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A Promised Land

By Barack Obama

Crown

Barack Obamas memoir A Promised Land was the most anticipated book in many a year, but since the significantly overpriced volume appeared, reaction to it has been noticeably muted. That could well be because of its length; it could more likely be because some sections of its narrative read like papers drawn directly from the Journal of Policy History. Initial reviews were surprisingly mixed, with a young Black poet sharply critiquing it in Obamas hometown Chicago Tribune and a highly knowledgeable progressive journalist slamming it forcefully in a long essay in The Week.

Yet no commentator to date has even attempted to take the measure of what this book tells us about Obama himself that we did not previously know. As the author of a book about Obamas pre-presidential life that is even longer than his new memoir, I find this is an easier task than most might imagine: A Promised Land does not tell us all that much new about the most widely recognized person on the globe. Yet there are a trio of themes that Obama repeatedly touches on, themes that do shed new light on a supremely guarded public figure. They are his deep, long-standing ambition to be president, his post-election fear that outsized public expectations had inescapably set him up for an underwhelming performance in office, and his painful realization that his administrations acknowledged failures illuminated how neither he nor his deeply devoted wife Michelle had enjoyed the lives the presidency bestowed upon them.

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Obama cops early on to possessing a deep self-consciousness, or what the Nigerian American novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in by far the longest book review in the history of The New York Times, characterized as a man watching himself watch himself. He tells readers nothing new about his childhood, college experiences, or his young adulthood as a community organizer on Chicagos Far South Side in the mid-1980s, but he does expressly confirm how Harold Washington, the citys first African American mayor, whom Obama once met only briefly, served as a profound inspiration for him. Above all, Harold gave people hope, and For me, this planted a seed. It made me think for the first time that I wanted to someday run for public office.

After less than three years as an organizer, I left for Harvard Law School with my motives open to interpretation and my own ambitions very much in mind. By early in his second year, Obama admits knowing even then that the practice of law would be no more than a way station for me. Just before his 1991 graduation, he told his then-fiance, Michelle, I could even see myself running for office. Michelles brother Craig has long told of how Barack volunteered to him that those aspirations included the presidency.

Back in Chicago, Obama began his political career within less than five years by winning election almost unopposed to a seat in the Illinois state Senate. The first two years in the legislature were fine, notwithstanding his wifes intense distaste for how often the job took him away from home, but by the end of my second session, I could feel the atmosphere of the capitol weighing on me, particularly as a junior member of the minority party. In addition, Michelle was increasingly unhappy, for they now had a newborn baby in their young family. This isnt what I signed up for, Barack. I feel like Im doing it all by myself.

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Obama acknowledges that I knew I was falling short, but his response to this conundrum was to run for Congress, challenging the well-known incumbent and onetime Black Panther Rep. Bobby Rush. Almost from the start, the race was a disaster, and the result was a humiliating defeat in which Obama won barely 30 percent of the vote. In its wake, I recognized Id been driven by the need to justify the choices I had already made in pursuing a political career and to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of others. In other words, I had become the very thing that, as a younger man, I had warned myself against. I had become a politician.

This is an unforgettable self-critique and confession, as Obama admits that even in the face of his wifes intensifying opposition to his life in politics, he was simply unable to quell his ambition for electoral success. Oddly, he then quickly narrates his decision to undertake a statewide race for a U.S. Senate seat without any similar self-revelation as to how he justified this initially long-shot undertaking in the face of such a daunting self-portrait. In the end, Obama triumphed thanks to self-inflicted wounds on the part of two top-tier opponents and a superb last-minute television advertising campaign. At age 43, following a breakout address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he found himself a widely heralded U.S. senator, much to his wifes amazement.

Even in the face of his wifes intensifying opposition to his life in politics, Obama was simply unable to quell his ambition for electoral success.

Ensconced in his new office, I figured I had all the time in the world to ponder a subsequent race for Illinoiss governorship or the presidency some years in the future. Yet within just a years time, Obamas ambition once again surged to the fore. Rather unconvincingly, Obama asserts that a disastrous hurricane and a brief early-2006 trip to an American military quagmire altered his relaxed timetable. Katrina and my Iraq visit put a stop to all that. Change needed to come faster, and so by the spring of 2006, the idea of me running for president in the next election no longer felt outside the realm of possibility.

