He portrays his college self as earnest, idealistic, and painfully serious. He was repeatedly warned about this. Sometimes I do. But people can be so selfish or just plain ignorant. When he was in the Illinois state legislature, a well-meaning lobbyist came up to him and told him to stop expecting people to be driven by noble ideals.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Why Obama fears for our democracy. He got crushed in a race for Congress in Chicago. He tried to get into one of the parties but was rejected. He flew home as Al Gore was accepting the nomination. The dragon of selfishness had eclipsed the better angels of his nature.
If this could happen to the man who would become Mr. Hope and Change, who among us is immune? When he got to the White House, events conspired to give credence to the darker view of human nature. An epidemic of greed and consumerism had just brought about a financial crisis. Republicans decided it was in their interest to obstruct every proposal he floated.
The leaders of China, Iran, and Russia practiced a ruthless realpolitik. You looked out for yourself first and then for your own. I interviewed Obama many times during those White House years, sometimes alone, often in groups of a dozen or so columnists. In the first years, even as history threw crisis after crisis at him, he retained his hopeful demeanor. But as the years went by, notes of bitterness and annoyance crept into his voice. He came to speak more proudly of his nuts-and-bolts reelection campaign than he did of the lofty one.
He sometimes projected the disappointment that, unfortunately, the rest of humanity was not up to his level. I learned to never ask him about any past decision, because it would send him off on a defensive minute peroration on why some debatable decision had been absolutely correct.
By the end of his presidency, it was easy to get the impression that idealism had been worn down by bitter experience—that the idealistic Obama, who early in his presidency gave a speech in Cairo about democracy and human rights in the Middle East, had given way to the later Obama, who seemed to find the whole Middle East a giant clusterfuck to be avoided as much as possible. It was as though God had decided to conduct a philosophical experiment—and the Machiavellian view had won.
Of course, Obama was never as innocent and high-minded as those hope posters would have had you believe. The man had read his Reinhold Niebuhr; he knew about the Christian theology that places sinfulness at the heart of mankind. Recently, I re-watched his Jefferson-Jackson Dinner speech in Iowa, the one that turbo-charged his campaign and made him the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. But when I went back and watched it again, it seemed just as much a ruthless dismantling of Hillary Clinton for being cynical, calculating, entitled, and probably corrupt.
In the book, Obama portrays himself as somewhat detached from the utopian frenzy he was generating in While everybody else was swept up in dreams of what might be, he was just making a ton of donor calls and giving the same speech multiple times a day.
Still, the main headline of his memoir is that Machiavelli did not win; the more hopeful view of human nature won. This is demonstrated most of all by the tone of the book. It is not prickly and defensive. It is not about settling scores. It is vulnerable and introspective. It is written in a way that assumes that readers will be generous with him, will see his vulnerabilities and not seize them as opportunities to savage him. This is not how people write when they think that society in general is dog-eat-dog.
The book radiates an emotional warmth that Obama used to share only with his inner circle. As his campaigns went on, he writes, his stump speeches were less argument, more about telling the stories of other Americans; less logic, more empathy; and less about proving a point than about revealing shared attachments. This is not an evolution you make if you view the world with distrust, and it allows A Promised Land to be far more personal and revealing than most political memoirs.
His administration was scant in scandal and betrayal, rich in camaraderie. Obama does endure repeated disillusionment, but then recovers and rises above it. Sometimes your way of being is more important than your way of thinking. 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. 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. 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.
We also left out modest quantitative errors, such as Trump's frequent imprecision with numbers. If anything, though, the word is unfair to Obama and Bush. When they became aware that they had been saying something untrue, they stopped doing it. Trump is different. When he is caught lying, he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, F. Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant.
As for Obama: His falsehoods tended to be attempts to make his own policies look better or to overstate a problem he was trying to solve. In a few cases, they seemed to be careless exaggerations he avoided repeating. Over all, Obama rarely told demonstrable untruths as president. And he appears to have become more careful over time. We counted six straight-up falsehoods in his first year in office. Across his entire second four-year term, we counted the same number, six, only one of which came in his final year in office.
In all, we found 18 different bald untruths from Obama during his presidency. Trump told his 18th separate untruth in his third full week in office, and his list keeps growing. In fact, Trump tells falsehoods about Obama and his administration more often than Obama told falsehoods about all subjects. Since his inauguration, Trump has told 10 separate untruths about Obama, including false allegations of wiretapping and false descriptions of Obamacare. We counted only two falsehoods Obama told about Bush.
As we mentioned above, it was not possible to create a similar list for George W. Bush, because the various fact-checking groups — whose work we used heavily here — were not operating continuously when he became president, in But several sources did try to evaluate some of his claims at the time.
Their work suggests that Bush sometimes told falsehoods but was fundamentally different from Trump. Bush instead seems to be somewhere on the pre-Trump presidential spectrum.
In , for example, Bush said significantly more stem-cell lines existed than actually did.
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