So far I've read 20-25% of Obama's memoir. There will probably be a number more of these 'beneath the fold' hot takes about it, but those who read it will not find any surprises. He goes through all the same events we all lived through with him, and he says pretty much about all of it what you'd expect him to say.
I'm still reading about the campaign, and the campaign, rather than the Presidency, was everything about Obama that I found objectionable - pretty much the opposite of well over 50% of the people I knew... It becomes clear as you go through it that Obama is not a typical politician. I doubt he was nearly as reluctant to become President as he claimed (though I'm sure Michelle was...), it's just a far-fetched leap of faith to believe that he does not have the same engine of ambition that knows no rest as 20,000 other overachievers do in every generation of this country. But it also becomes clear that Obama is a bit of what we call in Yiddish a 'luftmensch', one of those people who breezes through the air without a scratch, goes through life knowing that he will be uniquely lucky, and thinks of world politics as an opportunity to set up experiments in his own personal laboratory about whether transformation of national politics into the transcending of partisan divides for common good is possible.
The words 'transformation' and 'transcendence' seem to come up again and again, and whether in politics, or religion, those are words for which I have a particular kind of distrust, because the bill is always paid: somebody, somewhere, is going to pay for the increase in somebody else's prosperity.
The most interesting part of the book so far is about his brief period in the Senate and his interactions with older colleagues. When he gets to Washington, he seems amazed to find that his older colleagues had very little trouble transcending party lines, and that whatever their primary motivating ideological differences, when it came to the business of government, the willingness of all but the extreme Republicans (and Socialists....) among them to get in the way of the essence of government was little to none. This was, of course, not the essence of later politicians who came up through the Gingrich revolution, but it takes at least a generation to replace one form of public servant with another form of public masters. And if the complacency of even the best moderate republicans like his sometime mentor Dick Lugar created the modern Republican party, then the unstinting belief in the possibility of governmental transformation created the Bernie Sanders movement, which in turn hollowed out the ability to stop the modern Republican party from taking over literally everything until government is so dysfunctional that we can only stay in our houses for a year at a time.
So there's an unwritten implication in what he writes that he selectively omits. The implication is that his belief that we needed some sort of partisan transcendence and common good was exactly wrong: we already had it, and over a period of a half-century, we gradually let it blow up to hell, small piece by small piece. And so in retrospect, his belief that the country required some sort political transcendence toward a communitarian good set the country in exactly the wrong direction, because it delegitimized the achievements of what the US government already was. However bad things seem, how far we've come is a history book away (so long as the history book isn't lying to you...), and it exponentially dwarves all progress made in the entirety of human history. The more we delegitimize the progress already made, the more disastrously the delegitimization backfires. If you make the argument to the average American that the current amount of working toward the common good isn't enough to make a proper difference in their lives, what need, they will reason, is there for common good at all? Furthermore, they will reason what need is there for trust in government and institutions and hope itself? And thus far, Obama's refusal to marry hope to hard-headed realism about life's limitations already backfired with a movement around America's most worthless human being so nihilistic that its sole purpose was to set whatever remains functional in the US government on fire.
It speaks to the real intelligence and decency in Obama, qualities that I wonder if a number of eminent Democrats and pseudo-Democrats to his left lack, that when presented with the facts, he evolved along with them. Obama the President was generally as realistic as Obama the candidate operated in bad faith. If Obama's movement felt betrayed by him, and was dissatisfied with the speed of progress, well, hopefully 2020 has taught them a lesson or two (though I'm not holding my breath). This year, 2020, when we're all sitting on our couches in the valley of the shadow of death, this is the real world, everything until now has been a system-induced mirage which hundreds of millions of people devoted to and sacrificed their lives to put in place so that we could have better than the shit lives they did.
Obama is now the past, and to everybody's amazement, Biden is the future. The immediate future seems to be embodied by the old government of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson, and Biden is probably the last chance we get that someone with institutional memory of how to put back together an America when the trajectory of progress was continually upward. It already seems like he's doing it against most of the country rooting for him to fail, but this sort of 'restoration', whether it's restoration of Obama, or restoration of Kennedy and Johnson, or restoration of FDR, is our last best hope for the better angels of our nature to save us, because I think you've all noticed by now, we just came really close to something truly deadly, and if we came this close already, we'll come even closer soon.
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