When Obama first broached the idea with his wife, Michelle was unsurprisingly furious. When is it going to be enough? she asked, and her anger echoed something she had told him years earlier: Its like you have a hole to fill Thats why you cant slow down. Obama concedes the point. Was I still trying to prove myself worthy to a father who had abandoned me and was now long dead? Whatever it was in me that needed healing, whatever kept me reaching for more was the root of his unquenchable ambition, but Obama plumbs the question no further.

Eight months later, on the night of November 6, 2006, Obama returned home after the last of countless campaign appearances on behalf of other Democrats, appearances at which crowds responded far more to him than to the actual candidates. In what is without question the most notable passage in A Promised Land, Obama recounts what he says is a dream that awoke him late that night. I imagined myself stepping toward a portal of some sort And behind me, out of the darkness, I heard a voice, sharp and clear uttering the same word again and again. No. No. No. I jolted out of bed, my heart racing, and went downstairs to pour myself a drink. I sat alone in the dark, sipping vodka, my nerves jangled, my brain in sudden overdrive. My deepest fear, it turned out, was no longer of irrelevance The fear came from my realization that I could win the Democratic nomination and then the presidency, should he indeed declare his candidacy.

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This is an indelible admission for a world-famous figure, yet to date not a single English-language commentator on Obamas memoir has highlighted and quoted this passage, a comprehensive web search confirms. Yet it seems beyond doubt that some part of Obamas brain was attempting to rein in his snowballing ambition, warning himNo. No. No.not to pursue the chalice of which he had long dreamed. But as clearly as Obama remembered that late-night vision, he cast the warning aside and pursued the presidency just as he had long planned.

The experience of the 20072008 campaign weighed heavily on Obama the more popular he became. By the fall of 2008, facing off against the stolid, older Republican nominee, John McCain, Obamas worries mounted. The continuing elevation of me as a symbol ran contrary to my organizers instincts, and he understood the distance between the airbrushed image and the flawed, often uncertain person I was. Even before his actual electoral triumph, he feared the likelihood that it would be impossible to meet the outsized expectations now attached to me.

In retrospect, looking back at the scenes of mass ecstasy that reached from his election night rally to the day of his inauguration, Obama recognizes that we should have done more to tamp down this collective postelection high. He questions whether he erred in the momentous initial decisions he made to confront the calamitous economic crisis he inherited, asking whether I should have been bolder in those early months, willing to exact more economic pain in the short term in pursuit of a permanently altered and more just economic order.

Obama opines that the Senate filibuster, which required a supermajority of 60 votes rather than just 51, would prove to be the most chronic political headache of my presidency, and he at least half-seriously rues how on my very first day in office, I hadnt had the foresight to tell Senate Democrats to revise the chamber rules and get rid of the filibuster. Obama also samples a modest roster of additional regrets, writing that while in 2009 he believed it possible that China would challenge U.S. preeminence on the world stage I was convinced that any such challenge was still decades away. How wrong that was!

For most politicians, winning the presidency is their dream, but for Obama, the voice that had warned No. No. No. had not gone away.

Obama appears to acknowledge that he knew that the Affordable Care Act, his signature legislative achievement, would entail windfall profits that a new flood of insured customers would bring to hospitals, drug companies, and insurers while doing nothing to halt or reverse the skyrocketing costs charged by doctors and hospitals. He likewise concedes that as of the summer of 2009, the economy had gotten steadily worse with me in charge and that programs set up to help homeowners refinance or modify their mortgages fell woefully short of expectations. In an especially painful reminiscence, my administration was still deporting undocumented workers and separating families at the border and was doing so at an accelerating rate.

By October 2009, Obama was all too aware of the widening gap between the expectations and the realities of my presidency, and when to everyones utter amazement he was awarded the Nobel Peace PrizeFor what? he immediately askedhe understood on his celebratory trip to Oslo that on some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion. One evening at the White House, hearing a musical act practicing downstairs in preparation for a next-day performance, Obama snuck a discreet peek at them and was struck by the pure, unambiguous joy of their endeavors, such a contrast to the political path I had chosen.

Was Obama at least in part coming to regret how he had made pursuing and attaining the presidency his lifes work? He realized too how painfully lonely his wife found life in the White House, and whether in my seeming calm I was really just protecting myselfand contributing to her loneliness. He likewise recounts what he says became a recurring dream in which he is walking in some unnamed city when suddenly I realize that no one recognizes me and in response I feel like Ive won the lottery.

