The Audacity of Obama
I finished reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope yesterday. I actually haven't read very many current political memoirs, so I don't really know how it compares. Obama has been praised as a good writer, and I think that's true. He writes with a relaxed simplicity, seemingly able to write about his personal life not like a politician, but like a memoirist. Which is not to say the book doesn't have plenty of politics in it: it does.
Obama, like our new governor, Deval Patrick, gets oft accused of being vague about his policies, and he is. But with Obama, it's the way that he talks about politics that seems refreshing, not the amount of detail. I've heard the name Abraham Lincoln brought up in reference to Obama, and I do sense a certain amount of emotional empathy in him, the kind that Doris Kearns Goodwin described in Lincoln in Team of Rivals (which I wrote about here and here).
As I read through the book, I found myself liking Obama. I like the way he talks about politics and I like that he's got a writerly manner about him. When I finished the book, I saw an AP story in The Recorder, featuring a photo of Obama outside the Capitol. In the story, Obama was featured as one of the prominent critics of Bush's new troop surge idea.
I thought Obama's chapter on foreign policy was very interesting, especially his rundown of the recent history of Indonesia, where Obama spent several years of his youth. Obama seems to grasp, in a way that Bush doesn't, a nuanced, pluralistic view of the world. I once remarked that Obama's power and symbolism had to do with his background. He is to politics what Tiger Woods is to golf. The fact that his mother was a white woman from Kansas and his father was an immigrant from Kenya and the fact that he spent several years living overseas in Indonesia makes him a little bit of a lot of people. Like the Nike commercial, where all the kids of all different colors say, "I am Tiger Woods," Obama is someone a great many of people can relate to.
There seems a certain serendipity to my reading this book. I got it for my birthday (from two people with some keen insight, obviously) and read it while traveling for Christmas and New Year's, with stopovers at Chicago Midway. I had it on my mind as Deval Patrick was inaugurated Massachusetts' first African-American governor. I had once famously compared Patrick to Obama, although I can't completely claim credit for that. The comparison actually came from a quote from another blogger. But Patrick told me once that he showed the story to Sen. Obama and the two of them had a chuckle over it. There's nothing nicer to a writer than to know that you're being read.
Anyway, as I was reading through Obama's book, I kept thinking about his presidential aspirations and wondering if he was ready to be president yet. But something Patrick said Saturday night at Symphony Hall sticks out in my head: he said that people kept saying it wasn't his turn, and they were right, but it was his time.
Obama, like our new governor, Deval Patrick, gets oft accused of being vague about his policies, and he is. But with Obama, it's the way that he talks about politics that seems refreshing, not the amount of detail. I've heard the name Abraham Lincoln brought up in reference to Obama, and I do sense a certain amount of emotional empathy in him, the kind that Doris Kearns Goodwin described in Lincoln in Team of Rivals (which I wrote about here and here).
As I read through the book, I found myself liking Obama. I like the way he talks about politics and I like that he's got a writerly manner about him. When I finished the book, I saw an AP story in The Recorder, featuring a photo of Obama outside the Capitol. In the story, Obama was featured as one of the prominent critics of Bush's new troop surge idea.
I thought Obama's chapter on foreign policy was very interesting, especially his rundown of the recent history of Indonesia, where Obama spent several years of his youth. Obama seems to grasp, in a way that Bush doesn't, a nuanced, pluralistic view of the world. I once remarked that Obama's power and symbolism had to do with his background. He is to politics what Tiger Woods is to golf. The fact that his mother was a white woman from Kansas and his father was an immigrant from Kenya and the fact that he spent several years living overseas in Indonesia makes him a little bit of a lot of people. Like the Nike commercial, where all the kids of all different colors say, "I am Tiger Woods," Obama is someone a great many of people can relate to.
There seems a certain serendipity to my reading this book. I got it for my birthday (from two people with some keen insight, obviously) and read it while traveling for Christmas and New Year's, with stopovers at Chicago Midway. I had it on my mind as Deval Patrick was inaugurated Massachusetts' first African-American governor. I had once famously compared Patrick to Obama, although I can't completely claim credit for that. The comparison actually came from a quote from another blogger. But Patrick told me once that he showed the story to Sen. Obama and the two of them had a chuckle over it. There's nothing nicer to a writer than to know that you're being read.
Anyway, as I was reading through Obama's book, I kept thinking about his presidential aspirations and wondering if he was ready to be president yet. But something Patrick said Saturday night at Symphony Hall sticks out in my head: he said that people kept saying it wasn't his turn, and they were right, but it was his time.