Barack Obama| A Promised Land Review
Celebrating the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s memoir.
I’ve always deeply admired Obama’s personality and thought process since his 2008 campaign.
There aren’t many individuals out there who put the effort into how to build teams and bring an analytical approach to an otherwise consistently rudimentary and old-school presidency.
While there could have been many improvements within those eight years, especially in foreign policy, here are some of the highlights from his memoir — a mix of personal attributes that I find original, and what was novel about his administration.
His criticism of society’s overall structure is what lead him to pursue the presidency.
The Reagan administration’s economic plan started extreme individualism in the U.S. He’s emphasized through the early parts of the book how building a community mindset is a way to counter the problems we face today. A community mindset would allow minorities to grow, and there wouldn’t be heavy obstacles for those who are severely struggling. It would raise our standard of living.
We don’t have trust within society and government which leads to individualism as the center of our culture instead of interdependency. The wealth gap has drastically increased since the 60s. We push “meritocracy” in elite schools as the way for lower-income students to realize what they have to fight against, despite upper-class families “buying” their kid's degrees.
The pitfalls of society don’t usually end up on the individual — — it’s a systemic thing.
His grandmother’s perspective on life shaped his mental strength.
Madelyn Payne Dunham, his grandmother, or “Toot” instilled in him the values and reserve that shaped his mental strength. He got his level-headedness from her, with all the values about how to deal with life’s problems.
When you read some part of this memoir and Dreams of My Father, he’s had the fear of the expectations people would have for a person of color being in charge. There’s an underlying notion that a person of color would have to work two-fold in order to prove themselves. Toot taught him, that in order to continue, don’t get too happy or too sad, just keep moving forward. Throughout the presidency, he had a ritual every morning to practice the same affirmation.
There’s no bravado, but a refreshing sense of what it takes to be a strong individual, and dissect issues that are usually ambiguous.
“Look beautiful. Care for your family. Be gracious.”
Overall, not much has changed when it comes to the perception of women in politics. On an ambiguous level, women aren’t pushed for traditional “masculine” roles like pursuing STEM or being in the limelight for entrepreneurship. Continuously in each administration, women have typically been in a supportive role —where they had to show up as the president’s support system, but never an individual with their own aspirations. First Lady Michelle built that bridge in her own office while constantly fighting off gender wars — knowing that her way of conveying ideas or carrying out certain programs would be scrutinized by the media.
We are ambiguously taught, that girls should be “meek” and “shy” in our approach. It’s a worldwide phenomenon where we still teach girls that they should have a soft approach in the way they carry themselves. Traditionalism and old-school ideas haven’t died, and statistics show the same.
The masculine nature of America yields gender wars and extreme individualism.
First Lady Michelle didn’t fight gender wars for no reason.
Masculine countries are known to have gender wars as the main part of the culture. In fact, nature increases individual greed and doesn’t lead to wealth equality. The aggression of male dominance makes it harder for women to climb the ladder. The nature of the country becomes “aggression, independence, self-sufficiency.”
Feminine countries have a higher GDP, fast-growing economics, and a sense of more interdependency compared to masculine countries.
There’s always a sense that women have to carry the burden and have to juggle household work, career, and family life. However, the same burden isn’t for men, stereotypically.
He highlights that without supportive family friends, and relatives, the campaign would have never taken off. That interdependency is key in order to climb from the ground up.
The mathematical approach to his administration.
His presidency ushered in the age of innovation, youth voices, and analytical tools. Many administration officials have noted that he was more pro “data-driven decision making” rather than retail-face-value politics practiced by previous administrations.
He included teams for policymaking frameworks, officials for the new age of technology, and made sure that his economists were critical of his ideas.
Old school administrations didn’t have that analytical foresight — an aptitude to catch up with the times.
Why you should read this book if you haven’t already:
In an age where the internet has dominated our culture and way of thinking, you really wish we could go back to simpler times —where there was a sense of integrity and some groundedness. His memoir highlights that virtue, where he explained what we couldn’t see behind the scenes — where he regretted things the most — the naivety of what we believe a president is running for — but in the end, alike all people, is a very vague picture of a huge responsibility.