For most politicians, winning the presidency is their dream, but for Obama, the voice that had warned No. No. No. had not gone away. Instead, success could taste sour. His supporters had expected my election to transform our country, yet wed neglected our promise to change Washington. Even after the successful killing of terror lord Osama bin Ladenwhich he recounts in this volumes taut, finely honed final chapterObama could not escape the painful realization of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be.

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No. No. No. Obama Said, but He Went On Anyway - The American Prospect

At this point, there is no doubt that Steph Curry will go down in the history books as the greatest shooter who ever lived.

In an appearance on The Ringer podcast, even former U.S. President Barack Obama had to agree, saying it wasnt even a question that Steph is, indeed, the best long-distance specialist the game has seen.

Thats not even a question -absolutely. I have not seen anybody who can shoot that way in as many ways in as unlikely ways consistently as Steph Curry. I know Steph well everything he does is precise, its neat, its tight.

Barack and Steph do have a little history. When the Warriors won their first Championship in 2015, they visited Obama and the White House in, what used to be, a long-standing tradition.

Obama has long held an interest in NBA basketball, citing his fandom of the Bulls as a kid growing up in Chicago. So, Obama isnt just speaking as a former President when he recognizes Steph as the greatest shooter ever hes speaking as a fan and student of the game.

In 11 years in the NBA, Curry has built up quite a resume, earning 6 All-Star appearances, 6 All-NBA appearances, 2 MVPs, and 3 NBA Championships. Last season, we saw Curry and the Warriors sink near the bottom of the standings, and it was a sign that their dynasty may finally be over.

This season, with a (mostly) healthy squad and a re-tooled roster, they should be right back at the top. Obama is just one of many who has not forgotten who Curry is and what he is capable of.

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Barack Obama Says Steph Curry Is The Greatest Shooter Of All-Time - Fadeaway World

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump's often embattled Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, established new rules on handling sexual assaults on campus to strengthen protections for accused students, almost all of them men.

Joe Biden, who was the Obama administrations point man for the policies DeVos upended, has made his displeasure clear.

The Trump Administration's Education Department ... is trying to shame and silence survivors, the Biden campaign platform declared. Instead of protecting women, it has given colleges a green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their civil rights.

This story inititially published at RealClearInvestigations.com. It is reprinted here with permission.

To stand with survivors, Biden has promised not only to restore a set of Obama-era guidelines to combat so-called campus rape culture with compliance a condition of federal dollars but to add to them. As president, his campaign literature states, he would push for legislation creating, among other things, online, anonymous sexual assault and harassment reporting systems.

But as he works to restore and expand a believe women approach to sexual assault that DeVos and others criticized as a presumption of male guilt, Biden will face much more serious headwinds than the Obama guidelines did when first introduced in 2011.

In developments barely reported in the mainstream media, hundreds of colleges and universities across the country have run into a legal thicket as they've implemented the original guidelines. There has been a flood of lawsuits, more than 600 of them, brought by accused men in both state and federal courts claiming that colleges used biased, one-sided and unfair proceedings when they found them guilty of sexual misconduct and punished them, mainly by suspensions and expulsions from their schools.

Notable is that around half of the lawsuits heard by the courts to date have met with rulings in favor of the accused men in effect a validation of the Trump-DeVos effort to protect the due-process rights of accused men and a rebuke to the Obama-Biden approach.

Then there is the matter of the Supreme Court, reconstituted with a conservative majority by President Trumps three justice appointments including Amy Coney Barrett. Before her elevation a few months ago, she was central in what some lawyers view as a landmark case, Doe v. Purdue, when a federal appeals court found that Purdue University may have discriminated against a male student on the basis of sex, believing his female accuser's version of events while barring the young man from presenting evidence on his own behalf.

It is plausible, the court said in its unanimous decision written by Barrett, that Purdue chose to believe Jane because she is a woman and to disbelieve John because he is a man.

A real battle is shaping up, Andrew Miltenberg, the lawyer who brought the case against Purdue, said in a Zoom interview. On the one hand, you have Biden, the moving force behind the 2011 Obama policies who will attempt to roll back some of the regulations put into place under Trump, so we're going to be revisiting due process and related matters, like investigations, hearings, and appeals.

