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Enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies.
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I suspect that Gods plan, whatever it is, works on a scale too large to admit our mortal tribulations; that in a single lifetime, accidents and happenstance determine more than we care to admit; and that the best we can do is to try to align ourselves with what we feel is right and construct some meaning out of our confusion, and with grace and nerve play at each moment the hand that were dealt.
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there are people in the world who think only about themselves. They dont care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important. Then there are people who do the opposite, who are able to imagine how others must feel, and make sure that they dont do things that hurt people. So, she said, looking me squarely in the eye. Which kind of person do you want to be?
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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I dont know. What I can say for certain is that Im not yet ready to abandon the possibility of Americanot just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. For Im convinced that the pandemic were currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures cant help but collide. In that worldof global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexitywe will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches Americathe only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practiceto see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.
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Ive often been asked about this personality traitmy ability to maintain composure in the middle of crisis. Sometimes Ill say that its just a matter of temperament, or a consequence of being raised in Hawaii, since its hard to get stressed when its eighty degrees and sunny and youre five minutes from the beach. If Im talking to a group of young people, Ill describe how over time Ive trained myself to take the long view, about how important it is to stay focused on your goals rather than getting hung up on the daily ups and downs.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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To be known. To be heard. To have ones unique identity recognized and seen as worthy. It was a universal human desire, I thought, as true for nations and peoples as it was for individuals.
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Each person held aloft a single lit candlethe citys traditional way to express its appreciation for that years peace prize winner. It was a magical sight, as if a pool of stars had descended from the sky; and as Michelle and I leaned out to wave, the night air brisk on our cheeks, the crowd cheering wildly, I couldnt help but think about the daily fighting that continued to consume Iraq and Afghanistan and all the cruelty and suffering and injustice that my administration had barely even begun to deal with. The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable; on some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion. And yet, in the flickering of those candles, I saw something else. I saw an expression of the spirit of millions of people around the world: the U.S. soldier manning a post in Kandahar, the mother in Iran teaching her daughter to read, the Russian pro-democracy activist mustering his courage for an upcoming demonstrationall those who refused to give up on the idea that life could be better, and that whatever the risks and hardships, they had a role to play.Whatever you do wont be enough, I heard their voices say.Try anyway.
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The thing about getting old, Bar, Toot had told me, is that youre the same person inside. I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. Youre trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But its still you. You understand? I did now.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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I experienced failure and learned to buck up so I could rally those whod put their trust in me. I suffered rejections and insults often enough to stop fearing them. In other words, I grew upand got my sense of humor back.
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The truth is, Ive never been a big believer in destiny. I worry that it encourages resignation in the down-and-out and complacency among the powerful.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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But you dont choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide youre willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by.
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Id met my share of highly credentialed, high-IQ morons
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Either grab a drink and sit down with us or get the fuck out of here.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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But there comes a point in the speech where I find my cadence. The crowd quiets rather than roars. It's the kind of moment I'd come to recognize in subsequent years, on certain magic nights. There's a physical feeling, a current of emotion that passes back and forth between you and the crowd, as if your lives and theirs are suddenly spliced together, like a movie reel, projecting backward and forward in time, and your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking, because for an instant, you feel them deeply; you can see them whole. You've tapped into some collective spirit, a thing we all know and wish for - a sense of connection that overrides our differences and replaces them with a giant swell of possibility - and like all things that matter most, you know the moment is fleeting and that soon the spell will be broken.
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Heres the thing, I would say. Most people, wherever theyre from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. Theyre not trying to get filthy rich. They dont expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. But they do expect that if theyre willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldnt go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if theyve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect.
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Perhaps most troubling of all, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisisa crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted.
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there was the unsettling fact that, despite whatever my mother might claim, the bullies, cheats, and self-promoters seemed to be doing quite well, while those she considered good and decent people seemed to get screwed an awful lot.
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Glory and tragedy, courage and stupidity - one set of truths didn't negate the other. For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.
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When things are bad, Axe said, walking next to me as we left the December meeting, no one cares that things could have been worse.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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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 presidents 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. Clear about wars folly, the sorry tales we humans collectively store in our heads and pass on from generation to generation - abstractions that fan hate and justify cruelty and force even the righteous among us to participate in carnage. Clear that by virtue of my office, I could not avoid responsibility for lives lost or shattered, even if I somehow justified my decisions by what I perceived to be some larger good.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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Tamping down my emotions as the justice spoke to the audience, I looked over at a pair of handsome young Korean American boysSotomayors adopted nephewssquirming in their Sunday best. They would take for granted that their aunt was on the U.S. Supreme Court, shaping the life of a nationas would kids across the country. Which was fine. Thats what progress looks like.
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Have you ever noticed that if theres a hard way and an easy way, you choose the hard way every time? Why do you think that is?
