I expected A Promised Land to be a stylistic retread of Jimmy Carter’s honest but too wholesome Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a president (1982) or, even worse, of his recent, and unbearably sanctimonious A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. Having struggled to stay engaged in Obama’s bestselling but strangely passive pre-fame memoir, Dreams From My Father (1995), I feared its continuation in this longer sequel.

Instead, A Promised Land is as compelling, honest, revealing, and confessional as any I have read. With refreshing candour, Obama’s captures his own progress which, despite some fits and starts, was about as seamless as that of any American president. Sustained throughout is a balance between his sheer surprise at his good fortune and a confidence that the highest office was always his destiny. Behind every twist and turn is a stoic Michelle Obama rolling her eyes.

His political rise is remarkable only when we forget that he faced no real, serious hurdle. The great crisis of his life was the absence of a father (who returned to Kenya in 1964). He puzzles over his racial complexity and its meaning but prospers by sensibly refusing to be mired in American identity politics – a position he has maintained in his post-presidential years, as US politics has polarised into woke and nativist camps.

Until the presidency, he never held a real job, not an executive one anyway. This memoir offers us the first detailed account of his rather sketchy ‘community organizer’ years in Chicago. He learned retail politics on those streets but at no point did his actions and decision-making carry much consequence for the intended beneficiaries. He did not employ people. He ran no commercial business, beyond the accounts of his personal political project. Failures were mild to non-existent and easily corrected. His student days were ‘lazy’, he says, and see him move from good schools to élite ones. He was editor of the Harvard Law Review, his only executive job until he became president of the United States. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Jr – each had run big states as a precursor to national power; Obama had edited a student newspaper.

The most meaningful thing that happened to him in the decades prior to the presidency was meeting his future wife, Michelle Robinson. Obama does a fine job describing how crucial she is to his fortunes; she is, he tells us early on, his ‘most important decision.’ The memoir rarely goes more than a few pages without a reference to his partner and their two children. They are not like the props paraded by so many cricketers at the MCG; they are fundamental to the man Obama describes. We learn how much Obama loves and needs the three women in his life (after the loss of the fourth, his mother, in 1995). He took evident time in constructing his thoughts about this familial foundation of his ascendency. Obama spent his childhood absorbing the profuse and unconditional affirmation of his Kansan grandparents and much of his adulthood seeking a more sceptical version of the same from his partner.

Barack Obama poses for a family photo with daughters Malia and Sasha and Michelle Obama in front of the 2,400-foot Yosemite Falls in Yosemite National Park, California, 2016 (© Planetpix/Alamy Live News)

Obama explores the symbiosis between family support and political success in a manner rare in political memoirs. The utility of his marriage outdoes that of even Bill and Hillary Clinton, a political partnership that, because of Obama, never quite fulfilled their ambitions. In 2007–8, Hillary is vanquished by the ‘fairy-tale’ Obamas (Bill’s disparaging word for them), an even more humiliating defeat than the one that awaited her at Donald Trump’s hands eight years later.

The portrait of his rival, then wary ally, is especially telling. Obama steals the nomination from Hillary Clinton and then makes her his first secretary of state. Reading between the lines, we glimpse Obama’s often overlooked capacity for animus. In 2007, concerned they were going to lose to the upstart Illinoisan ‘from nowhere’, Hillary’s team put it about that Obama had not just used illegal drugs but had, in his own words, ‘dealt drugs as well’.

This rift in the camps, which never healed, reached its nadir on an airport runway in December 2007. During an apparent effort by both Democratic candidates to apologise, Obama criticised the behaviour of Hillary’s team and by implication her own conduct. ‘My efforts at lowering the temperature were unsuccessful,’ he writes, ‘and the conversation ended abruptly, with her still visibly angry as she boarded the plane.’ In a fitting retribution for Hillary’s petulance, Obama later condemns her to a business-class seat for much of his first term, making her his first secretary of state. Keep your friends close and your enemies much further away.

But Obama’s real nemesis is mostly missing in this memoir. There is a spectre haunting it, that of Donald Trump. He is present throughout the 750-plus pages of this beautifully crafted memoir, but appears on only four specific occasions, the second separated from the first by the length of a Bible. Obama had every right to expect his memoirs to be the definitive account of a transformational leader and his eight-year presidency. Instead, the real agent of transformation is his successor. In comparison to Trump’s single-term, the Obama years appear dull and strangely lifeless here. References to wars like the one in Libya are hedged or, like Afghanistan, are ambivalent. The global financial crisis, despite his efforts to make himself central to its resolution, ends more by natural economic adjustment than by his progressive agency.

The battles over healthcare are not really battles – the Republicans never joined the fight, intransigence is not fighting – and become repetitive, technocratic, and even pious in this retelling. The real colour and fire began in 2017, reaching their greatest intensity during the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020-21 presidential transition. We have never seen a presidency like the one now ending. Obama’s, in contrast, was all rather enervating – disappointing even.

