Rising Star

One of my 2018 New Year’s Resolutions was to read more. As a forcing function, I’m going to capture my thoughts on books I read this year as I finish them.

David Garrow’s ‘Rising Star’ is 1,472 pages long, meaning it’s taken me two months to finish it. I am going to try and read a few shorter books before I jump in to the next book on my list — Caro’s ‘Power Broker’ (1,344 pages).

The tl;dr on ‘Rising Star’ is that it’s the most revealing of the Obama books so far. The most detailed, the most engaged with its primary sources, and the most effective at disassembling the saviour narrative that rocketed Obama to the Presidency.

It lays out Obama’s story up until that speech in 2004 in a linear, forensic way. It’s obsessively detailed, with a Robert Caro-like willingness to examine every element of Obama’s early life.

Want to know how students rated each of Obama’s classes every year he taught them at the University of Chicago? Interested in how much tax he and Michelle paid in 1998? Keen to read what he wrote to friends on the back page of their Punahou yearbooks? If you answered yes, ‘Rising Star’ is going to enthral you.

‘Rising Star’ is also an odd book. It devotes the majority of its pages to Obama’s life up until the point he is elected to the United States Senate in 2004. Then Garrow speeds things up, skimming across the top of the 4 years of Obama’s Presidential run. Finally, he concludes the book with a decidedly un-forensic teardown of Obama’s character and Presidential record that hands over much of the narrative weight to the opinion of one of Obama’s ex-girlfriends.

If you’ve seen the ending of ‘The Florida Project’, it’s much the same. The first 1 hour 45 minutes of the movie is stunningly shot on 35mm film and the final two minutes are shot on on an iPhone. The ending is jarring, and diminishes what came before it.

All that said, no biographical work has had more impact on the way I think about one of the most fascinating characters in modern political history.

Obama first emerged as an international figure after his 2004 ‘Red State, Blue State’ speech at the Democratic National Convention. He was 42 at the time, and relatively unknown. He’d just won the Democratic nomination for a US Senate seat after spending 8 years, mostly in obscurity, in the Illinois Senate.

Just 4 years later, he was President.

To go from that 2004 DNC speech to the Presidency in 2008 is an astounding, astonishing life trajectory.

Understanding the mechanics of that trajectory is one of my great personal fascinations.

I’ve read most of the meaningful Obama books — Remnick’s ‘The Bridge’, Maraniss’ ‘Barack Obama’, both Woodward books, Jodi Kantor’s ‘The Obamas’, ‘Game Change’, David Plouffe’s ‘The Audacity To Win’, Jonathan Alter’s ‘The Promise’, Richard Wolffe’s ‘Revival’, and of course, ‘Dreams from my Father’ and ‘The Audacity of Hope’.

Of all these, ‘Rising Star’ does the most to reveal Obama the person, as opposed to Obama the phenomenon, breaking Obama’s “monopoly on his personal narrative”.

While most assessments of Obama’s rise pinpoint that 2004 DNC speech as the key moment in his rise, the actual inflection point happens earlier, in three, fascinating, loosely linked moments.

The first was the remapping of Illinois legislative districts following the 2000 census. Due to an obscure constitutional quirk, the balance of power in the Legislative Redistricting Commission was decided by a blind winner-take-all draw. The Democrats won, new, more favourable district maps were drawn, and suddenly, after 5 years on the sidelines, Obama was enabled to pass meaningful legislation.

Without amassing his legislative record, there is no possibility Obama would have won the Senate race.

The second moment happens with the results of polling undertaken by Obama’s campaign prior to his Senate run:

“On the evening of May 9, Harstad Strategic Research launched a seven-day calling program during which 605 likely Democratic primary voters and 603 likely general election voters, with one-quarter of the former included in the latter, would be asked a series of questions.”

The results of that poll were: “astonishingly encouraging”.

Even though 95% of Illinois voters were unfamiliar with him, once Obama was described to them, 72% found him highly appealing which was “an out-of-the-park score.”

The results of that poll tipped Obama towards running.

The final moment was Obama’s meeting with Emil Jones, the President of the Illinois Senate. In that meeting, Obama convinced Jones to back him in his Senate run, which Jones recalled vividly:

“He says, ‘You’ll have the power to make a United States senator.’ I said, ‘Damn, I hadn’t thought of that.’ He says, ‘Well, you’ve got that power.’ And we kept talking, and I said, ‘Well, if I have that kind of power, do you know of anyone I could make a United States senator?’ I was just sitting there. And he said ‘Me.’”