At the same time, Miltenberg, widely viewed as a pioneer in this emerging field of law, continued, you have a clear majority on the Supreme Court who will be sympathetic to the plight of young men accused of sex assault and who haven't had an equitable opportunity to be heard. And you have Supreme Court Justice Barrett, who's written the most significant decision on the matter to date. It's setting up an interesting and potentially volatile dynamic.

Lawyers expect that as Biden strives to return to the Obama-era policies, confusion will abound as high schools, colleges, and universities try to figure out what set of policies they should follow because it would probably take years to rescind and replace the Trump/DeVos rules.

But it seems almost inevitable that the Biden administration will return to beliefs about sexual assault long advanced by feminists and the campus left. The very Biden vocabulary the use of the term survivor rather than the more neutral alleged victim or simply plaintiff is telling. It illustrates an inclination to assume, as Barrett found the Purdue administrators to have done, that sexual assault accusations should take priority over any contrary arguments or even evidence presented by the accused student.

Biden's past statements indicate an acceptance of the rape culture ideology, the belief that, as one feminist website puts it, sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture, and that the deeply embedded misogyny of patriarchal culture requires extraordinary measures to combat a vision of society rejected by its critics as wild exaggeration.

We need a fundamental change in our culture, and the quickest place to change culture is to change it on the campuses of America, Biden said in a 2015 speech at Syracuse University.

Biden was especially blunt in a 2017 speech at George Mason University when he said, Guys, a woman who is dead drunk cannot consent you are raping her, a statement suggesting but then dismissing the ambiguities that often cloud sexual assault claims, including the common presence of alcohol, and differing and changing recollections.

Biden ardently supported the Obama administrations 2011 Dear Colleague letter introducing the guidelines to college administrators, even though from the outset there were strong objections to some of its provisions. Among them, the letter encouraged schools to use a preponderance of the evidence standard of proof in deciding sex assault cases, rather than the more stringent clear and convincing evidence standard, which had been commonly in use in these cases before. A preponderance of the evidence is the lowest standard used in legal proceedings, requiring only that an accusation be seen as more than 50% likely to be true.

The Obama guidelines also permitted a single adjudicator model, whereby the person responsible for handling the case does both the investigation into the facts and makes the judgment of the accused person. This person is more often than not the Title IX coordinator on campus, Title IX being the 1972 law that banned sex discrimination in education, generally seen as an effort to advance women's rights.

The guidelines also left it up to schools whether to hold live hearings, at which accused students could present exculpatory evidence, call witnesses, or cross-examine the students accusing them. Some court decisions that have gone against colleges have found that some sort of live hearing and some sort of questioning of accusers is necessary for a fair outcome.

We did see some bad cases in the Obama era, cases where it basically didn't matter what evidence there was, Jackie Gharapour Wernz, a lawyer who worked in the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said in a Zoom interview. The college was going to find against the defendant, the male defendant, no matter what. I think the schools felt pressure under the Obama guidance.

Conservatives arent the only ones who have raised questions about the guidelines. The liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom Coney Barrett replaced upon her death this year, expressed misgivings about them in a 2018 interview, just when DeVos was announcing the new rules: There's been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that's one of the basic tenets of our system.

Similarly, 28 Harvard Law School professors signed a letter in 2014 protesting the measures Harvard had adopted in response to the guidelines which, they said, lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process and are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.

The law professors complained that Harvard decided simply to defer to the demands of certain federal administration officials rather than exercise independent judgment.

A survey conducted by YouGov in mid-November showed 68% of the 2,532 Americans polled agreeing that students accused of crimes on college campuses should receive the same civil liberties protections from their colleges that they receive in the court system. Only 8% disagreed.

The DeVos rules, formally adopted in May after a two-year process of notice and comment, addressed the main complaints expressed about the Obama-era guidelines. Among other things, the DeVos rules require live hearings and the right of the accused, or usually his lawyer or adviser, to cross-examine the accuser; give schools the option to use clear and convincing evidence as their standard of proof; and narrow the concept of harassment.

Of course, no reasonable person condones sexual assault, or opposes punishing those genuinely guilty of it, but experts say it is often difficult to determine whether the activity was coercive or consensual.

Probably 40 or 50% of allegations of sexual assault are baseless, Brett A. Sokolow, the head of TNG, a risk management and consulting law firm who has served as an expert witness in many cases, said in a phone interview. There are a lot of cases where someone says they were incapacitated, but the evidence doesn't support that they weren't able to make a decision.

