready for the second coming. Barack’s mother must have failed to teach him that bragging is generally regarded as unmannerly.

Rarely does a week go by when I don’t run into somebody—a friend, a supporter, an acquaintance, or a total stranger—who insists that from the first time they met me or heard me speak on TV, they knew I’d be president. (APL. 65)

Then, there is his take away for the reader on his first encounter in European summit meeting with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

She was famously suspicious of emotional outbursts or overblown rhetoric, and her team would later confess that she’d been initially skeptical of me precisely because of my oratorical skills. I took no offense, figuring that in a German leader, an aversion to possible demagoguery was probably a healthy thing. (APL, 335)

This short piece is packed with slippery “Obama-isms” to remind you of his gifts (“my oratorical skills”), his magnanimity (“I took no offense”), and best of all, his condescending all knowingness – Merkel’s initial skepticism of him, he stoops to assure us, is “probably a healthy thing.” Because? Well, he is letting you in on the scope: you see, those Germans, especially, have to be concerned about demagogues, lest they fall again for a you know who. Then again, maybe Chancellor Merkel, “famously suspicious of … overblown rhetoric,” had correctly judged that it was Obama’s singular talent.

A careful reading of the early pages of A Promised Land reinforces what any perceptive Obama watcher has known since his national debut at the 2004 Democrat Presidential convention: he is highly accomplished at convincing lots of people that he is a very special “something” that he is not.

His modus operandi in launching his political career was to craft a persona with perceivable positive qualities that would attract white voters to the right of the liberal end of the political spectrum. He would eschew the angry, confrontational scolding antics of the likes of Jesse Jackson, instead working the crowds with his compassion and charm.

That persona would include a selfless devotion to public service, coupled with an acute awareness of the suffering of the little guy.

I left for Harvard Law School. And here’s where the story gets murkier in my mind, with my motives open to interpretation. — I told myself then—and like to tell myself still—that I left organizing because I saw the work I was doing as too slow, too limited, not able to match the needs of the people I hoped to serve.

No, sorry. There was no “murkiness” in his mind. He never told himself this. The story flunks the same believability test as the whopper, cited above, about wanting to be president so the “black kids and Hispanic kids, kids who don’t fit in will see themselves differently.” The work he was doing was not “too slow.” It was “too limited, not able to match” however, Obama’s needs that had nothing to do with wanting to lift up the down trodden. He left “organizing” – one of those left-wing amorphous virtue-words designed to keep you confused – to seek broader opportunities to unleash his talents for self-promotion and eventually bask in the adoration of his manufactured image of a big-bundle-of-wonderful.

A local job-training center couldn’t make up for thousands of steel jobs lost by a plant closing. An after-school program couldn’t compensate for chronically underfunded schools, or kids raised by their grandparents because both parents were doing time. On every issue, it seemed, we kept bumping up against somebody—a politician, a bureaucrat, some distant CEO—who had the power to make things better but didn’t. And when we did get concessions from them, it was most often too little, too late. The power to shape budgets and guide policy was what we needed, and that power lay elsewhere.” (APL, 16-17)

So many needy people. So much indifference, selfishness and double-dealing. Here he piles on with some tugging-at-the-heartstrings pictures of distress so we all know how deeply he cares. “Obama the Incorruptible,” both competent and caring: he is a black Maximillian Robespierre, a regular man of the people, battling corruption, selflessly dedicated to the common good. It is a common good, he declines to mention, that would include his retirement destination in Martha’s Vineyard and a 18 million dollar Hawaii beachfront mansion, far from job training centers for the unemployed, and the underfunded, after-school programs. Obama is dispensing for the reader the very same pixie-dust “idealism” that threw the college girls into swooning spells at his 2008 campaign rallies with the fake Greek columns and had NBC’s Chris Mathews comparing hm to Jesus and talking about “the thrill going up his leg” upon hearing him speak.

That persona would also, initially, convince white voters that, unlike race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, he was not bent on keeping them on the permanent hook for “racism.”

I learned not to claim my own victimhood too readily and resisted the notion held by some of the Black folks I knew that white people were irredeemably racist. The conviction that racism wasn’t inevitable may also explain my willingness to defend the American idea: what the country was, and what it could become.” (APL, 13). [Note that “Black” gets the honorific uppercase in contrast to “white.”]

This may be the most outrageous piece of dishonesty in the entire book, lies folding into lies. Victimhood and racial grievance are the central motifs of his autobiography, Dreams from my Father. America’s history was the history of its “racism,” and its persistence in every crevice of American society. “What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow.” (NPR Interview, 2015) It was never clear what Obama thought the “American idea” was other than a useful catchphrase with which to launch his stock banalities.

That he resisted the notion that white people were not “irredeemably racist” is a howler. Near the end of his second term – with no more voters to deceive – Obama turned geneticist. “And [“racism”] that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.” (NPR Interview, 2015)

The “we” who are “not cured of it” turns out to be us, that is, white people, and it appears that the “cure” is a long way down the road, not to mention that white people won’t be the ones who to say when they are cured. Obama turned out to be just another racial-racketeer running a moral extortion scam – “your tribe did bad things to my tribe; you owe us … for a long time. We’ll get back to you when the debt is paid.”

And just in case you think that wasn’t Obama’s thinking in this vein, his go-to advisor on race relations was the scurrilous race-hustler, Al Sharpton, a frequent quest at the Obama White House. It’s even worse than that: As early as late 2007 or early 2008, Obama dispatched his consiglieri, Valerie Jarrett, to strike a secret deal with Sharpton. “Sharpton would discreetly support Obama for president, working mostly behind the scenes; he wouldn’t publicly criticize Obama, but he also wouldn’t back him in a way that aroused attention.” Very shrewd and illustrative of the cynicism of Obama’s racial politics – a balancing act of keeping black resentment on a slow boil while guilting white Americans to act against their own interests. Standard tacit-support agreements were the Reverend’s “standard M.O.” according to New York reporter, Wayne Barrett, who had followed him. Sharpton was so toxic that you paid him to lay low; he was “the only guy who prospers for not making an endorsement.”

This was the origin of a collusion between the virulently anti-white Sharpton and Obama, who needed to dissimulate his racial animus in order to entice white voters. Once elected, he would openly embrace the fake Reverend and take frequent opportunities to remind white Americans about “the long shadow” and that they were still on the hook.

That persona, finally, would have to be young, well spoken, charismatic and appear to be smart.

To put all of these together in an up-to-date, attractive package and sell it to the American buyers was beyond the resources of a former “community organizer” looking to use the corrupt Chicago political machine to make a big jump into national politics. It is difficult to dispute the contention that Obama’s rise to the top was due not to some attractive personality features and his limited skill set – photogenic, articulate, interpersonally able – but to the sheer stroke of luck of having found the person of David Axelrod, a Jewish advertising genius, who in just four years turned an unknown, backbench state senator with no political experience, a busy mouth and a bloated ego into the President of the United States.