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Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals? If so, do we really believe that our notions of self-government and individual freedom, equality of opportunity and equality before the law, apply to everybody? Or are we instead committed, in practice if not in statute, to reserving those things for a privileged few?
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And so the world watches Americathe only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practiceto see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.
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But I also realized that around the world, in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save themsend them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.
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I recalled a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called The Drum Major Instinct. In it, he talks about how, deep down, we all want to be first, celebrated for our greatness; we all want to lead the parade. He goes on to point out that such selfish impulses can be reconciled by aligning that quest for greatness with more selfless aims. You can strive to be first in service, first in love.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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The truth is, Ive never been a big believer in destiny. I worry that it encourages resignation in the down-and-out and complacency among the powerful. I suspect that Gods plan, whatever it is, works on a scale too large to admit our mortal tribulations; that in a single lifetime, accidents and happenstance determine more than we care to admit; and that the best we can do is to try to align ourselves with what we feel is right and construct some meaning out of our confusion, and with grace and nerve play at each moment the hand that were dealt.
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By nature Im a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low. But my care with words raised another issue on the campaign trail: I was just plain wordy, and that was a problem. When asked a question, I tended to offer circuitous and ponderous answers, my mind instinctively breaking up every issue into a pile of components and subcomponents. If every argument had two sides, I usually came up with four. If there was an exception to some statement I just made, I wouldnt just point it out; Id provide footnotes. Youre burying the lede! Axe would practically shout after listening to me drone on and on and on. For a day or two Id obediently focus on brevity, only to suddenly find myself unable to resist a ten-minute explanation of the nuances of trade policy or the pace of Arctic melting. What dya think? Id say, pleased with my thoroughness as I walked offstage. You got an A on the quiz, Axe would reply. No votes, though.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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Through them, I resolved the lingering questions of my racial identity. For it turned out there was no single way to be Black; just trying to be a good man was enough.
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And then there was the unsettling fact that, despite whatever my mother might claim, the bullies, cheats, and self-promoters seemed to be doing quite well, while those she considered good and decent people seemed to get screwed an awful lot.
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I wont be wading in early, Teddy said. Too many friends. But I can tell you this, Barack. The power to inspire is rare. Moments like this are rare. You think you may not be ready, that youll do it at a more convenient time. But you dont choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide youre willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by.
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Whatever you do wont be enough, I heard their voices say. Try anyway.
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Your problem, he said, is you keep trying to answer the question. Isnt that the point? I said. No, Barack, Axe said, that is not the point. The point is to get your message across. What are your values? What are your priorities? Thats what people care about. Look, half the time the moderator is just using the question to try to trip you up. Your job is to avoid the trap theyve set. Take whatever question they give you, give em a quick line to make it seem like you answered itand then talk about what you want to talk about. Thats bullshit, I said. Exactly, he said.
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As my wife saw itas most people would see it, I imaginean unwritten book was hardly a financial plan. In other words, she said, youve got some magic beans in your pocket. Thats what youre telling me. You have some magic beans, and youre going to plant them, and overnight a huge beanstalk is going to grow high into the sky, and youll climb up the beanstalk, kill the giant who lives in the clouds, and then bring home a goose that lays golden eggs. Is that it? Something like that, I said. Michelle shook her head and looked out the window. We both knew what I was asking for. Another disruption. Another gamble. Another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didnt. This is it, Barack, Michelle said. One last time. But dont expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldnt even count on my vote. AS A KID, I had sometimes watched as my salesman grandfather tried to sell life insurance policies over the phone, his face registering misery as he made cold calls in the evening from our tenth-floor apartment in a Honolulu high-rise. During the early months of 2003, I found myself thinking of him often as I sat at my desk in the sparsely furnished headquarters of my newly launched Senate campaign
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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With these thoughts came another: Was that unity of effort, that sense of common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? The question nagged at me. For all the pride and satisfaction I took in the success of our mission in Abbottabad, the truth was that I hadn't felt the same exuberance as I had on the night the health care bill passed. I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. And the fact that this was the case, the fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be - and how much work I had left to do.
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The most effective debate answers, it seemed, were designed not to illuminate but to evoke an emotion, or identify the enemy, or signal to a constituency that you, more than anyone else on that stage, were and would always be on their side.
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Toot showed me how to balance a checkbook and resist buying stuff I didnt need. She was the reason why, even in my most revolutionary moments as a young man, I could admire a well-run business and read the financial pages, and why I felt compelled to disregard overly broad claims about the need to tear things up and remake society from whole cloth. She taught me the value of working hard and doing your best even when the work was unpleasant, and about fulfilling your responsibilities even when doing so was inconvenient. She taught me to marry passion with reason, to not get overly excited when life was going well, and to not get too down when it went badly. All this was instilled in me by an elderly, plainspoken white lady from Kansas. It was her perspective that often came to mind when I was campaigning, and her worldview that I sensed in many of the voters I encountered, whether in rural Iowa or in a Black neighborhood in Chicago, that same quiet pride in sacrifices made for children and grandchildren, the same lack of pretension, the same modesty of expectations.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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The conviction that racism wasnt inevitable may also explain my willingness to defend the American idea: what the country was, and what it could become.