There's also the education that schools provide, Sokolow continued, telling students that if you were drunk and somebody had sex with you, come to us.

Sokolow estimates that over the years across the country some 20,000 or more students have been disciplined at their universities for sexual misconduct.

According to a database posted on the Title IX for All website, some 676 lawsuits have been brought against universities by men claiming discrimination or due process violations against them, and 194 of those decided by the courts have met with a favorable outcome for the student plaintiffs.

Many cases that have gone against the universities have been settled out of court, 98 of them, according to KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, who keeps track of the cases filed. This usually occurs after the school has lost its preliminary effort to have charges against it dismissed. But there have been two cases that have actually gone to trial, one involving a student suspended for alleged sexual misbehavior at Brown University, another at Boston College, one before a judge, the other a jury, and the students prevailed in both of them.

Johnson argues that courts are generally deferential to universities and reluctant to interfere in academic questions, which makes the substantial number of decisions in favor of the accused itself quite remarkable.

What's also remarkable, as Johnson put it in a phone interview, is that Biden has never acknowledged even a single one of these cases.

Whether he recognizes them or not, any effort by Biden to formally rescind and replace the DeVos rules will take time, given that the DeVos rules were adopted after a lengthy, formal administrative process. By contrast, the Obama guidelines were a set of informal recommendations, taken seriously by schools because of the threat of financial penalties, but never having the status of formally adopted regulations.

A more difficult problem could well be that many of the court decisions issued so far presage difficulties for schools that adopt the very policies that a Biden administration is likely to favor.

Doe v. Purdue, for example, showed that schools could be found to be discriminating against accused men if they adopt a start by believing approach. As Barrett put it in her decision in which the parties were anonymized: The majority of the [disciplinary] panel members appeared to credit Jane based on her accusation alone, given that they took no other evidence into account. They made up their minds without reading the investigative report and before even talking to John.

The court in Doe v. Purdue didn't address the question of cross-examination, required by the DeVos rules but likely to be made optional in a Biden program. But in several cases already decided, courts have affirmed that cross-examination, or, at least, some direct questioning of an accuser by the accused or his representative is fundamental to a fair procedure.

In a 2018 case, Doe v. Baum, for example, the University of Michigan expelled a male student after he was accused by a female student of having sex with her when she was too drunk to give consent.

The university expelled John after a three-person panel found that Jane's account was more credible than his. John, who said the sex was consensual, sued, and a federal appeals court ruled in his favor, on the grounds that he had never received an opportunity to cross-examine [Jane] or her witnesses.

When the university's determination turns on the credibility of the accuser, the accused or witnesses, that hearing must include an opportunity for cross examination, the court found.

In another recent case, Doe v. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a male student accused of sexual assault (the female complainant saying that she had been too intoxicated to give her consent) argued that the schools use of the Obama guidelines rather than the stricter DeVos rules amounted to sex discrimination against him, and the court agreed. In other words, the court seemed to be saying that the DeVos rules could be applied retroactively to ongoing cases, even if they had been initially filed before the DeVos rules came into effect.

There is no question that the decision increases the risk of legal challenges by respondents against their schools for using old procedures in ongoing or new cases, Wernz wrote in a blog post.

The difference in these cases led one expert, Peter Lake, a professor of law at Stetson University and director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy to say, Due process in higher education is becoming a ball of confusion a mix of conflicting cases and regulations in flux.

That is why some experts believe the matter is likely to end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. Accused students have had appellate decisions in their favor in much of the country, but no general standard has been established, and there have been contrary decisions as well, KC Johnson said.

So my sense is that the Biden administration will construct a narrative around the decisions that have gone in favor of sexual misconduct accusers. It will be eager to confront the courts on this.

If the issue does go to the Supreme Court, the case will be heard by two among the nine justices, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation hearings were dominated by accusations of sexual misconduct against them, which both angrily denied. The newest justice, Barrett, has already given a strong indication in her Doe v. Purdue opinion of how she might rule.

And then there's the irony that Biden himself, though a believe women champion, has himself been accused of assault. Tara Reade, a former staffer, claims that some 30 years ago, when Biden was a senator, he pushed her against a wall in the Senate Office Building and digitally penetrated her, an incident that she recounted to friends at the time.

Biden has adamantly denied the accusation, saying that the alleged incident never, never happened.

