A Promised Land

by Barack Obama

Even today, I want to take that sentence back and make a few simple edits. “So it’s not surprising then that they get frustrated,” I would say in my revised version, “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 more 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.” That’s what I believed. It’s why I’d gotten votes from rural white voters in downstate Illinois and Iowa—because they sensed, even when we didn’t agree on an issue like abortion or immigration, that I fundamentally respected and cared about them.

This is the whole ball game

And maybe I’m bothered by the care and delicacy with which one must state the obvious: that it’s possible to understand and sympathize with the frustrations of white voters without denying the ease with which, throughout American history, politicians have redirected white frustration about their economic or social circumstances toward Black and brown people.

Truth

The “crazies” in his party mistrusted him, they considered him a RINO—Republican in Name Only—and he was regularly attacked by the Rush Limbaugh crowd.

It started during the Cliton administration. The rise of blogs and social media accelerated and magnified the "crazies" on both sides but the right took it way too far.

Indeed, Maliki’s ties to Iran, where he had lived in exile for many years, as well as his uneasy alliances with certain Shiite militias, made him anathema to Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf region, underscoring just how much the U.S. invasion had strengthened Iran’s strategic position there.

It was also about preventing Iran from taking further advantage of the mess we’d made.

Of course, at the time, Maliki still didn’t really call the shots in his country. The commander of coalition forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, did—and it was my conversation with him that foreshadowed some of the central foreign policy debates I’d have for much of my presidency.

Tragedy and setbacks may have scarred him, I would learn, but they hadn’t made him bitter or cynical.

Palin’s nomination was troubling on a deeper level. I noticed from the start that her incoherence didn’t matter to the vast majority of Republicans; in fact, anytime she crumbled under questioning by a journalist, they seemed to view it as proof of a liberal conspiracy.

Bush and Secretary Paulson appeared on television alongside Ben Bernanke and Chris Cox, the respective chairs of the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and announced the need for Congress to pass a bill that would eventually be known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, establishing a new emergency fund of $700 billion. This was the price, they estimated, of staving off Armageddon.

I had begun consulting with an ad hoc advisory group that included former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, former Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and legendary investor Warren Buffett. All had lived through major financial crises before, and each confirmed that this one was of a different order of magnitude. Without swift action, they told me, we faced the very real possibility of economic collapse: millions more Americans losing their homes and their life savings, along with Depression-era levels of unemployment.

Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party—xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks—were finding their way to center stage.

I want everyone to be respectful and let’s make sure we are because that’s the way politics should be conducted in America.”

The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before.

(To their credit, members of the press would place Malia and Sasha off-limits for the duration of my presidency, an act of basic decency that I deeply appreciated.)

“I remember my dad talking about the American Dream when I was a kid,” he said. “How the most important thing was to work hard. Buy a house. Raise a family. Do things right. What happened to that? When did that become just a load of…?” He trailed off, looking pained before wiping the sweat from his face and restarting his mower.

“war against terrorism” had been staggering: almost a trillion dollars spent, more than three thousand U.S. troops killed, as many as ten times that number wounded.

Later, toward the end of my presidency, The New York Times would run an article about my visits to the military hospitals. In it, a national security official from a previous administration opined that the practice, no matter how well intentioned, was not something a commander in chief should do—that visits with the wounded inevitably clouded a president’s capacity to make clear-eyed, strategic decisions. I was tempted to call that man and explain that I was never more clear-eyed than on the flights back from Walter Reed and Bethesda. Clear about the true costs of war, and who bore those costs.

It was the same feeling I’d had earlier in the year, seeing that solitary figure facing down tanks in Tiananmen Square, the same inspiration I felt whenever I watched grainy footage of Freedom Riders or John Lewis and his fellow civil rights soldiers marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

He confirmed that the economic crisis was strengthening the forces of nationalism and populist extremism across the continent, and although he agreed with my strategy to reengage Russia, he cautioned that the annexation of Georgian territory was just the most overt example of Putin’s efforts to intimidate and interfere throughout the region. “Without attention from the U.S.,” he said, “freedom here and across Europe will wither.”

The Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, anchored by Navy SEAL teams and Army Special Forces, carried out nighttime raids and hunted down terrorist suspects mostly inside—but sometimes outside—the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. And the CIA developed new forms of analysis and intelligence gathering.

Even controversial Bush administration programs like the Patriot Act, which I myself had criticized, seemed to me potential tools for abuse more than wholesale violations of American civil liberties.

They would take for granted that their aunt was on the U.S. Supreme Court, shaping the life of a nation—as would kids across the country. Which was fine. That’s what progress looks like.

To have that rare chance, reserved for very few, to bend history in a better direction.

“Federalist No. 10”):

Biden was more succinct: “It’s fucking outrageous.”

But I also think that the episode illustrated just how accustomed the military had become to getting whatever it wanted during the Bush years,

Whatever you do won’t be enough, I heard their voices say. Try anyway.

80 percent of success is a matter of showing up,

and I wondered when exactly such a sizable portion of the American Right had become so frightened and insecure that they’d completely lost their minds.

China’s economic success had made its brand of authoritarian capitalism a plausible alternative to Western-style liberalism in the minds of young people not just in Shanghai but across the developing world.

She’d pointed out, as well, how the burdens of such damage most often fell on the poor, who had no choice about where to live and couldn’t shield themselves from poisoned air and contaminated water.

To them, worrying about maintaining pristine landscapes and exotic wildlife was a luxury only Westerners could afford.

“You can’t save trees by ignoring people,” my mother would say.

the clear consensus among scientists was that in the absence of bold, coordinated international action to reduce emissions, global temperatures were destined to climb another two degrees Celsius within a few decades. Past that point, the planet could experience an acceleration of melting ice caps, rising oceans, and extreme weather from which there was no return.

The human toll of a rapid climate shift was hard to predict. But the best estimates involved a hellish combination of severe coastal flooding, drought, wildfires, and hurricanes that stood to displace millions of people and overwhelm the capacities of most governments. This in turn would increase the risk of global conflict and insect-borne disease.

Climate change is one of those issues governments are notoriously bad at dealing with, requiring politicians to put in place disruptive, expensive, and unpopular policies now in order to prevent a slow-rolling crisis in the future.

in polls we conducted at the start of my campaign, the average Democratic voter ranked climate change near the bottom of their list of concerns.

Richard Nixon had worked with a Democratic Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970.

George H. W. Bush championed a strengthening of the Clean Air Act in 1990.

the party had turned environmental protection into another front in the partisan culture war.

As for congressional Republicans, just acknowledging the reality of human-made climate change invited suspicion from party activists;

Getting things done meant subjecting yourself to criticism, and the alternative—playing it safe, avoiding controversy, following the polls—was not only a recipe for mediocrity but a betrayal of the hopes of those citizens who’d put you in office.

And yet throughout the twentieth century, in law after law and in cooperation with presidents of both parties, Congress had kept delegating regulatory and enforcement authority to a host of specialized agencies, from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn’t have to.

It was a lot easier to measure a business’s profits and losses than it was to put a price on preserving an endangered bird or reducing the probability that a kid got asthma.

Back in 1990, George H. W. Bush’s administration had put a cap-and-trade system in place to curb the sulfur dioxide coming out of factory smokestacks and contributing to acid rain, which was destroying lakes and forests across the East Coast. Despite dire predictions that the measure would lead to factory closures and mass layoffs, the offending companies had quickly figured out cost-efficient ways to retrofit their factories, and within a few years, the problem of acid rain had all but disappeared.

I realized that for all the power inherent in the seat I now occupied, there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.

petrostates

If globalization and a historic economic crisis were fueling these trends in relatively wealthy nations—if I was seeing it even in the United States with the Tea Party—how could India be immune?

Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity, with many Indians taking great pride in the knowledge that their country had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation.