A Promised Land summary

Obama’s first true watershed moment was in 2000. His life seemed to be going OK: he’d married Michelle, a whip-smart and gorgeous lawyer from Chicago, and they’d had a beautiful daughter, Malia. He’d taken two jobs in Chicago, practicing and teaching law. He also had an early opportunity to run for state senate – a race he won, twice. 

But it wasn’t enough for him. Despite Michelle’s protestations that she needed him around more, he decided to run for the House of Representatives against a popular incumbent. It was a bold move, and it didn’t quite go as planned. He lost by 30 points.

After his DNC speech, the hype surrounding Obama quickly became ridiculous. It was already becoming difficult for him to do normal things. One day after a chaotic visit to the Lincoln Park Zoo, his daughter Malia suggested he adopt the alias Johnny McJohn John to be more anonymous. Michelle retorted that he could only be really anonymous if he had an operation to pin his ears back. 

Pretty much as soon as he stepped off the DNC stage in 2004, people started telling him he’d one day be president. His own convictions weren’t that strong. But somehow, by the spring of 2006, running for president no longer felt like an impossibility. The media wouldn’t take no for an answer, no matter how many times he denied it. When Nevada senator Harry Reid said he should think about it, his hard-line stance softened. But it was a visit with Senator Ted Kennedy that finally changed his mind. Invoking his idealistic brothers, John and Robert, Kennedy looked into Obama’s eyes and told him, “Moments like this are rare. You think you may not be ready. But you don’t choose the time. The time chooses you.”

The Iowa high wouldn’t last: they lost New Hampshire, the very next primary race. But Obama now sees this loss as one of the most important moments in the campaign. They now understood that it wouldn’t be as easy as it had seemed. The staff gritted their teeth and got back to work. 

There were more problems in store. An old friend of Obama’s, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was caught on tape giving wild opinions about white supremacy and “Black inferiority” at a Sunday church service. It brought up some old issues for Obama around his complex relationship with the Black community. Some among them thought America wasn’t ready for a Black president; others thought he wasn’t “Black enough” to represent the community. 

When it came time for Obama to pick a running mate, Joe Biden wasn’t the immediate choice. On paper, the two men were polar opposites. Biden, nineteen years older than Obama, was a career congressman. Obama was a young upstart. Biden’s warmth and lightheartedness were a far cry from Obama’s professorial cool. But he was smart, compassionate, and paid attention – and, above all else, he had heart. It was an easy decision in the end. 

Obama was enjoying a clear advantage in the polls when John McCain, the Republican nominee, announced his own running mate – a press release that prompted Joe Biden to ask, “Who the hell is Sarah Palin?” Joe, and the country, soon found out. 

A president’s schedule is packed, from the moment he or she is elected. But, during the winter of 2008, there was only one thing that truly mattered: halting the economy’s collapse. The stock market had lost 40 percent of its value. There were foreclosure filings on 2.3 million homes. Household wealth had dropped more than five times what it had during the Great Depression. Things were so bad that Obama took up smoking again, up to ten cigarettes per day.

The first thing to do was pass a fiscal stimulus bill, pumping money into the economy until it could get going again. The proposed bill offered a range of benefits: more food stamps, extended unemployment insurance, middle-class tax cuts, and aid to states to help them avoid laying off teachers, firefighters, and other employees. But getting it through Congress was far from a sure thing. 

One day, about 100 days into his presidency, Obama had a meeting with Tim Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury. Normally, Obama could tell how bad the numbers were just by the expression on Geithner’s face. But this time was different: the economy looked like it was turning a corner.

But by now, the financial crisis had reached every corner of the globe, and was the dominant issue on the table at the 2009 G20 summit in London. Obama’s job was to convince the entire G20 that fiscal stimulus was the right move, including recalcitrant countries like Russia and China. Of the European contingent, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were new acquaintances. Merkel was a patient, methodical leader with bright blue eyes that sometimes betrayed deep emotion. She and Obama hit it off right away. Sarkozy, on the other hand, was all emotional outbursts. He also wore lifts in his shoes, Obama noted with amusement. 

Republicans were against the Affordable Care Act from the very start. After market-testing around 40 anti-reform messages, they realized that describing the plan as a “government takeover” made Republican voters the most angry. McConnell launched offensives against the legislation using exactly this language. 

Their efforts to rile up the public were working. In the summer of 2009, the so-called Tea Party was in ascendance. The Tea Party was an effort by the right wing to attract voters by magnifying their fears. Local Tea Party chapters mobilized their supporters against what they dubbed “Obamacare” using the same social-media tools that Obama rode to the presidency. One of their favorite talking points was an old rumor that Obama had actually been born in Kenya, and was thus ineligible to be president. 

Obama’s first years in office taught him that he was at heart a reformist, not a radical. Some of his foreign policy decisions reinforced that perspective – but others forced him to revisit his values, and the extent to which he could live up to them. 

The war in Afghanistan is an example where a radical approach would have been catastrophic. The situation on the ground – a corrupt, ineffectual government and a population that largely lived according to the whims of the Taliban – meant that a total troop pullout was never an option. In fact, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were recommending a huge new deployment – seventeen thousand more troops against a Taliban summer offensive. 

Osama bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, had been unaccounted for since December 2001. Shortly after he assumed office, Obama told his staff that he wanted to make the hunt for bin Laden a top priority. Bin Laden’s continued freedom was a taunt to American power, he figured, and a painful issue for the 9/11 families. 

In 2010, his request finally bore fruit. CIA analysts had found a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where they had gathered intelligence on a man they called The Pacer. The Pacer, who was well over six feet tall, never left the compound, and he burned his trash instead of throwing it out. He had the same number of wives and children as Osama bin Laden. For exercise, he walked in circles in the compound’s garden. The CIA put the probability of it being bin Laden between 60 and 80 percent.