Some experts certainly believe that if Biden were to undergo the sort of campus procedure that he advocated during the campaign, with a presumption in favor of the accuser, no live hearing, and no opportunity to present witnesses or to cross-examine Reade, he would most likely be found guilty.

Original post:
Legal experts say Biden's pushing ahead to the Obama past on campus rape could be a mistake - The Center Square

More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in Octobers waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didnt think Toot [Obamas grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.

And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toots apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. I thought you might want to take some back with you, she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Grampss shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.

Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmothers hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, shed be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.

What dreams might she be having? I wondered if shed been able to look back and take stock, or whether shed consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that shed reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when shed experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.

I thought back to a conversation Id had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.

The thing about getting old, Bar, Toot had told me, is that youre the same person inside. I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. Youre trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But its still you. You understand?

I did now.

For the next hour or so, I sat talking to Maya about her work and her family, all the while stroking Toots dry, bony hand. But eventually the room felt too crowded with memories colliding, merging, refracting, like images in a kaleidoscope and I told Maya I wanted to take a quick walk outside. After consulting with Gibbs [communications director Robert Gibbs] and my Secret Service detail, it was agreed that the press pool downstairs would not be informed, and I took the elevator to the basement level and went out through the garage, turning left down the narrow street that ran behind my grandparents apartment building.

The street had barely changed in 35 years. I passed the rear of a small Shinto temple and community center, then rows of wooden homes broken up by the occasional three-story concrete apartment building. I had bounced my first basketball a gift from my father when I was 10 years old down this street, dribbling the length of the uneven sidewalk on my way to and from the courts at the nearby elementary school. Toot used to say that she always knew when I was coming home for dinner because she could hear that darn ball bouncing from 10 stories up. I had run down this street to the supermarket to buy her cigarettes, motivated by her promise that I could buy a candy bar with the change if I was back in 10 minutes. Later, when I was 15, Id walk this same street home from a shift at my first job, scooping ice-cream at the Baskin-Robbins around the corner, Toot laughing heartily when I grumbled to her about my paltry paycheck.

Another time. Another life. Modest and without consequence to the rest of the world. But one that had given me love. Once Toot was gone, there would be no one left who remembered that life, or remembered me in it.

I heard a stampede of feet behind me; the press pool had somehow gotten wind of my unscheduled excursion and were gathering on the sidewalk across the street, cameramen jostling to set up their shots, reporters with microphones looking at me awkwardly, clearly conflicted about shouting a question. They were decent about it, really just doing their jobs, and anyway I had barely traveled four blocks. I gave the press a quick wave and turned around to go back to the garage. There was no point in going farther, I realized; what I was looking for was no longer there.

I left Hawaii and went back to work. Eight days later, on the eve of the election, Maya called to say Toot had died. It was my last day of campaigning. We were scheduled to be in North Carolina that evening, before flying to Virginia for our final event. Before heading to the venue, Axe [chief campaign strategist David Axelrod] asked me gently if I needed help writing a topper to my usual campaign remarks, to briefly acknowledge my grandmothers death. I thanked him and said no. I knew what I wanted to say.

It was a beautiful night, cool with a light rain. Standing on the outdoor stage, after the music and cheers and chants had died down, I spent a few minutes telling the crowd about Toot how shed grown up during the Depression and worked on an assembly line while Gramps was away in the war, what she had meant to our family, what she might mean to them.

She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America, I said. Theyre not famous. Their names arent in the newspapers. But each and every day they work hard. They look after their families. They sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren. They arent seeking the limelight all they try to do is just do the right thing.

And in this crowd, there are a lot of quiet heroes like that mothers and fathers, grandparents, who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives. And the satisfaction that they get is seeing that their children and maybe their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren live a better life than they did.

Thats what Americas about. Thats what were fighting for.

It was as good a closing argument for the campaign as I felt that I could give.

***

If youre the candidate, Election Day brings a surprising stillness. There are no more rallies or town halls. TV and radio ads no longer matter; newscasts have nothing of substance to report. Campaign offices empty as staff and volunteers hit the streets to help turn out voters. Across the country millions of strangers step behind a black curtain to register their policy preferences and private instincts, as some mysterious collective alchemy determines the countrys fate and your own. The realization is obvious but also profound: its out of your hands now. Pretty much all you can do is wait.

