The Quintessential Optimist

Reading a presidential memoir, for any American, is normally an act of retroactive curiosity. And no one does it quickly. The pages are densely littered with information no longer relevant to anyone but the most issue-specific historians. But when those memoirs are released at times still pressed with living characters and heavy, pent-up emotions, it’s hard not to get drawn in, deep into the details and minutiae that we may not care about in five, ten, or twenty years. Going into this week of Thanksgiving, I decided to hunker down and barrel through every one of those densely littered pages of a former president still very much alive and well, a cover to cover read of years not so long ago forgotten.

What Obama did, in this memoir, was to answer two questions that have nagged at me since 2008 and 2016, respectively. The first of which was my disappointment that he even ran for the highest office in the land at all, especially when it seemed so presumptuous and premature. I admired and appreciated him as an American Senator, even back in 2006 and 2007, because he talked about and fought for government transparency as I was studying political science at a largely conservative university. But I was annoyed, even then, that he stuck his toe into the heights of an executive world for which he had no experience. The whole thing felt oddly out of touch and frustratingly opportunistic, like he was seizing on the fame of a populist ride that was out of his hands. I certainly didn’t pick up this book expecting him to address that nagging question, but he did so nonetheless, and did so with a brutal honesty that conceded his own ego clashing up against the risks of waiting, or even the risks of inflaming the opposition of his biggest fan, Michelle. In the end, he explains that he ran so that others in the diversity of our American landscape might one day see themselves capable of doing the same, and because he thought maybe, just maybe, he could also help.

The other question I had was answered or addressed in the classiest of ways throughout every chapter of the book. And it’s the hardest question to ask without getting angry. During the 2016 Campaign, Obama had given stump speeches for Hillary using phrases to combat her opponent that were lofty but suspect, phrases like “that’s not who we are” and “we’re better than this.” But in the aftermath of that election, when a sufficient number of Americans rallied behind the worst, most vile representative of the American psyche, someone who stoked fear and hate and vitriol, someone who held no regard for the military, for women, for the poor, for immigrants, for minorities or those with special needs, I found myself audibly arguing with Obama’s invisible shadow, saying, “We’re not better than this. We are this. We are every bit these awful things.” It wasn’t that I bowed out of my undying optimism, especially as a teacher who never gives up on a student, however challenging, but that I felt myself compelled to be more real, more cognizant about the nature of humanity, that we can be and are cruel, that we can be and are selfish, heartless, vane, and violent. And over the last four years, I desperately wanted to know how he could so boldly claim those words—“that’s not who we are” and “we’re better than this.”

But what Obama does here, without a tinge of bitterness across 700+ pages, is to admit the obvious. Through centuries of oppression and slavery, through Jim Crow segregation and global atrocities, through sexism and racism and xenophobia and hatred and vanity and selfishness, we can be and often have been a ruthless, heartless, and careless people. To pretend that he doesn’t see that, or for anyone to pretend that it doesn’t exist, would be naive. It would even be foolish for someone to believe that they could ever do enough to change the worst in human nature. But we have, we are, and we will aim, as always, for a promised land that we believe is within reach. So try anyway, he says. Quintessential optimist.

Thanks for the reminder, Mr. President. And Happy Thanksgiving.