Sam Leith
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Visiting the pyramids in Egypt really sets him off. He contemplates an old graffito of a jug-eared figure who looks a bit like him: ‘All of it was forgotten now, none of it mattered, the pharaoh, the slave, and the vandal all long turned to dust.’ He also, in more prosaic moments, has the Alan Partridge quality of liking to end sections by quoting his own witticisms and the approving reactions to same(‘We both got a good laugh out of that’).
But under all that hopey changey stuff, and where the long sections about wrangling policy through Congress really come into their own, is a superbly engaging study in realpolitik. He was famous for his windy rhetoric; but to get anything done in office required a steely political operator. Obama, the centrist dad’s centrist dad, is again and again confronted by the hard arithmetic of the caucus at home, and of tangled interests abroad. He really shows you how the sausage is made — and his cool, conscientious, covering-all-the-angles pragmatism, more than his optimism, is the real fascination in this book. If first-term Obama has an arch-nemesis, it’s not Osama Bin Laden or Donald Trump: it’s the Senate filibuster. And there’s a wry sense of the absurd. On the campaign trail in Iowa, he secures the endorsement of the ‘Butter Cow Lady’, ‘who at the state fair each year sculpted a life-sized cow out of salted butter’, and blasts statewide the prerecorded call announcing her support. ‘She later created,’ he says proudly, an Iowan Ozymandias: ‘a 23-pound butter bust of my head.’
He delivers crisp little put-downs, too. As a candidate, when a do-gooding ice-cream company called on him to defund the Pentagon, he recalls wearily: ‘I had to call either Ben or Jerry — I don’t remember which.’ Nicolas Sarkozy is a ‘bantam cock’ (that’s surely at least half right) whose conversation
swooped from flattery to bluster to genuine insight, never straying far from his primary barely disguised interest, which was to be at the center of the action and take credit for whatever it was that might be worth taking credit for.
Putin leads a Russia that ‘resembled a criminal syndicate as much as it did a traditional government’. BP’s Tony Hayward is ‘a walking PR disaster’. Moscow Mitch McConnell — who made it his mission to thwart anything and everything Obama wanted to do regardless of its merits — is described as
an unlikely Republican leader. He showed no appetite for schmoozing, backslapping or rousing oratory. As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends even in his own caucus; nor did he have any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign finance reform.
And the man himself? He likes vodka neat, has a weakness for nicotine, loves to play basketball, golf and spades. He’s uxorious, devoted to his kids, introspective and self-questioning. He doodles in meetings (‘abstract patterns… sometimes people’s faces or beach scenes — a seagull flying over a palm tree and ocean waves’). He psyches himself up for rallies by listening to Jay-Z and Eminem. And as a young man he read Marx, Marcuse, Fanon and Foucault — but (he makes clear so as not to give Jordan Peterson fans an embolism) mainly to impress girls.
And, wow, what a weird world the President lives in: empty motorways wherever you go, ‘armed Swat teams’ filling every staircase, rooftops cluttered up with ‘Secret Service countersniper teams, clad in black’. If you take off for the loo, hulking men in black suits will mutter ‘Renegade to Secondary Hold’ into their cufflinks. Every day starts with a briefing dossier that Michelle calls the ‘Death, Destruction and Horrible Things Book’.
It’s plain that Michelle doesn’t like any of it all that much. When Barack was originally thinking about running for president, he told her: ‘You get the final say.’
Michelle lifted her eyebrows as if to suggest she didn’t believe me. ‘If that’s really true, then the answer is no,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to run for president, at least not now.’
Three pages later, he’s running for president anyway. ‘If one of the qualifications of running for the most powerful office in the world was megalomania,’ he writes, ‘it appeared I was passing the test.’
Because you read about autobiography
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