Plouffe [campaign manager David Plouffe] and Axe were driven crazy by the helplessness, passing hours on their BlackBerrys scrounging for field reports, rumors, bad weather anything that might be taken as a data point. I took the opposite tack, giving myself over to uncertainty as one might lie back and float over a wave. I did start the morning by calling into a round of drive-time radio shows, mostly at Black stations, reminding people to get out and vote. Around 7.30, Michelle and I cast our votes at the Beulah Shoesmith elementary school, a few blocks from our home in Hyde Park, bringing Malia and Sasha with us and sending them on to school after that.

I then made a quick trip to Indianapolis to visit a field office and shake hands with voters. Later, I played basketball (a superstition Reggie [personal aide Reggie Love] and I had developed after we played the morning of the Iowa caucus but failed to play the day of the New Hampshire primary) with Michelles brother Craig, some old buddies and a handful of my friends sons who were fast and strong enough to keep us all working hard. It was a competitive game, filled with the usual good-natured trash talk, although I noticed an absence of hard fouls. This was per Craigs orders, I learned later, since he knew his sister would hold him accountable if I came home with a black eye.

Gibbs, meanwhile, was tracking news from the battleground states, reporting that turnout appeared to be shattering records across the country, creating problems in some polling places as voters waited four or five hours to cast their ballots. Broadcasts from the scenes, Gibbs said, showed people more jubilant than frustrated, with seniors in lawn chairs and volunteers passing out refreshments as if they were all at a neighborhood block party.

I spent the rest of the afternoon at home, puttering around uselessly while Michelle and the girls got their hair done. Alone in my study, I made a point of editing the drafts of both my victory and concession speeches. Around 8pm, Axe called to say that the networks had called Pennsylvania in our favor, and Marvin [trip director Marvin Nicholson] said we should start heading to the downtown hotel where wed be watching the returns before moving over to the public gathering at Grant Park.

Outside the front gate of our house, the number of Secret Service agents and vehicles seemed to have doubled over the past few hours. The head of my detail, Jeff Gilbert, shook my hand and pulled me into a brief embrace. It was unseasonably warm for Chicago at that time of year, almost in the mid-60s, and as we drove down Lake Shore Drive, Michelle and I were quiet, staring out the window at Lake Michigan, listening to the girls horsing around in the back seat. Suddenly Malia turned to me and asked, Daddy, did you win?

I think so, sweetie.

And were supposed to be going to the big party to celebrate?

Thats right. Why do you ask?

Well, it doesnt seem like that many people might be coming to the party, cause there are no cars on the road.

I laughed, realizing my daughter was right; save for our motorcade, the six lanes in both directions were completely empty.

Security had changed at the hotel as well, with armed Swat teams deployed in the stairwells. Our family and closest friends were already in the suite, everyone smiling, kids racing around the room, and yet the atmosphere was still strangely muted, as if the reality of what was about to happen hadnt yet settled in their minds. My mother-in-law, in particular, made no pretense of being relaxed; through the din, I noticed her sitting on the couch, her eyes fixed on the television, her expression one of disbelief. I tried to imagine what she must be thinking, having grown up just a few miles away during a time when there were still many Chicago neighborhoods that Blacks could not even safely enter; a time when office work was out of reach for most Blacks, and her father, unable to get a union card from white-controlled trade unions, had been forced to make do as an itinerant tradesman; a time when the thought of a Black US president would have seemed as far-fetched as a pig taking flight.

I took a seat next to her on the couch. You OK? I asked.

Marian shrugged and kept staring at the television. She said, This is kind of too much.

I know. I took her hand and squeezed it, the two of us sitting in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then suddenly a shot of my face flashed up on the TV screen and ABC News announced that I would be the 44th president of the United States.

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The room erupted. Shouts could be heard up and down the hall. Michelle and I kissed, and she pulled back gently to give me the once-over as she laughed and shook her head. Reggie and Marvin rushed in to give everyone big bear hugs. Soon Plouffe, Axe and Gibbs walked in, and I indulged them for several minutes as they rattled off state-by-state results before telling them what I knew to be true that as much as anything Id done, it was their skill, hard work, insight, tenacity, loyalty and heart, along with the commitment of the entire team, that had made this moment possible.

