Born to a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas,
brought up in Indonesia and Hawaii, educated in California and New York, Obama
has a plural personality. In this book,
he takes readers on a journey from his earliest political aspirations to the
pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism
to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president
of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s
highest office. I found it particularly
interesting reading after the past four years, especially the last year, of
Trump.
It’s hard to believe that on the day of Obama’s 2009
inauguration that within a year the US financial system would have stabilized
from the 2008 crash, almost all TARP funds would be fully repaid (having
actually made taxpayers money), and the economy would have begun what would
become the longest stretch of continuous growth and job creation in US history.
(Pg. 304).
My Notes:
Pg. 134: During
a primary visit to Wisconsin, Michelle, during the course of a speech in which
she described being awed by how many people were energized by the campaign
said: “For the first time in my adult
lifetime, I’m really proud of my country…because I think people are hungry
for change.” It was a textbook gaffe—a
few ad-libbed words that could then be diced, clipped, and weaponized by the
conservative media.
Pg. 140: Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy: ABC News had compiled a series of short clips
culled from several years of Wright’s sermons, skillfully packaged to fit a
two-minute segment on Good Morning America.
There was Wright calling America “USA of KKK.;” “Not God bless America,
God Damn America;’ Wright explaining 9/11 might in part be explained by our
record of military interventions and wanton violence overseas, a matter of
America’s chickens…coming home to roost.”
Ultimately, Obama had to publically and completely sever all ties with
Reverend Wright.
Pg. 144: Obama’s guns and religion comment. In Pennsylvania, Obama was asked why so many
working class voters continued to vote against their interests and elect
Republicans. He answered: “You go into
some of these small towns in Pennsylvania and like a lot of small towns in the
Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing has replaced
them. And they fell through the Clinton
administration and the Bush administrations, and each successive administration
has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have
not.” He then added: “So it’s not surprising then that they get
bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t
like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or antic-trade sentiment as a way to
explain their frustrations.”
He wished he had said: “So it’s not surprising then
that they get frustrated and they look to the traditions and way of life that
have been constants in their lives, whether it’s their faith, or hunting, or
blue-collar work, or traditional notions of family and community. And when Republicans tell them we Democrats
despise these things—or when we give these folks reason to believe that we
do—then the best policies in the world don’t matter to them.”
Pg. 163ff: Joe
Biden. Biden had to overcome a severe
stuttering problem as a child and two brain aneurysms in middle age. In 1972, just weeks after Biden was elected
to the Senate, his wife and baby daughter had been killed—and his two young
sons, Beau and Hunter injured—in a car accident. He met and married his current wife, Jill,
three years after the accident.
Pg. 175: As a
Senator, Obama had opposed the Iraq war.
As he ran for president he focused on the combination of globalization and revolutionary new
technologies had been fundamentally altering the American economy for at least
two decades. US manufacturers had
shifted production overseas, taking advantage of low-cost labor and shipping
back cheap goods to be sold by big-box retailers against which small businesses
couldn’t hope to compete. More recently,
the internet had wiped out entire categories of office work and in some cases
whole industries.
Pg. 183: During
the 2008 campaign, both Obama and McCain tried to keep a non-partisan position
on the essential TARP $700 billion bail-out.
Obama offered to sign a joint statement to that effect with McCain. McCain, instead, proposed they suspend their
campaigns. In any event, McCain’s
position was unclear: first, he was against the AIG bailout then reversed
himself a day later. Obama refused to
stop his campaign as “presidents must handle more than one problem at a time,’
but agreed to fly back to DC if a conference was needed. They held this conference. Obama showed he well-understood the problems;
McCain appeared unprepared and uninformed.
Pg. 193: On
September 29, 2008, Bush’s TARP legislation fell thirteen votes short of
passage in the House, with two-thirds of Democrats voting to support it and
two-thirds of Republicans voting against it.
The Dow immediately plunged 778 points.
Several days later an amended version of TARP passed.
Pg. 235: State of the Union in December 2008,
preceding Obama’s Inauguration:
Twelve of the largest twenty-five largest financial institutions had
failed, merged, or restructured to avoid bankruptcy during the previous
year. The stock market had lost 40
percent of its value. There were
foreclosure filings on 2.3 million homes.
Household wealth had dropped 16 percent, which was five times the percentage
loss that occurred in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash. (Also: the US had a war in Afghanistan and
Iraq to deal with).
Pg. 242: The postwar consensus (civility?) broke
down—starting with LBJ'’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which
fulfilled LBJ’s prediction that the Act would lead to the wholesale abandonment
(in the South) of the Democratic Party.
The breakdown moved on steadily year to year—through Vietnam, riots,
feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe V. Wade, urban
crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union
busting and the Robert Bork confirmation hearing; through assault weapons bans
and the rise of Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton Impeachment—America’s
voters and representatives became more and more polarized.
Pg. 243: The filibuster
is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.
Its use began in 1805 when Vice President Aaron Burr urged the
Senate to eliminate the ‘motion to proceed’—a standard parliamentary provision
that allows a simple majority of any legislature to end debate and call for a
vote. Congress today effectively requires 60 votes in the Senate to move
anything forward.
Pg. 314: The
cumulative costs of the Bush labeled ‘war against terrorism’ had been a
staggering almost trillion dollars spent, more than three thousand US troops killed,
as many as ten times that number wounded. Meanwhile, the use of extraordinary
renditions, black sites, waterboarding, indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo,
had the country and the world questioning America’s commitment to the rule of
law.
