One might read something like this sometime in the future after Covid-19 is vanquished and life has gained a semblance of normalcy: “As people had felt poorer, they’d stopped spending, just as mounting losses had caused banks to stop lending, imperiling more businesses and more jobs.” The line might sound a bit bland but it is as political as it is economic coming from former US President Barack Obama’s new memoir, A Promised Land, the first of planned two volumes. He is recalling the effects of the 2008-2009 financial crisis as he was beginning his first term in office. The crisis, which had originated in the US housing market, had major global implications in economies big and small, even in Africa. He reminds himself “that every president [feels] saddled with the previous administration’s choices and mistakes, that 90 per cent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises.” How he won the political battle to pass The Recovery Act that would put the country back on its feet after the financial crisis would not only be one of his major achievements but set the pace for the battles ahead with the Republicans – also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP). Prominently featuring even then was Senator Mitch McConnell, now Minority Leader after the Democrats took the slim Senate majority in the just-concluded US elections. One can expect that the political hardship he meted on Obama will similarly be dished on the new President Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president. How the inevitable political clash may play out in writ in their personalities as Obama’s mastery as a writer hints with the insightfully vivid and humorous biographical sketches papering the book. In his recollection, what McConnell “lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness and shamelessness — all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.” His then vice president Joe Biden is a decent, honest, loyal man who Obama perceives “might get prickly if he thought he wasn’t given his due — a quality that might flare up when dealing with a much younger boss.” Anybody familiar with the two, even remotely from the distance watching them in the news on TV, would likely agree that Obama gives a fair shake of who they come through as individuals. His observations also suggest how it might pit the Democrats against Republicans and vice versa in what, to many non-Americans, seem perplexing and highly partisan political intrigues that are now greatly jerked after Donald Trump’s divisiveness. But apparently, that’s how it works, the seeming divisiveness often being about political survival by some in a “strategy of pugnacious, all-out obstruction [even] during a time of genuine crisis.” One might say the politics is not particularly different in other democracies, except one gets the sense that in the US it might be more partisan and has always been. Obama writes that if, like McConnell, your primary concern was clawing your way back to power, recent history suggested that such a strategy made sense. For all their talk about wanting politicians to get along, he explains, American voters rarely reward the opposition for cooperating with the governing party. Borrowing from his own experience while in office, the rival politicians “understood that any help they offered my administration in mounting an effective, sustained government response to the crisis would only be to my political benefit—and would tacitly acknowledge the bankruptcy of their own anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric. “If, on the other hand, they fought a rearguard action, if they generated controversy and threw sand in the gears, they at least had a chance to energize their base and slow me and the Democrats down at a time when the country was sure to be impatient.” It is uncanny how this is already playing out as the Biden Administration seeks to undo Trump’s misdeeds during the pandemic with an economic stimulus package the GOP is set against. I have thoroughly enjoyed the read as it intimately and wittily weaves moments in Obama’s personal life in a larger canvas of his time in office and the political battles and events that defined it.