But there are two moments of unimpeachable and interwoven drama, the combined import of which elude the author. The book builds towards them without ever really acknowledging that it is doing so. In May 2011, Obama kills one of America’s greatest foes, Osama bin Laden, but gives life to the political career of Obama’s controversial successor, Donald Trump. In one of those strange conjunctions of history, Obama, having secretly just given the order to violate Pakistan airspace in the hunt for bin Laden, finds himself giving a usually uninspiring but, on this occasion, fateful speech at the White House Correspondents’  Dinner in which he goes out of his way to mock a seated Trump. Dispatching one opponent that evening simultaneously created another with far more disruptive capacities.

Obama treated the threat from Islamist terrorism in deadly earnest – killing more alleged terrorists, extra-judicially by drone strike, than George W. Bush or Donald Trump combined. But, he admits, ‘I found it hard to take [Trump] too seriously ... all hype ... a carnival barker.’ In 2010, the New York real estate magnate had comically, in Obama’s telling, called the White House ‘out of the blue to suggest that I put him in charge of plugging the [Deepwater Horizon oil] well.’ Trump’s subsequent embrace of ‘birtherism’ (the absurd claim that Obama was not US-born and was thus the agent of some nefarious foreign plot against America) further discredited Trump’s legitimacy even as it enhanced his profile. Obama just never saw Trump coming.

This blind spot speaks to a weakness across the memoir. Obama writes about the disaffection his style of progressive politics generates but seems incapable of comprehending it. This was compounded in the tin-eared campaigning of his anointed successor, Hillary Clinton. Obama wrestles with the voter sympathies that carried Trump to power but cannot, ultimately, understand them. The unmentioned opioid and suicide epidemics that take hold in the Obama years are not addressed. The despair symbolised by them, and how this made Trump possible, is not assessed satisfactorily.

There is something enduringly academic in the analytical style of the author. Obama’s disposition is more one of solitary researcher than of gregarious, adroit politician. He tells us in fascinating detail how he forced himself to become rhetorically succinct and less publicly stiff, and yet, like so many progressive scholars, he is often disappointed by the ordinary people who fail to live up to his expectations of them – men and women (more than seventy-four million of them in November 2020) who refuse to follow a Democratic script for their liberation. He reckons that expertise and knowledge are enough, but underestimates how much blind faith can oppose these academic creeds.

This self-reflective style makes for a great read. As we grapple with the rage-fuelled inarticulacy of the defeated Trump, it is a blessed relief. But the memoir never quite captures why such a ‘change’ president, a man who embodied more liberal hopes than any single leader in modern American history, ended up handing over power to his polar opposite.

Set against this lacuna, the following will seem like quibbles. Over such a lengthy book (it took Obama four years to write and takes him more than twenty-nine hours to read the audio version) a reviewer’s quibbles build up. The former president overthanks his aides to the point where it seems he really wants to retain the credit he gives them. His deference to family is sincere but repetitive. He thinks admonitions that ‘we are better than this’ fill the gap left by a refusal to work the phones and cajole legislators – the consummate skills of Lyndon Johnson that Obama does not possess.

We learn just how sincerely Obama holds his political project, and how little we feature in it. In this meticulously detailed and lengthy book, there is not one mention of Australia, his nation’s ‘closest ally’, or so we like to believe. Despite what Canberra hopes, Australia does not figure in this president’s world view – at least not yet. His historic (for us) 2011 trip to Australia happened a few months after this volume concludes. I am not sure it will open the second volume.

Obama was a Transatlanticist, loved as much by the European Union as Trump was hated, and not, despite his ‘pivot to Asia’, really that much interested in this side of the world. His China policy was anaemic. His interest in Indonesia, where he lived from the age of six to ten, is fleeting here. Though Obama was paternally connected to Kenya it was his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose AIDS relief program transformed the prospects of millions of Africans: Bushcare less Obamacare.

The president we observe in this memoir, despite what his fans and opponents claim, is complicated. Indeed, his great political talent was to be an empty vessel into which people poured their preferred libation. Cosmopolitans saw a great progressive crusader who would heal the uninsured sick and cool the planet; realists saw a man who put US national interests above the whining demands of internationalists. Both caricatures receive some validation in this book, but neither is fully confirmed.

As he signalled in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 2009 – which too few people noted – his priority was not transnational dreams of world peace but the security and prosperity of the United States. It was an emphasis that Trump adapted and resold in 2016. Obama offers a memoir that stands above so many others because he accepts, ultimately, the limitations of his vision, that a promised land will always remain unattainable. His legacy is not one of transformation but of ordinariness. His failures, despite the unique qualities he brought to the office, were like those of so many before him. His hopes and dreams, like theirs, went unrealised.