Obama: From Promise to Power [マスマーケット]

Barack Obama (or "Barry," as David Mendall says he used to be known) is the freshest and most compelling of the new faces contending for the White House. So he's ripe for a good journalistic biography, and this one, the first presumably of many, arrives at a useful time. Mendell's book explores the life of the Senator-candidate-memoirist with greater candor than the man himself can do in his own writing.

It is no criticism of Obama's own accounts of his life to say that they suffer from the limitations that all memoirs do: When the subject of a book is also its author, most matters are written about in a way that is inevitably favorable to the subject-author's own interests. In a memoir, even the admission of mistakes and the confession of failings is inevitably shaped in line with the need for favorable self-portraiture, toward, say, a wish to appear honest and candid.

For the reader, the danger of a memoir written by a sophisticated professional politician like Barack Obama is that you never know when you're being spun and when you aren't. His candidacy is running into the same trap--on the stump he professes to be an outsider, innocent of Washington's games, a position that was taken to task today by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

Dowd: You may recall her column about Obama that included a memorably cheap shot at his physical appearance. Predictably, this provoked Obama's ire and showed a prickliness that at the time seemed out of place, but which Mendell convincingly portrays in this book as part of his makeup. He really does chafe when someone goes after him, even unfairly. He seems prima-donnaish, thin-skinned. (As two recent reviewers carrying hatchets against Mendel seem not to understand, there are much worse flaws to have.) That personality trait is not to be found in The Audacity of Hope, but it's believably explored in Mendell's book. That's why it's worth reading. The book is written at arm's length, by an author who covered Obama during his campaign for Illinois Senator. He traveled with him, comforted him in tough times (he's not purely objective, but the price of access is always a degree of intimacy), and watched his candidacy emerge. He may be the first journalist to have done so.

Perhaps predictably, two recent reviews here, apparently written by Obama campaign operatives, trash the book and tout The Audacity of Hope as the final word on the man. Folks, a word to the wise: Whenever a serious, substantive book gets trashed with a one-star review on Amazon written by an anonymous reviewer, it's likely the reviewer has some hidden agenda.

What I find after a lifetime of reading history and memoir is that the final word on the man never comes from the man himself. With his book, Mendell establishes himself as the starting point of reference for future study of Obama, should his fortunes proceed to the point where that study becomes worthwhile beyond 2008.

Mendell is a long-time political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and has been covering Obama since he first ran for the Illinois State Senate. Before I tell you what I cleaned from the book, I'm going to give a quote from Mendell:

"What the public has yet to see clearly is his hidden side: his imperious, mercurial, self-righteous and sometimes prickly nature, each quality exacerbated by the enormous career pressures he has inflicted upon himself. He can be cold and short with reporters who he believes have given him unfair coverage. He is an extraordinarily ambitious, competitive man with ... a career reach that seems to have no bounds. He is, in fact, a many of raw ambition so powerful that even his is still coming to terms with its full force."

Beyond Mendell's observations about Obama itself, are his observations about Obama's luck, for the most part, in two ways: his political timing (except for challenging Bobby Rush) and his political handlers, above all David Axelrod.

Beyond that, here's some specific takes from Mendell:

First, Obama's sometime lack of specificity on policy issues is nothing new.

Second, Obama's attendance at a Chicago antiwar rally, according to Mendell, while it had a degree of idealism behind it, also had a degree of political calculation involved.

Third, Obama did pass some bills in his last term in the Illinois Senate to bolster his U.S. Senate campaign. Specifically, despite his strong stance on gun controls, he sponsored a bill to let retired cops have concealed carry. Why? To get the endorsement of the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, which he did.

Add it all up, and I see a Barack Obama of dichotomy. From his family background, international experiences and more, a person of more idealism than many politicians, even with some tempering. At the same time, as Mendell describes, he's a politician who can fight tough, and will.

The dichotomy? The two sides don't seem to converse with each other a lot, at least in Mendell's observation, which I think exacerbates the thin-skinnedness.

Finally, if you're going to compare Obama to a Kennedy, it's Bobby, not Jack. The image of Bobby's 1968 trip to South Africa turned on the light bulb for me. Same amount of Senate experience at the time of campaigning for president. Same dichotomous mix, or non-mixing, of idealism and bare-knuckle politics. Same drivenness -- Bobby had that same type of charismatic energy in a way Jack didn't.

This book starts a little slow, with too many early references to what was already written in Obama's bestselling memoir "Dreams from My Father".

Eventually, the book by Mendell picks up with another view on Obama's ups and downs, including Obama's failed bid to oust Bobby Rush from his congressional seat in 2000. (Ironically, Rush is now backing Obama for President in 2008)

The book also has good insights into the specific results that Obama has delivered for African-American constituents in Illinois.

The strategies and tactics of David Axelrod (Obama's consultant) made for compelling reading, and were a big part of Obama's overwhelming victory in the 2004 race for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate.

Overall, the book is a nice complement to "The Audacity of Hope" by Obama himself. I would just read "The Audacity of Hope" first, then Mendell's book.

Thomas Brooks
Award-Winning Author,
A WEALTH OF FAMILY: An Adopted Son's International Quest for Heritage, Reunion, and Enrichment