“I had more important things to do”: when Obama was still making fun of Trump

Barack Obama publishes his memoir and it is often grim to read about a man who struggles with himself and expectations. And who has dark premonitions. Angela Merkel will particularly appreciate reading the book.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Barack Obama has built his ordeal. Because he meant what he promised, because he wanted change, hope, not just as a PR slogan, but out of conviction. And then he arrived at the White House and realized that “my heart was now chained to strategic considerations and tactical analyzes”. That he could not meet expectations, neither his own nor those of others.

One who often couldn’t do what he wanted and suffered from it: this is the story that Barack Obama tells in his long-awaited memoir of his first term. He would like to explain what it feels like to be president. In his own words: like a climber who realizes after the storm on the summit that there is still a much higher peak behind it, supplies are exhausted, bones ache and a storm is approaching.

From the collapse of Lehman to the collapse of Greece, from the disaster in Afghanistan to the historic bankruptcy to the congressional elections, an endless wave of gigantic tasks spills over 1,000 pages. And a dark premonition of what will come a few years later, like the refreshing wind that heralds the storm: a country is moving away, Republicans and Democrats are entrenched, the tone is radicalized. And later, almost at the end, the boy who was “completely uninhibited” appears. Obama ignored him at first, mocked his conspiracy theories without knowing what was in store for the country.

Just a normal teenager

But “A Promised Land” is Obama’s story, and because he can tell compelling stories, he lets readers know as best he can that the presidency is just like a normal job. You find yourself mired in too many projects, do your best, mostly fail, get angry with colleagues, smoke too much, sleep too little. Well, you can “blow up the whole world”, as Obama writes, apparently still in amazement.

Obama describes the road to the Oval Office as a typical Cinderella story: he was a completely normal teenager, a “listless student and passionate basketball player” who only chatted with sports friends and girls “and how and where we met. can get drunk. “Read Marx and Foucault? Just a way to pick up women in college. Eventually, however, he made it to elite Harvard University and met Michelle Robinson, whom he married in 1992. Ms. Obama is skeptical or even bothered about her career as a politician, especially when she suffered a bitter defeat at 2000 congressional elections. A low point that Obama relentlessly describes: “I was nearly 40 and broke, suffered a humiliating defeat, my marriage was not the best.”

Suddenly a warlord

Obama can be credited with the fact that he did not skip his failures, but often performed them with the tone of the class nerd who had a bad feeling during his class work and was therefore the only one who wrote an A. “Humblebrag” is as the Americans call it, feigned humility that can degenerate into showing off. It didn’t go so badly for Obama – four years later, this man was the party’s hope and the US senator, and four years later suddenly the first black American president in history. And even more: a global beacon of hope that is still speaking as a candidate in Berlin ahead of 200,000 in 2008 – a role that makes him “uncomfortable”, as he writes. Mainly because it creates expectations that no politician can meet. He suspects it, yet he has to learn the hard way.

Realpolitik’s lesson begins as soon as he moves to the White House. “Yes we can”? Not in a global financial crisis spreading around the Lehman crash that plunged millions of Americans into unemployment and homelessness. Not with the stubborn Republicans, for whom “the rules no longer apply” in the culture war against Obama. Not the responsibility of the Commander-in-Chief, who many voters would have liked to see as the president against the war, but who sent even more soldiers to Afghanistan. “Until now I had criticized the ‘War on Terror’ from cheap places,” writes Obama. “Now it was my war.”

Because he ends it in Iraq and continues it in Afghanistan, he explains in digressions of one page down to the smallest detail (leaving aside the controversy on the question of how he conducts it, keyword drone war), supplemented by digressions in the history of the countries incorporated in a seminar introductory on how the American system of government works. Even for German readers who, thanks to John King’s geography lessons on CNN, can easily find Susquehanna County on the map during the election, some chapters on Obamacare and the TARP law are likely to be difficult.

Those who follow him will be rewarded with some exciting self-reflections from Obama. He also shares many people’s disappointment with his politics, he writes at one point. “People thought my choice would change the country. Instead, their lives are more difficult and Washington more destroyed than ever.” He remains largely silent about what he himself contributed to the disappointment: the privilege of the memoir writer. What is striking, however, is the frequency with which he blames external factors for the failure, for example in the summer of 2009, which he had planned as “the summer of recovery”: “Only Greece has imploded”. Or the new Middle Eastern strategy that clashed with the Arab Spring: “If only our timing had been better”.