The rest of the night is mostly a blur to me now. I remember John McCains phone call, which was as gracious as his concession speech. He emphasized how proud America should be of the history that had been made and pledged to help me succeed. There were congratulatory calls from President Bush and several foreign leaders, and a conversation with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, both of whose caucuses had had very good nights. I remember meeting Joe Bidens 91-year-old mother, who took pleasure in telling me how shed scolded Joe for even considering not being on the ticket.

More than 200,000 people had gathered in Grant Park that night, the stage facing Chicagos glittering skyline. I can see in my mind even now some of the faces looking up as I walked onstage, men and women and children of every race, some wealthy, some poor, some famous and some not, some smiling ecstatically, others openly weeping. Ive reread lines from my speech that night and heard accounts from staff and friends of what it felt like to be there.

But I worry that my memories of that night, like so much else thats happened these past 12 years, are shaded by the images that Ive seen, the footage of our family walking across the stage, the photographs of the crowds and lights and magnificent backdrops. As beautiful as they are, they dont always match the lived experience. In fact, my favorite photograph from that night isnt of Grant Park at all. Rather its one I received many years later as a gift, a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial, taken as I was giving my speech in Chicago. It shows a small gathering of people on the stairs, their faces obscured by the darkness, and behind them the giant figure shining brightly, his marble face craggy, his eyes slightly downcast. Theyre listening to the radio, I am told, quietly contemplating who we are as a people and the arc of this thing we call democracy.

This is an extract from A Promised Land by Barack Obama, published by Penguin Random House on 17 November at 35. To order a copy for 29.75, go to guardianbookshop.com.

More here:
Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency exclusive extract - The Guardian

Obama does endure repeated disillusionment, but then recovers and rises above it. He may vent that the American people dont really care about the environment enough to seriously inconvenience themselves, but when hes done venting, he refuses to behave as if he thought people were all bad. Part of what youre sensing here are times when I make decisions to be gracious, when I assume the best in people, not because Im naive but because this is how I choose to operate in the world, Obama recently told Jeffrey Goldberg. Sometimes your way of being is more important than your way of thinking. Its possible to observe selfishness in others yet refuse to play by their rules. Its possible to say to yourself, This is a potentially corrupting situation, but I choose to resist that corruption.

We all have to decide where to situate ourselves in the world, and again and again Obama situates himself with the idealists. On foreign trips, he makes it a point to have meetings with college students. He doesnt really think Russian human-rights activists have many prospects in the Putin era, yet he still holds a big public meeting with them. Throughout his presidency he was slow to intervene abroad, even when innocent lives were at stake, but he still stood with his foreign-policy adviser, Samantha Power. She evoked my own youthful idealism, the part of me still untouched by cynicism, cold calculation, or caution dressed up as wisdom.

Perhaps there is something distinctly African American about this posture. African Americans are among the most mistreated people in America, but they are also, as survey after survey shows, the most optimistic people in America. Poor Black people are even more optimistic than wealthy Black people. One sees an almost willful decision to simply refuse to be ground down by circumstances, an insistence on seeing a brighter day ahead and observing the present from the vantage point of a better future.

The spirit of the blues, the great writer Albert Murray once observed, moves in the opposite direction from ashes and sackcloth, self-pity, self-hatred, and suicide. As a matter of fact the dirtiest, meanest, and most low-down blues are not only not depressing, they function like an instantaneous aphrodisiac! You cant always choose your life, Murray argued, but you can choose your style. The blues idiom starts not by obscuring or denying the existence of the ugly dimensions of human nature, but by making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response. When you sing the blues you become the humanizer of the chaos.

Imani Perry: Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.

Once upon a time, scientists emphasized our selfish genes, arguing that life was a bloody battle for survival, red in tooth and claw. But recently the evidence has swung wildly the other way. The neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman wrote a book, Social, that describes how human beings are wired to connect and cooperate. The Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard wrote a book, Altruism, showing that when hard times come, sharing is more common than pillaging, and cooperation is more common than indifference. And The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest, by the Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, is a summary of the many research studies that show that most people are basically good, not bad. In any given experiment, Benkler observes, 30 percent of the participants behave selfishly, but roughly half of the participants behave cooperatively, in predictable and systematic ways. Many people behave altruistically even when others are mean, and even when it comes at personal cost. In practically no human society examined under controlled conditions, Benkler concludes, have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly.

Read more from the original source:
The Tattered Idealism of Barack Obama - The Atlantic