Fool Me Twice—Part Two

3,855 words

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

“Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment—with the answer, No effects. Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it!”

            — Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution

Part 1 available here.

In March of 2025, I wrote a review of the first of two volumes of Barack Obama’s Presidential memoirs, A Promised Land. More precisely, I noted that my review was limited to roughly the first half of the 768-page tome that covered Obama’s first term in office.

I then confessed that “making your way through a gazillion pages of Obama writing about his most favorite thing in the world, himself, is a truly punishing ordeal,” and at some point, I would complete the review of volume one. This would be whenever I could force myself to grapple with page after page of mind-numbing details of whatever busy BHO happened to be doing, thinking, imagining, remembering, or promising at any given moment. Obama as a writer is much like Obama as a speaker. Words pour out of him, like antifreeze frothing out of an overheated car radiator when you pull off the cap; almost none of them are significant, interesting, or memorable.

I finally did it. I think of it as “taking one for the team.”

There are several things to keep in mind as you read this review of the second half of volume one.

BHO left office nine years ago. It has been over five years since the release of volume one, and we still don’t know when to expect volume two. “There has been little information on when volume two will be ready, with no release date set.” (Deadline) Given the long delay and the 700 plus pages of the first book, there is good reason to believe that the second one will be no less prolix and even more self-worshipping and detached from reality than the first one. I predict the second volume will close with a typical BHO non-sequitur.

As the historic, first Black President, I brought hope and change to marginalized Americans in keeping with who we are as a true democracy. My administration restored the values that makes America a place of equal opportunity—America’s Promise, kept. Yet, I underestimated the deep historical roots of prejudice and racism and how much difficult work remains to be done before America achieves its true greatness.

America has failed to recognize the scope of Obama’s selfless idealism and is unwilling to embrace the “hope and change” he had promised. After eight wonderful years of Obama’s promised “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” how else does he explain why Americans in 2016 rejected Obama2 in a pantsuit and chose to replace him with his nemesis, the crude and rude, Orangeman?

Obama’s post-Presidency, I would venture to say, follows an almost Hegelian, thesis-antithesis kind of historical unfolding so far.

Thesis: as a candidate and President, BHO was the man historically ordained—“ above the world, sort of a god ” as Evan Thomas of Newsweek gushed in 2008—to make a broken America whole, to right the wrongs, repair the damage, and bring us all together. Remember? “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!” As forgettable as it was vacuous, yet capturing the solipsism of the Obama persona.                                                                                                                          ,

This was Barack Obama as critically scrutinized by members of the fourth estate.

“Many spiritually advanced people I know. . . identify Obama as a lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who [can] actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford in a piece headlined “Is Obama an Enlightened Being?” (Guardian)

“If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure wear some flowers in your hair.”

The cult of Obama—the Black Jesus, the Lightworker, Nobel prize winner for being Obama—flamed brightly for a season, began to fade and then flickered out in his final years as his “true colors” increasingly appeared, at least to many white voters. He was just another black, race hustler peddling his grievances—an Al Sharpton with better manners, packaged and marketed by red-diaper baby, Chicagoan David Axelrod, financed by the shady billionaire Pritzker family. The real Barack Obama was artfully concealed from the voters.

Anthesis: BHO has been out of office for close to a decade. He was able to cash in on his time in office and is worth tens of millions of dollars. He and the little Mrs. spend their time producing content for Netflix and hopping from mansion to mansion. No one claims he’s a genius or a god or even interesting any more. His senile Vice-President seems to have wrecked his party once given the reins. The Hindu broad, Kamala, who was going to be the female version of The One blew a billion dollars on the worst Presidential campaign in history. Michelle has gone petulant, with a series of podcasts complaining about “being seen only as Barack’s wife,”—what else is she?—and how miserable she was as first lady. Rumors abound that the former beta-male President is gay. Much has been made in this quote from a 1982 letter to his girlfriend: “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.” I suspect Obama’s navigation between reality and his imagination is often a challenge for him.

Originally projected at $330 million dollars, the monstrosity of his Presidential library, yet unfinished is now likely to exceed over one billion when complete. Forced upon a neighborhood where it was unwanted, no one will go to it whenever it opens. This is vintage Obama: no limits, no discipline, no clue, mostly verbal smog. He launched the project six years ago with his typical vaporous “hope and change” lingo. The finished project will be a simulacrum, a spectacle of waste, incompetence, and corruption that betrays the counterfeit character of its originator.

Synthesis: to be determined.