In many moments, however, the humor that has contributed so much to Obama’s popularity flashes through: When an adviser calls him and reports on the Nobel Peace Prize, the President of the United States responds with a counter question: “For what ? “

Praise to Merkel

Chapters where Obama lets his readers play the mouse in world history are easier to read, preferably of course in heroic acts and hussar acts, in which the former president sometimes displays a thief’s delight. At the COP15 World Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, he and Hillary Clinton carried out a commando action that one of his advisors celebrated as a “real number of gangsters”: Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wants to break the deal and evades a conversation with Obama. It allows Jiabao to be tracked down and disrupts his conspiratorial encounter with Brazil, India and South Africa – eventually there is an agreement in which emerging countries also pledge for the first time to contribute to climate protection.

Obama must coordinate his actions in Copenhagen especially with Europeans – and the woman he sees as Europe’s leading figure: Angela Merkel. He would like German readers to imagine him vividly, laconically “good luck” for his meeting with the Chinese, where he “pulled the corners of his mouth down (…), the facial expressions of a person accustomed to facing unpleasant things to take. “

“Reliable, honest, intellectually accurate”

Obama writes only in the highest tones of the German Chancellor – even if Merkel initially greeted him with skepticism, “for my ability as a speaker”. She didn’t take it badly at Merkel, an aversion to possible demagogy is probably a good quality for German politicians. And the more the president of the United States got to know Merkel, the more sympathetic she became to him: “Reliable, honest, intellectually precise and naturally friendly.” This does not mean that Merkel and Obama have always agreed on the content, indeed, during the economic crisis of 2009, for example, the German Chancellor repeatedly blocked American requests for stimulus injections – with a typical Merkel phrase. , “as if I had suggested something slightly tasteless”: “Yes, Barack, I think it might not be the best approach for us.”

The Chancellor’s stoic nature even amused Obama from time to time – such as at the G20 meeting in London in 2009, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy sang the name of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner aloud in exuberance for the ‘agreement. Obama burst out laughing, also at Angela Merkel’s “saddened” expression. “She looked at Sarkozy like a mother to a bad child.”

Mockery and derision for Trump

Obama found a not at all funny man who had only been paying attention “marginally” for a long time, but who suddenly dominated the headlines – with the lie that Obama was not born in the United States. “At first I ignored the nonsense,” writes Obama, who called Donald Trump an “attention-grabbing lion.” She met him when Trump offered to cover the bubbling Deepwater Horizon well. It was probably one of the best decisions of the Obama administration to let the professionals do the surgery.

“A Promised Land” makes it clear how Republicans and especially the Tea Party are cultivating the field for Obama’s successor, with uncompromising tricks and lies. At the time, four out of ten Republican voters believed that Obama was not actually a native of the United States. A circumstance that the president took then with irony, in his legendary appearance at the correspondents dinner, when he mocked Trump, who was sitting in the audience: “What do you want to prove next? That we have never been to the moon?” In fact, the last words he wanted to dedicate to Trump. “I had more important things to do.”

“I felt guilty”

To Obama’s sadness, this has often also been the case with the family, which he cannot look after as he wishes. “I felt guilty,” she admits at one point because she wasn’t often there to see Malia and Sasha grow up, read to them and accompany them to sports. All the more intensely, she lives the rare moments of normality and also lets readers share in her proud tears. With all the insights into the Obamas’ private life, which isn’t always rosy, he never explicitly states how he truly feels about being president.

He fills many pages with the question of what his election means for the people of color in the United States, names the racism that still poisons society, but does not provide insight into his experiences. Maybe because he knows you’ll always be president. And that’s why his heart remains forever chained to strategic considerations.

Barack Obama: a promised land. From American English by Sylvia Bieker, Harriet Fricke, Stephan Gebauer, Stephan Kleiner, Elke Link, Thorsten Schmidt and Henriette Zeltner-Shane. 1024 pages, with 32 pages of color image. € 42.00. Penguin Publishing House. It will be released on November 17, 2020.