THE PROMISE:
PRESIDENT OBAMA, YEAR ONE
JONATHAN ALTER
Simon & Schuster
458 pages, hardcover
$36.00 CDN
Jonathan Alter’s new book, The Promise (2010) is a thorough, presently unrivalled assessment of the forty-fourth president of the United States of America’s transitional and troubled first year in office.
The title is drawn from a recurring theme throughout Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, culminating in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in 2008 where, as Alter relates, he used the word nineteen times.
Of course, it also conveys the transformational importance of Obama’s election within America’s often strained, racially-charged social contract and the nation’s seemingly unrivalled capacity for self-reinvention.
In another sense, the ‘promise’ is a complex metaphor at the heart of Obama’s political philosophy and governing discourse: a place where reciprocal responsibilities between past and future, and individuals and communities all intersect.
Alter aims to observe this at work but also establish an implicit comparison between Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the thirty-second president of the United States and the subject of his previous book, The Defining Moment (2006). Specifically, Alter asserts that Obama’s victory is most significant because it delivered someone to the nation’s highest office as close to FDR since FDR and at a time of crisis closer to FDR’s own than any president since.
This operative comparison prevails largely because it is content to haunt the foreground of Alter’s engaging narrative while he moves through specific events in Obama’s first 365 days: the administration’s preferred metric for evaluation.
That, and it also happens to be true.
In effect, Alter’s familiarity with FDR enables him to make specific analogies that build toward a broader economic and historical contextualization of Obama’s policies. Readers will no doubt welcome this as a refreshing alternative to the nauseating, near-constant comparisons between Obama and America’s sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln.
The Promise is presented as a blend of journalism and history intended to “…serve as the basis for future arguments” and research. It prevails at this, too — largely by drawing on “more than two hundred interviews” that work together to establish the atmosphere of the Obama White House by examining the president’s “zen temperament” and decision-making process, expanding well-known milestones with lesser-known (sometimes shocking) anecdotes, and exploring the personal quirks and rivalries of his staff and advisors.
Alter’s narrative begins with Obama’s post-election decisions and his earliest orders in office, but it quickly becomes apparent how the president selected healthcare as his primary issue for year one. Despite Obama’s “three dimensional” calculus, many staff felt this was a counter-intuitive approach and it set off an internal war between the “the perfect and the good” — not to mention a legislative stand-off with Congress that just barely succeeded.
Alter also relates not only how alarmingly few (economic and military) advisors were available to fill top posts but how dysfunctional relationships carried over from previous appointments. A lack of unburdened talent with executive experience is clearly one of the extenuating factors in America’s standing disputes with both Wall Street and the Pentagon.
While Alter does disclaim a certain affection for his subject (and fellow Chicagoan), some readers will find him overly sympathetic to Obama. This is a fair point; there is room in The Promise for more criticism of the new president. Consider, for example, the president’s reluctance to investigate and prosecute the misdeeds of the previous administration.
Still, Alter’s approach is less a partisan effort than an attempt to take Obama at his own deed and word (read: journalism over history), and considerably influenced by Alter’s underlying comparison between presidents thirty-two and forty-four (read: history over journalism). And this may, in fact, be the book’s most important contribution: a layered, accessible journalistic history of a still raw and fairly recent event with as much for readers today as tomorrow.
Within the burgeoning Obama book industry, The Promise has more in common with Richard Wolffe’s campaign-road tell-all, Renegade (2009) and David Remnick’s biographical sketch, The Bridge (2010) than some of the more narrow studies. However, the real measure of The Promise will be contrast to Bob Woodward’s forthcoming (as-yet titled) Obama book, slated for release in September from the same publisher.
Among the more compelling reasons to read The Promise, at least for Americans, is a means of getting some quiet time with their new president and for a better understanding of how he thinks and governs, far from the cacophony of the media.
While readers outside the United States will find Alter’s accessible prose and refreshing analysis a cathartic means of cleansing their palate from eight years of war and privatization under George W. Bush and his unfriendly cast of nicknamed, neoconservative goons.
NOTE
It is not without some irony that FDR is responsible for setting the “first hundred days” presidential benchmark. Nevertheless, the media’s fixation on it has much less to do with historical precedents than selling headlines and speculative newsmagazine specials. It is often far better, as Alter proves, to measure someone by their own personal metric.
This is the first instalment in a running series of short book reviews. More information on the series and my approach to reviews can be found here.