In sum, BHO bears all the markings of a has-been some folks fondly remember but care or think little about. Obama: he came, he saw, and he went. “The planet” has yet to notice.

On to the review. As I forged ahead in volume one, I was struck with the fact that Obama is and always has been a conman. With this memoir BHO attempts a post-Presidency con, selling himself as a high-principled idealist, who was uniquely skilled to fix a financially broken, racially polarized, under-achieving America.

Part of this con is, as when he was President, Obama doing his Chief Moralist shtick, tut-tutting us with his fake “we.”

Here is BHO at his condescending best on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, 2010:

[T]he only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen…

Why do you think that would be? Because it wasn’t practical or realistic to make such a radical change in our energy infrastructure? No, it was your fault, reader.

[B]ecause at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face…” (italics added)

Who is the “we,” the “us” who drive the big cars that BHO, George Clooney, and Leonardo DiCaprio disapprove of? Who is the “we” that “loves cheap gas” we don’t deserve, and the we who don’t “care about the environment”?

Obama is never among the “we” folks. These are rubes, the “bitter clingers” with limited attention spans, not up for “saving the planet” and “caring” about the things important to people who never have had real jobs.

[I]n the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings…

We Americans are selfish and short-sighted, the media lacks motivation to do what they are supposed to do. Only Obama from his Olympian perch seems to have a grasp on what must be done to save the planet. “If I aspired to lead the free world, I decided, I’d have to make climate change a priority of my campaign and my presidency.” (APL, 488, Kindle Edition) Was HBO on a mountain top somewhere communing with the Almighty when he got his priorities in order? This skinny man from where ever he came from can never avoid sounding like an 11th-grade high school nerd campaigning for student council.

[A]nd the one thing I could be certain of was that … what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. (APL, 571, Kindle Edition, italics added)

Obama sounds like “Mom” blowing up at her truculent teens—“yet one more mess” I have to “clean up.” Here we discern that Obama’s view of most of his fellow Americans is loaded with contempt. Obama has no oil sector competencies that gives him any credibility to complain about having “to clean up” the messes made by “the majority of us” who are not as perceptive as he is. The reader has to choke on the condescending arrogance.

Throughout the memoir Obama never separates from his progressive moralism and his role as protectorate of the oppressed.

In consultation with our local embassies, we often invited young activists from the host country’s marginalized groups—religious or ethnic minorities, refugees, LGBTQ students—to participate. By handing them a microphone and letting them tell their own stories, I could expose a nation of viewers to the justness of their claims. (APL, 449 Kindle Edition)

The Solomonic Obama spreads “justice” throughout the land. “[Y]oung activists from the host country’s marginalized groups?” Spawning little Obamas, eleutheromaniacs, from places hither and yon to spread the discontent, signal their virtue, and build resumes for NGO sinecures.

Obama traveled a lot in his quest to fix not just America, but the world. In Russia, Putin “compact—a wrestler’s build—with thin, sandy hair, a prominent nose, and pale, watchful eyes.” (APL, 463, Kindle Edition) Don’t we all know what Putin looks like?

Obama has a thing about the hair of people he encounters.

Benjamin Netanyahu: “Built like a linebacker, with a square jaw, broad features, and a gray comb-over…” (APL, 630, Kindle Edition)

Samantha Power: “in her mid-thirties, tall and gangly, with red hair, freckles, and big, thickly lashed, almost sorrowful eyes that crinkled at the corners when she laughed.” (APL. 639, Kindle Edition)

Back to Putin. I sense that Putin was a little too alpha male for “girlie man” Obama, as Arnold Schwarzenegger would put it.

Putin did, in fact, remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall—tough, street smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade. (APL 467, Kindle Edition)

Take a moment to digest this. Obama looking down from on high on his delusional moral cloud engaged in a jaw-dropping display of psychological projection—“narrow experiences” “bribery,” “shakedowns,” “fraud,”—the very milieu that produced the 44th President.

Obama’s prose moves with a rhythmic monotony, but always with the objective keeping the reader focused on Obama in all the facets of his imagined perfection. These range from the personal—husband, father, family man, friend—to his magisterial powers, guided by a moral compass that points the way to achieving the “progressive” goals touted by the likes of his Hollywood groupies and cable-channel talking heads who back in 2008 had him as the second coming. Littering the text and swelling the word count are banalities like this:

The truth is that war is never tidy and always results in unintended consequences, even when launched against seemingly powerless countries on behalf of a righteous cause. (APL, 655, Kindle Edition.)