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If we won, it would mean that I wasnt alone in believing that the world didnt have to be a cold, unforgiving place, where the strong preyed on the weak and we inevitably fell back into clans and tribes, lashing out against the unknown and huddling against the darkness.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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Two hundred and thirty-two years and they wait until the countrys falling apart before they turn it over to the brother!
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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I was also part of a post-Vietnam generation that had learned to question its own government and saw how - from the rise of McCarthyism to support for South Africa's apartheid regime - Cold War thinking had often led America to betray its ideals. This awareness didn't stop me from believing we should contain the spread of Marxist totalitarianism. But it made me wary of the notion that good resided only on our side and bad on theirs, or that a people who'd produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were inherently different from us. Instead, the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communisists, I thought; it was true for all of us. The brave struggle of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain felt of a piece with, rather than distinct from, the larger struggle for human dignity taking place elsewhere in the world - including America.
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I thought the country I'd just described to them - a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone. At about the same age as the graduates were now, I'd seized on that idea and clung to it for dear life. For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.
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over time Ive trained myself to take the long view, about how important it is to stay focused on your goals rather than getting hung up on the daily ups and downs.
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God sees the world through the eyes of those most oppressed.
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This, I was coming to realize, was the nature of the presidency: Sometimes your most important work involved the stuff nobody noticed.
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For the next few minutes, Edith led the room in hollering Fired up! Ready to go! back and forth, again and again. I was confused at first, but figured it would be impolite of me not to join in. And pretty soon, I started to feel kinda fired up! I started to feel like I was ready to go! I noticed everybody at the meeting suddenly was smiling too, and after the chanting was done we settled down and talked for the next hour about the community and the country and what we could do to make it better. Even after I left Greenwood, for the rest of the day, every so often, Id point to someone on my staff and ask, You fired up? Eventually it became a campaign rallying cry. And that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldnt be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaignand by extension a democracyproved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.
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Before settling in to work, we noticed a large travel case on the mantelpiece. I unsnapped the latches and lifted the top. On one side there was a large desert scene on a marble base featuring miniature gold figurines, as well as a glass clock powered by changes in temperature. On the other side, set in a velvet case, was a necklace half the length of a bicycle chain, encrusted with what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rubies and diamondsalong with a matching ring and earrings. I looked up at Ben and Denis. A little something for the missus, Denis said. He explained that others in the delegation had found cases with expensive watches waiting for them in their rooms. Apparently, nobody told the Saudis about our prohibition on gifts. Lifting the heavy jewels, I wondered how many times gifts like this had been discreetly left for other leaders during official visits to the kingdomleaders whose countries didnt have rules against taking gifts, or at least not ones that were enforced. I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal gloryor maybe just a taste of something better. I set the necklace down and closed the case. All right, I said. Lets work.
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O, fly and never tire, Fly and never tire, Fly and never tire, Theres a great camp-meeting in the Promised Land. FROM AN AFRICAN AMERICAN SPIRITUAL
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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My staffs biggest fear was that Id make a gaffe, the expression used by the press to describe any maladroit phrase by the candidate that reveals ignorance, carelessness, fuzzy thinking, insensitivity, malice, boorishness, falsehood, or hypocrisyor is simply deemed to veer sufficiently far from conventional wisdom to make said candidate vulnerable to attack. By this definition, most humans will commit five to ten gaffes a day, each of us counting on the forbearance and goodwill of our family, co-workers, and friends to fill in the blanks, catch our drift, and generally assume the best rather than the worst in us.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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And if I was seen as temperamentally cool and collected, measured in how I used my words, Joe was all warmth, a man without inhibitions, happy to share whatever popped into his head. It was an endearing trait, for he genuinely enjoyed people. You could see it as he worked a room, his handsome face always cast in a dazzling smile (and just inches from whomever he was talking to), asking a person where they were from, telling them a story about how much he loved their hometown (Best calzone I ever tasted) or how they must know so-and-so (An absolutely great guy, salt of the earth), flattering their children (Anyone ever tell you youre gorgeous?) or their mother (You cant be a day over forty!), and then on to the next person, and the next, until hed touched every soul in the room with a flurry of handshakes, hugs, kisses, backslaps, compliments, and one-liners. Joes enthusiasm had its downside. In a town filled with people who liked to hear themselves talk, he had no peer. If a speech was scheduled for fifteen minutes, Joe went for at least a half hour. If it was scheduled for a half hour, there was no telling how long he might talk. His soliloquies during committee hearings were legendary. His lack of a filter periodically got him in trouble, as when during the primaries, he had pronounced me articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, a phrase surely meant as a compliment, but interpreted by some as suggesting that such characteristics in a Black man were noteworthy. As I came to know Joe, though, I found his occasional gaffes to be trivial compared to his strengths. On domestic issues, he was smart, practical, and did his homework. His experience in foreign policy was broad and deep. During his relatively short-lived run in the primaries, he had impressed me with his skill and discipline as a debater and his comfort on a national stage. Most of all, Joe had heart. Hed overcome a bad stutter as a child (which probably explained his vigorous attachment to words) and two brain aneurysms in middle age.