Without Jones’ support, Obama would not have won the Senate race.

The winner-take-all draw, the astonishing poll results and Emil Jones’ support were the launchpad for Obama’s rise. Three obscure, hidden events, but history changing in retrospect.

There is the true story of Obama’s life, and there is the story of his life that propelled him to the Presidency. They are different stories.

The Obama Presidency story, the one the world fell in love with, is the same one he gave in every stump speech:

• Father from Kenya, mother from Kansas. Funny sounding name.
• Community organizer in the Chicago’s south.
• The first-ever African-American President of the Harvard Law Review.
• Constitutional Law lecturer at the University of Chicago.
• Pragmatic, unifying politician opposed to the Iraq War, dedicated to universal healthcare, and committed to lifting up the poor and middle classes.

Obama’s life story, like anyone else’s, is much messier than that.

Hidden from public view is the extent to which his mother Ann and father Barack Snr were missing from his life.

“He had never spoken so glowingly during Ann’s lifetime of her impact on his life, but in the years following her death at age fifty-two, his memories of her became far warmer than they had ever been when she was alive.”

And while his parental roles were filled by his grandparents, his grandmother was a VP at a Hawaiian bank and tied up more in her work than it is comfortable to for someone to say publicly.

Obama’s best parent was his grandfather Stanley Dunham, but beyond that, he effectively raised himself.

In considering a Presidential run, Obama said: “I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband … I haven’t completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet.”

And yet, for his daughter’s entire lives up to that point, he’d been a ‘weekend Dad’, who’d take them to the park on Sundays and not much else. He was a better parent that his parents had been, but he was still largely a distant one.

In a speech discussing how he had grown up fatherless, Barack said, “I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle — that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my children.”

And yet, at the same time, at a dinner party launch for ‘The Audacity of Hope’:

when the time came for Barack to offer some brief remarks, he “started to say he was sorry to have been away from his family so much … and began crying so hard he couldn’t go on.”

And while he rose to the Presidency on hope, and unification, and bipartisanship, his political record actually reflected caution and pragmatism.

In a New York magazine piece at the time, John Heilemann observed that:

“for all his promise, Obama is basically an empty vessel… the legislation he has offered has been uniformly mundane, marginal, and provincial. How many times has he used his megaphone to advance a bold initiative or champion a controversial cause? Zero. The excitement about Barack “isn’t issue-based: It’s stylistic. His popularity is rooted in his calm, consensus-seeking deliberative demeanor and in his calls to common purpose.”

Despite that, the romantic narrative of Obama the bipartisan reformer won out and he won the Presidency.

Contrary to the stump speech version of Obama’s story, his actual life is much messier and more complex. The extent to which he grew up alone, the extent to which he himself was absent from his children’s early lives, and the dissonance between his actual voting record and the promise of his unifying, transformational Presidency have all been downplayed to almost zero.

In the end, “Garrow’s Obama may be less impeccable than the demigod of popular lore, but he is also more complex, more interesting and, finally, more human.”

‘Rising Star’ unearths multiple new threads on the Obama story — the extent of his drug use in high school as part of the ‘Choom Gang’, the degree to which ‘Dreams from my Father’ was a work of fiction, the depth and intensity of Obama’s relationship with ex-girlfriend Sheila Jager, the shallowness of his belief in God, the importance of Chicago and Michelle to his black identity, and the importance of his black and white upbringing in winning voters of both ilks.

None of that takes away from the astonishing temperament Obama displayed as he withstood the g-force of his ascent.

I still remember sitting in my lounge room in 2008, overjoyed at his victory, and stunned as he walked onstage with such preternatural calm. As if this was always in the plan.

As the expectations of him rose to messianic levels, Obama never seemed to waver. Whether it was the real him, or a self-constructed external version, few people could have withstood that pressure and remained so intact.

Whatever you think of Obama, he remains an authentic voice in a chorus of political artifice.

He won the Presidency twice, resuscitated a post-GFC economy, and passed healthcare reforms on an unprecedented scale. Ironically though, as the President elected on a platform of unification, he left the office in a state of intensified division. History’s view of Obama will be, like all those before him, an amalgam of good and bad.

‘Rising Star’ takes the smooth, narrative contours of Obama’s early life and reveals their jagged granular detail.

As David Greenberg summed it up in Politico: “Garrow’s remorselessness in deconstructing the character, the public persona — and in seeking instead to recover and present the real, lesser-known Obama — is what makes Rising Star such an unforgettable and valuable book.”