As a Presidential memoir the text is seriously impaired by the author’s lack of self-awareness which renders him almost childishly undisciplined. He truly seems to believe that, no matter how banal, trivial, or incidental a detail may be to the genuine purpose of his writing, because it somehow relates to Obama, the reader cannot help but be captivated.

Case in point:

There remained stretches when it [things between Barack and Michelle] really did feel fine, evenings when the two of us snuggled under a blanket to watch a show on TV, Sunday afternoons when we got down on the carpet with the girls and Bo and the entire second floor of the residence filled up with laughter. (APL, 544-545, Kindle Edition)

Obama was steeped in a radicalized world of the 1960s where long-standing norms and traditions were, as Mao’s Red Guard had them, “olds” to be eliminated. Obama is a man without boundaries with an intellect that follows no rules of order, that cannot distinguish levels of importance and seriousness. He cannot even comprehend the boundary that distinguishes genres of literature. In this case, People Magazine with its style of misty-eyed schlock from serious memoirs of retired statesmen.

No filter appears to be in place:

Still, the smell of the ocean and sparkle of sunlight against the late summer leaves, the walks along the beach with Michelle, and the sight of Malia and Sasha toasting marshmallows around a bonfire, their faces set in Zen-like concentration—those things remained. And with each day of extra sleep, laughter, and uninterrupted time with those I loved. (APL,589, Kindle Edition)

There is so much of this sort of personal trivia loaded into the 768 pages that reveals Obama’s childish lack of limits and discipline. All of his efforts are aimed to make us experience how wonderful he is. Page after page of this distracting personalia dilutes whatever serious ideas might be available to communicate important insights. But it also gives us a glimpse of the self-indulgent, sybaritic life-style of the Obama’s, one that would accelerate upon leaving office. Obama, again, seems unaware that the “smell of the ocean” and the walks on exotic beaches are not consistent with his moralistic preening about the “marginalized” and oppressed who live in slums, have never seen a beach and don’t get to eat “the best fried shrimp on earth.”

Even worse:

IN AUGUST, MY FAMILY and I flew up to Martha’s Vineyard for a ten-day vacation. [Who cares?] We’d first visited the island off the coast of Cape Cod [no single mothers in sight] fifteen or so years earlier, at the invitation of one of my law firm’s partners, Allison Davis, and with the encouragement of Valerie, who’d spent summers there with her family when she was growing up. [Already too much information, especially as it relates to the ever-lurking Valerie] With its broad beaches and windswept dunes, the fishing boats coming into dock, the small farms and green meadows framed by oak forests and old stone walls, the place had a quiet beauty [hackneyed] and unhurried vibe that suited us. [what is an “unhurried vibe?”] We appreciated, as well, the Vineyard’s history: Freed slaves had been part of its earliest settlements, and Black families had rented summer homes there for generations, making it that rare resort community where Blacks and whites seemed equally at home. [Slip in some racial grievance falderal] We had taken the girls there for a week or two every other summer, usually renting a small place in Oak Bluffs, close enough to town that you could bike there and with a porch where you could sit and watch the sun go down. Together with [once more] Valerie and other friends, we’d spend lazy days with our feet in the sand and a book in hand, swimming in water that the girls loved but was a little too cold for my Hawaiian tastes, [still more about what we should know about The One] sometimes spotting a pod of seals close to shore. Later, we’d walk to Nancy’s to eat the best fried shrimp on earth, and then Malia and Sasha would run off with their friends to get ice cream or ride the small carousel or play games. [Enough! Stop wasting our time. How many Americans have the resources and time to experience this kind of luxury you always seem to experience with Valarie?] (APL, 589, Kindle Edition)

Obama also likes to pump up the achievements of his most disastrous Cabinet picks:

Hillary, in particular, was a whirlwind that first year, hopping from continent to continent as doggedly as she’d once campaigned for the presidency. Seeing the excitement her visits generated in foreign capitals, I felt vindicated in my decision to appoint her as America’s top diplomat. It wasn’t just that she was treated as a peer by world leaders. Wherever she went, the public saw her presence in their country as a sign that they really mattered to us. (APL, 448, Kindle Edition)

More evidence free assertions. Obama neglects to add that the four years after her Secretary of State role were a “whirlwind” of exploiting that role to money launder tens of millions of dollars to the fake charity known as the Clinton Foundation.