Barack Obama,
A Promised Land
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The Muslim speech, as we took to calling the second major address, was trickier. Beyond the negative portrayals of terrorists and oil sheikhs found on news broadcasts or in the movies, most Americans knew little about Islam. Meanwhile, surveys showed that Muslims around the world believed the United States was hostile toward their religion, and that our Middle East policy was based not on an interest in improving peoples lives but rather on maintaining oil supplies, killing terrorists, and protecting Israel. Given this divide, I told Ben that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other. That meant recognizing the extraordinary contributions of Islamic civilizations in the advancement of mathematics, science, and art and acknowledging the role colonialism had played in some of the Middle Easts ongoing struggles. It meant admitting past U.S. indifference toward corruption and repression in the region, and our complicity in the overthrow of Irans democratically elected government during the Cold War, as well as acknowledging the searing humiliations endured by Palestinians living in occupied territory. Hearing such basic history from the mouth of a U.S. president would catch many people off guard, I figured, and perhaps open their minds to other hard truths: that the Islamic fundamentalism that had come to dominate so much of the Muslim world was incompatible with the openness and tolerance that fueled modern progress; that too often Muslim leaders ginned up grievances against the West in order to distract from their own failures; that a Palestinian state would be delivered only through negotiation and compromise rather than incitements to violence and anti-Semitism; and that no society could truly succeed while systematically repressing its women.
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For Michelle, the road to the good life was narrow and full of hazards. Family was all you could count on, big risks werent taken lightly, and outward successa good job, a nice housenever made you feel ambivalent because failure and want were all around you, just a layoff or a shooting away.
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What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already. Instead, I was constantly dealing with probabilities: a 70 percent chance, say, that a decision to do nothing would end in disaster; a 55 percent chance that this approach versus that one might solve the problem (with a 0 percent chance that it would work out exactly as intended); a 30 percent chance that whatever we chose wouldnt work at all, along with a 15 percent chance that it would make the problem worse.
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But who knows? I said, looking around the table. Theres no guarantee we can pull it off. Heres one thing I know for sure, though. I know that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be president of the United States, the world will start looking at America differently. I know that kids all around this countryBlack kids, Hispanic kids, kids who dont fit intheyll see themselves differently, too, their horizons lifted, their possibilities expanded. And that alonethat would be worth it.
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For my mother, the world was full of opportunities for moral instruction. But I never knew her to get involved in a political campaign. Like my grandparents, she was suspicious of platforms, doctrines, absolutes, preferring to express her values on a smaller canvas.
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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 didnt have to. And it was thanks to those experts that Americans could worry less about the quality of the air we breathed or the water we drank, that we had recourse when employers failed to pay us the overtime we were due, that we could count on over-the-counter drugs not killing us, and that driving a car or flying on a commercial airplane was exponentially safer today than it had been just twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. The regulatory state conservatives complained so bitterly about had made American life a hell of a lot better.
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Without any constitutional basis, public debate, or even the knowledge of most Americans, passing legislation through Congress had come to effectively require 60 votes in the Senate, or what was often referred to as a supermajority. By the time I was elected president, the filibuster had become so thoroughly integrated into Senate practiceviewed as an essential and time-honored traditionthat nobody much bothered to discuss the possibility of reforming or doing away with it altogether.
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More than anyone, this book is for those young peoplean invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.
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What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already.
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Meanwhile, bank executives bristledsometimes privately, but often in the pressat any suggestion that they had in any way screwed up, or should be subject to any constraints when it came to running their business. This last bit of chutzpah was most pronounced in the two savviest operators on Wall Street, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, both of whom insisted that their institutions had avoided the poor management decisions that plagued other banks and neither needed nor wanted government assistance. These claims were true only if you ignored the fact that the solvency of both outfits depended entirely on the ability of the Treasury and the Fed to keep the rest of the financial system afloat, as well as the fact that Goldman in particular had been one of the biggest peddlers of subprime-based derivativesand had dumped them onto less sophisticated customers right before the bottom fell out.
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