Serious strivers who go into politics outnumber the ego-driven but need ego for sustenance.
From local councillors up ‘the voters’ overnight can say ‘that’s it, you’re out’ and the lowliest are at the mercy of their least thoughtful constituents. The unreasonable, many of whom will never vote for them, demand answers at the least considerate moments. Their family privacy has gone. Until recently ‘the wife’ picked up most pieces. It is surely an odd job, described with insight by Barack Obama in his most recent book.
Johnson, Gove and Leo Varadkar are more typical voter-befuddlers, Trump and Putin extreme cases. Books by the retired, as wide a range of oddballs as of talents, are a mixture of good, bad and downright ugly. Only 30 pages into ‘A Promised Land’ Obama introduces his first dive into politics: ‘Here’s where the story gets murkier in my mind, my motives open to interpretation.’ That signifies rare enough self-awareness.
His first security detail, installed earlier than for any previous candidate, gave him the call sign ‘Renegade’. The long charge-sheet from those he disappointed may be unrealistic about the odds he faced.
When Barack Hussein Obama became president the family were untypical in Washington. When he became a US senator he was the only African American. He explicitly wants his story to inspire Black children. Son of a single mother brought up largely by formidable grandmother Toot, only this last experience resembled that of many African American boys.
After an upbringing in Hawaii, Indonesia and Kenya, growing awareness of the need to ‘locate’ himself sent him towards political development. This section is still intriguing, like his account of the Clintons’ campaign against him for the Democratic nomination. Respect for Hillary’s doggedness exceeds any for Bill.
Michelle Obama’s book ‘Becoming’ described their marriage counselling when he was off most of the week in the state senate. The resigned, realistic outcome was that she started getting up at dawn, to give herself time at the gym before another day combining work and children. It must reflect many households tied to political careers. She stayed loath to sign up to his campaigns. With guards around them for the rest of their lives, what are their arguments now? With ‘Black Lives Matter’ believably contending that racism in the fabric of the USA means reform is impossible?
Deportations, drone death-tolls, failure to penalise those responsible for the scandal of sub-prime mortgage-selling; the awful reality of Trump in the White House obscured what Obama the president had avoided or mishandled.
‘In the first hundred days of my administration, no margin for error existed,’ he writes, and indeed major economic crisis greeted the start of his first term. His team told him brusquely that no, he could not block ‘contractually obligated bonuses’ to senior employees of AIG, the multi-national insurance corporation hugely responsible for the imminence of a second Great Depression. Naming the guilty risked panic, igniting fears. Later he wondered ‘whether I should have been bolder...in pursuit of a more just economic order.’
Was he ‘too cautious in either word or deed’ because he thought appealing to Lincoln’s better angels stood a greater chance of ‘leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised?’ (The book title comes from the spiritual ‘O Fly and never tire, There’s a great camp-meeting in the Promised Land.’) But he knows he ‘is a reformer, conservative in temperament if not in vision.’ Almost certainly ‘wrenching political and economic norms’, he says, would have made things worse for the least powerful.
Never less than readable, while maintaining that his is a practical optimism he lays out the compromises that keep many idealists out of politics. Some fear that Trump’s leap to prominence with no political work-experience may encourage the emergence, soon, of someone more dangerous still; an authoritarian with discipline. Even if the odds stay unchanged, the latest good book by an Obama is a likeable distraction.