Pg. 339: Few
nations feel obliged to act beyond narrow self-interest; and those that shared
America’s basic commitment to the principles upon which a liberal market-based
system depended—individual freedom, the rule of law, strong enforcement of
property rights and neutral Arbitration of disputes, plus baseline levels of
governmental accountability and competence—lacked the economic and political
heft, not to mention the army of diplomats and policy experts, to promote those
principles on a global scale.
Pg. 344: In an
effort to show good manners, Obama answered a reporter who questioned America’s
Exceptionalism claim and his thoughts on it.
Obama said he believed in it just like he suspected the English, French,
and other nations. That this was turned
into “Obama’s apology tour” by
certain media types is a reminder of how splintered our media landscape had
become—how an increasingly poisonous partisanship no longer stopped at the
water’s edge.
Pg. 365: Obama
formed the impression that aging autocrats, such as Egypt’s Mubarak, shut away
in palaces, their every interaction mediated by obsequious functionaries, were
unable to distinguish between their personal interests and those of their
nations, their actions governed by no broader purpose beyond maintaining the
tangled web of patronage and business interests that kept them in power.
Pg. 375: The quest for some form of universal
healthcare in the US dates back to 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt ran on the
Progressive ticket for President. The
United Kingdom had already instituted national health insurance systems, and
other European nations would eventually follow suit. It wasn’t long after Roosevelt’s failed effort
before doctors and southern politicians vocally opposed any type of government
involvement in healthcare, branding it as a form of bolshevism.
After FDR imposed a nationwide wage freeze meant to
stem inflation during WWII, many companies began offering private health
insurance and pension benefits as a way to compete for the limited number of
workers—after the war, this system persisted (until the 1980s when employers started off-loading healthcare). Harry Truman proposed a national healthcare
system in 1945 and again in 1949, but his appeal for public support was no
match for the well-financed PR efforts of the AMA and other industry
lobbyists. Progressives then turned to
just helping those neglected populations: LBJ and Medicare, followed by
Medicaid, Clinton’s failure, George Bush’s Drug Plan, and finally Obamacare.
Pg. 376: All of
this explains why the US spent a lot
more money per-person on healthcare than any other advanced economy (112
percent more than Canada, 109 percent more than France, 117 percent more than
Japan) for similar or worse results.
Pg. 383: Obamacare. Each and
every person would be required to purchase health insurance (an individual
mandate). Middle-income people who couldn’t access insurance through their job,
didn’t qualify for Medicare or Medicaid, and were unable to afford insurance on
their own would get a government subsidy to buy coverage. Subsidies would be determined on a sliding
scale according to each person’s income, and a central online marketplace—an
‘exchange’—would be set up so that consumers could shop for the best insurance
deal. Insurers, meanwhile, would no
longer be able to deny people coverage based on preexisting conditions. These
two ideas—the individual mandate (upheld 5-4 in 2012) and protecting people
with preexisting conditions—went hand in hand.
Pg. 447: From
the beginning of the Obama administration in 2009 an emphasis on the
importance of international cooperation and America’s intention to engage other
nations, big and small, on the basis of mutual respect, was placed on every
foreign policy statement coming out of the White House. The US even paid the UN dues after several
years in which the Bush administration had withheld payments.
Pg. 489: There had been a time when protecting the
environment was bipartisan. Nixon
had worked with a Democratic Congress to create the EPA, George H.W.Bush
championed a strengthening of the Clean Air Act in 1990. But those times had passed as the GOP electoral
base had shifted to the South and the West where conservation efforts had long
rankled oil drillers, mining interests, developers, and ranchers, the party had
turned environmental protection into another front in the partisan culture
war. Conservative media outlets portrayed
climate change as a job-killing hoax hatched by tree-hugging extremists. Big Oil funneled millions of dollars into a
web of think tanks and public relation firms committed to obscuring the facts
about climate change.
Pg. 604: George Bush Jr’s changes to the estate tax
alone had reduced the tax burden for the top 2 percent of America’s richest
families by more than $130 billion in projected revenue out of the US
Treasury, the laws’ changes helped turn a federal budget surplus under Clinton
into a burgeoning deficit—a deficit that many Republicans were now using to
justify their calls for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the
rest of America’s social safety net.
Pg. 614: DREAMERS: By 2010, an estimated eleven million
undocumented persons were living in the US, in large part thoroughly woven into
the fabric of American life. Entire
sectors of the American economy relied on their labor. Enter the DREAM Act. The idea that young undocumented immigrants
who’d been brought to the US as children could be given some sort of relief had
been floating around for years, and at least ten versions of the DREAM Act had
been introduced in Congress since 200f 1, each time failing to garner the
needed votes. The Act would grant
Dreamers temporary legal residence and a pathway to citizenship, sol long as
they met certain criteria. The most
recent bill required they entered the US before the age of sixteen, lived here
for five continuous years, graduated from high school or obtained a GED, and
attended college for two years or joined the military—and they could have no
serious criminal record.
Pg. 623: The conflict between Arabs and Jews dates back
to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British, who were then
occupying Palestine, committed to create a ‘national home for the Jewish
people” I a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs. Then in 1947, the UN approved a partition plan
to establish two sovereign states, one Jewish, the other Arab, with Jerusalem
to be governed by an international body.
Pg. 641ff: ARAB
SPRING:
The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in 2011 when a frustrated fruit
vendor set himself on fire outside a local government building.
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