To keep the balloon of his ego constantly expanding, Obama lays it on with adolescent-style high school drama to display his intrepid, fearless leader persona. In the days of the 2009 recovery, Obama had to negotiate a trade deal with China:

I’d promised to fight on those workers’ behalf for a better deal on trade [with China], and I intended to keep that promise. With the world’s economy hanging by a thread, though, I had to consider when and how best to do that. (APL, 476), Kindle Edition)

“The world’s economy hanging by a thread”? You get the picture. Obama didn’t just save America; he rescued “the world” on the precipice of destruction.

The problem facing a reviewer of this kind of rambling wreck of Presidential history is with his narration of both the domestic and international challenges and crises that he faced between 2009 and 2013. The accounts are crippled both with irrelevant details, self-serving, self-inflating asides so extended and bogged down with inanities and platitudes that the reader cannot help but lose concentration and interest.

In Brazil during the 2011 Libyan crisis:

As our communications technicians rushed about checking for loose cords and faulty portals, I sat down in a chair and scooped a handful of almonds from a bowl on a side table. (APL, 662, Kindle Edition)

On a diplomatic mission to India in 2009:

After ten hours in the air, with a refueling stop at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, almost everybody on board (including Michelle, in the forward cabin; Valerie, on the couch outside the conference room; and several senior staffers stretched out at odd angles on the floor) had gone to sleep. Unable to wind down, I’d enlisted our regular foursome for a game of Spades, and I was trying to read through my briefing book and signing a stack of correspondence between plays. My divided attention—along with Reggie’s second gin and tonic—may have accounted for the fact that Marvin and Pete were up six games to two on us, at ten dollars a pop. (APL, 593, Kindle Edition)

Valerie Jarrett is everywhere in this book, Obama’s Svengali who, I suspect, requires of him that her guiding, maternal presence during his Presidency requires subtle recognition.

After endless pages of these unconstrained memory-dumps, any non-Obama-smitten reader who wonders what really happened will abandon this quasi-fantasy swampland and consult serious studies that are available elsewhere. The prose is hackneyed, the principal characters often misrepresented, and the author nakedly egotistical to the point of parody. Obama squandered 700 pages of print and wasted his reader’s time doing what he has always done—pretending to be something he has never been, wise, selflessly devoted to the less fortunate, and endowed with unique gifts of leadership and statesmanship.

In conclusion, however, I must mention, what stands out as the most egregious, dishonest representations of his foreign policy in the entire volume, are the destruction of Libya and the killing of Muammar Gaddafi. Here is how Obama spins it:

March ended without a single U.S. casualty in Libya, and for an approximate cost of $550 million—not much more than what we spent per day on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—we had accomplished our objective of saving Benghazi and its neighboring cities and perhaps tens of thousands of lives. According to Samantha, it was the quickest international military intervention to prevent a mass atrocity in modern history. (APL, 668, Kindle Edition)

“[P]erhaps tens of thousands of lives?” Saved on the cheap! This is flagrant deceit. We all know now what a disaster the American takedown of Muammar Gaddafi was. It was one more piece of the Bush-Obama destabilization of the region. The destruction of Libya turned out to be a chaotic transition center that flooded Europe with mass migration from Africa and the Middle East. It was never a low-cost, humanitarian mission, not the whopper asserted here by Obama.

Libya stands as a sobering testament to the catastrophic consequences of military intervention in Africa, where regime change by outside powers births chaos rather than stability. The cautionary parallels between Gaddafi’s Libya and other interventions expose the fallacy of regime change as a pathway to stability, revealing it instead as a catalyst for enduring turmoil. (“We came, We saw, We failed: Libya’s descent into the Stone Age,” Modern Diplomacy)

Obama, as well, makes no mention of the brutal killing of Gaddafi, sodomized with a bayonet. Girl boss, Hillary Clinton at her ominous, gloating best was captured on film grinning, sadistically bragging about it. “We came, we saw, he died.” Yet another “we” that betrays the hypocrisy of the ruling elite. One does wonder if this paragon of feminist-liberal orthodoxy paused to wonder what it would be like to die having a bayonet rammed up her rectum. Hillary the dumpy pantsuit warrior, never in her life in harm’s way, like Obama, pretending to be tough and courageous, all the while treacherous and scurrilously mendacious. When held to account for her negligence in the 2012 Benghazi attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound that killed four Americans, her infamous response before a congressional committee was, “What difference does it make now?”

There was more that I was going to say about A Promised Land, but I suspect the readers have long grown weary of Obama and his swollen ego. Eight years of him as POTUS was Chinese water torture; his books add insult to injury. Volume two will be released someday to be sold and gather dust on the shelves, unread. Or, end up in piles at the public library annual book sale—two for a dollar.