The Man from Everywhere and Nowhere
Any fair critic of the author needs to acknowledge that he is an immensely talented writer. Just as he once dazzled crowds with flourishes of sonorous rhetoric, Obama here offers readers a style of prose completely atypical of the average political memoir. As legions of ghostwriters can attest, most politicians and public figures are ill-equipped to produce a single readable paragraph without conscripting a phalanx of uncredited wordsmiths in the effort. Even the more gifted and independently-minded among them would struggle to bring such literary flair to the often mundane business of governance, campaigning, and retail politics. In Obama’s hands, however, all three are seamlessly woven into a sweeping narrative tapestry in which very little seems labored or out of place.
While they certainly include plenty of extraneous description—recounting, in forensic detail, the exact appearance of meeting tables at international summits (adorned with “a national flag, a microphone with operating instructions, a commemorative writing pad and pen of varying quality”) or lengthy taxonomies of various physical objects found in the Oval Office (“the busts of long-dead leaders and Remington’s famous bronze cowboy; the antique grandfather clock…the thick oval carpet with stern eagle stitched in its center, and the Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria in 1880 ornately carved from the hull of a British ship that a U.S. whaling crew helped salvage after a catastrophe…”)—the 700 pages that make up A Promised Land are brimming with lyrical passages like the following description of the White House Rose Garden from the book’s opening chapter:
“Oh, how good that garden looked! The shady magnolias rising high at each corner; the hedges, thick and rich green; the crab apple trees pruned just so. And the flowers, cultivated in greenhouses a few miles away, providing a constant explosion of color—reds and yellows and pinks and purples; in spring, the tulips massed in bunches, their heads tilted towards the sun; in summer, lavender heliotrope and geraniums and lilies; in fall, chrysanthemums and daisies and wildflowers. And always a few roses, red mostly but sometimes yellow or white, each one flush in its bloom.”Delivered from the fingertips of a Hillary Clinton or a John Kerry, the preceding description would probably hit with the cacophonous thud of an elbow smashing the keys on a grand piano; its imagery stale, its delivery mannered, and its rhythm a jarring staccato.* Wielded by Obama, however, even a description of the White House Rose Garden quickly turns into an epochal meditation on fatherhood, duty, longing, the passage of time, and the wondrousness of America—the author somehow evoking George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., and Norman Rockwell’s 1946 oil painting Working on the Statue of Liberty in a single paragraph that follows (“The men in the painting, the groundskeepers in the garden—they were the guardians, I thought, the quiet priests of a good and solemn order”).
There are numerous sections in this vein, the book leaping with ease across vast expanses of space, time, history, geography, ideology, and culture—from the battlefields of Gettysburg and Appomatox to the palace intrigues of ancient Egypt; from the jazzy rhythms of Manhattan’s Village Vanguard to the writings of Langston Hughes and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; from the cloistered world of White House cabinet deliberations to the open air retail politics of the Iowa caucuses. As elegant as his paean to the Rose Garden, Obama’s more literary passages ultimately achieve something else: the fusion of his thoughts and biography with anything and everything he finds around him. On a rhetorical level, the effect is incredibly potent, giving the impression of a thoughtful leader perpetually grappling with the infinite complexities and nuances of a world rendered in glorious technicolor. Aesthetically pleasing though it may be, this mode of storytelling does more to obscure than illuminate the author’s actual beliefs, its imagery and style being so polychromatic that anyone can, indeed, find their own preferences or tastes represented somewhere between the lines.
Obama’s choose-your-own-adventure schtick undeniably explains much about his popularity and appeal, a reality to which he himself seems exquisitely attuned. “I was new and unexpected,” the author writes of his rapid ascent from senator to president, “a blank canvas onto which supporters across the ideological spectrum could project their own visions of change.” Removed from their immediate context, in fact, parts of A Promised Land could almost be read as self-aware metacommentary on the nature of political cipherhood. (...)
From his debut book Dreams From My Father to the present day, Obama’s tendency to invoke grand, dialectical oppositions then resolve them with abstract appeals to unity or similitude has been a hallmark of his style. Combined with his flair for lofty, even mythical imagery and ability to fuse his thoughts and biography with everything around him, the upshot is a rendering of events in which every strand of history, culture, and ideology appears to realize itself in Barack Obama: a man whose life and presidency represent the synthesis of every strain of American life hitherto in tension. The same basic pattern recurs again and again throughout Obama’s prose and speeches in great Enigma Variations of rhetorical triangulation—as everything from his music preferences to his foreign policy team find the old dichotomies dismantled and an underlying harmony revealed. At times this rhetoric has even sounded like Biblical prophecy, as when Obama expressed his confidence that future generations would “look back and tell our children that… this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” (upon being elected, Obama immediately appointed BP’s climate change-denying chief scientist to his Department of Energy). (...)
Obama emphatically insists he was uncomfortable with those who expressed outsized hopes in him and discussed him in messianic terms, but admits that his campaign deliberately “helped to construct” this association in the public’s mind between the election of Barack Obama to the presidency and the fulfillment of America’s promise and the end to people’s troubles. The route to the “promised land” was through his presidency. It was hope itself, change itself. Elect me, he said, and we will end our divisions, part the seas, and move to a new stage of history. Say what you will, but this is a powerful piece of personal branding. Not for nothing did Advertising Age give Obama its 2008 Marketer of the Year award, the 44th president winning out over Apple and Zappos.
Yes We Can…what?
Try as he might, Obama’s elegant obfuscations and literary digressions can only take him so far. A Promised Land is, after all, a response to critics and a memoir concerned with recounting the specifics of political decisions from the point of view of the man at their center—an effort which inevitably necessitates the occasional clearly-stated opinion. Even here, however, the author frequently proves difficult to pin down—his narration often ventriloquizing the perspectives of others and invariably placing him somewhere, dispassionately, in between. One again recalls Taibbi in 2007 describing Obama’s capacity to exude a “seemingly impenetrable air of Harvard-crafted moral neutrality” while expending tremendous rhetorical energy “showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view [and emphasizing] that when he does take hard positions on issues, he often does so reluctantly.”
For all his talk of grand aspirations and hopes, then, Obama does not come across as someone with a very strong or clearly-defined set of political goals. It is striking, in fact, given the book’s subject matter and length, how little he says about why he wanted to hold elected office in the first place, what he does offer in this regard mostly taking the form of empty platitudes.
Image: Crown Publishing Group
