Because if I can do that.… It doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with them on everything, but at least maybe they can see me. What are the things that they feel, believe, hope, fear, that I can relate to. I am trying to get a sense of what’s motivating them. I’m trying to understand their backstory. When I write, what I’m trying to do is reflect how I see people in that same way. The reason that I got into politics was the sense that, as shattering as the experience of race and discrimination and slavery and Jim Crow and the decimation of Native American tribes, all that stuff was, there is still something in this country that says, “We can be better and we can learn to be more inclusive and see each other and expand our definition of ‘We the People.’ ” So I think that the empathy you describe is central to my politics. So in order for people to capture that progression, that journey of me as a young person inspired by the civil rights movement through my early political career, all the way through to the presidency, that required people to have a sense of how I saw the world.īarack Obama wears a cowboy hat offered by a supporter after speaking at an outdoor rally February 23, 2007, in Austin, Texas.
He is a person like you, who is interacting with people, who is trying to do stuff, is disappointed sometimes, is afraid, falls short, has doubts. What I wanted to do for the reader, particularly for young people, is to give them a sense of commonality between their day-to-day choices, decisions, insights, hopes, fears, and what somebody who ends up being the president of the United States is going through. So often, when we see a political figure or we’re talking about policy, we somehow think that’s separate and apart from our daily lives. Part of the goal of the book was to connect my personal journey with the public life that people saw.
I asked myself: How do you think he is able to do this? How is he able to accomplish this? I was wondering if your capacity for empathy is what enables you to do that. You give us sensory details, you give us hints about their personality and their motivation, and they are really vivid and really immediate. But still, every character, you give us a very specific impression of them from the first moment. And there’s a huge cast, from Hillary to characters who have secondary roles, like Norm Eisen or Sonia Sotomayor. One of the things that I was really impressed by was how well you developed your characters. Because you explicitly talk about empathy several times in A Promised Land. I really want to ask you about characters and about empathy. In some ways, laughing about it or some gallows humor about those situations worked better when you were dealing with stress day in and day out, the way we were, than if you were trying to give some sober speech. That was an example of using humor at a time when the stakes were incredibly high and we were feeling really embattled.
My legislative director says, “It’s a really narrow path we’ve got here it depends on whether you feel lucky.” And I say, “Listen, where am I?” He said, “Well, you’re in the Oval Office.” “And what’s my name?” “Barack Obama.” “No, it’s Barack Hussein Obama. There’s a scene I write in the book when we’re debating whether we can still move forward on the Affordable Care Act. That was part of how I managed to maintain perspective and take the work of the presidency seriously, or running for president seriously, but not take myself too seriously.
Obama then perish professional#
The professional comics never wanted to follow me.
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