Sasha Abramsky - Inside Obamas Brain

Table of Contents

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First published in 2009 by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Sasha Abramsky, 2009

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Abramsky, Sasha.
Inside Obamas brain / Sasha Abramsky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-15953-8

1. Obama, BarackPsychology. 2. Obama, BarackPolitical and social
views. 3. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
E908.3.A26 2009
973.932092dc22 2009030610
[B]

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On a cold, windy, winters day, Barack Obama looked down from his podium at the base of the Lincoln Memorial and surveyed the crowd. Even by Obama-mania standards, it was enormous. Hundreds of thousands of people were packed into the open spaces of the National Mall. They had traveled from all across the United States to be in the nations capital. Many had journeyed from overseas. They had come, bundled up against the chill, to watch, and to listen to, history unfold.

This gathering, a star-studded musical extravaganza on the last Sunday of George W. Bushs presidency, was a prelude. Two days later Obama was going to be inaugurated as the countrys forty-fourth president. Standing directly in front of the great stone statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln, three flags planted on either side of him, Obama, as he had done so many times during the election campaign, let his words soar skyward. As I prepare to assume the presidency, he declared, his tone deep and sonorous, yours are the voices I will take with me every day I walk into that Oval Officethe voices of men and women who have different stories but hold common hopes; who ask only for what was promised us as Americansthat we might make of our lives what we will and see our children climb higher than we did. It is this thread that binds us together in common effort; that runs through every memorial on this mall; that connects us to all those who struggled and sacrificed and stood here before.

Washingtons monuments loom large in American pageantry. They bring the past to life, or rather our visions of the past. Thus was inauguration organizer Emmett Beliveaus decision to go beyond mere parades and brass bands and to put together a top-talent concert at the Lincoln Memorial two days before the swearing-in ceremony intended as a conscious nod to a noble heritage. It was designed to signify renewalor, if you think more in marketing terms, a rebrandingof America; a reclaiming of destiny; a sense of the American ideal, contained within the original founding documents, finally within reach of being realized. It was meant to summon the ghosts of generations past to this new cause. Abolitionists. Suffragettes. Nineteen-thirties trade unionists. Second World War GIs. Civil rights protesters.

The concert was supposed to redefine who and what constituted America, from the opening piece, Aaron Coplands majestic Lincoln Portrait, through to the finale, eighty-nine-year-old Pete Seeger, backed by Bruce Springsteen, singing the full-length, infused-with-radicalism version of This Land Is Your Land. There was the imagery, projected on huge screens above the podium and along the mall, and reproduced on millions of television screens around the world, of ordinary workers doing their jobs throughout the land. There was the visual tribute to the African American singer Marian Anderson, denied permission to sing in Washington in the late 1930s by the Daughters of the American Revolution, brought to perform on the Mall afterward at the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The America of the recent past, the program might have read, the country that lavished wealth and attention on the few while neglecting the needs and stories of the many, is being ushered out today. Welcome to the unveiling of a new-model America. Welcome to a new beginning.

Something transformative had occurred in the national conversation through the long primary campaign and then the presidential election season leading up to November 4, through the long weeks preceding the inauguration, and then during the inauguration festivities themselves. Catalyzed by the person and words of Obama, America, collectively, engaged in a discourse, around race and around identity, around national visions of progress and community, that has likely forever altered the countrys own self-image as well as the image of the United States seen by the rest of the world. The Sunday after the election, New York Times journalist Michael Sokolove, reporting on Levittown, Pennsylvania, voters overwhelming support for Obama, wrote that the nation was transformed on Tuesday but what had to occur first was the transformation of individual voters.

Over a period of months, millions of those voters had confronted their own prejudices, their own sets of expectations as to what a real American was; and, come Election Day, they decided they could, after all, vote for a black man who had built a political career out of listening to ordinary people tell the stories of their lives. The excitement of crowds not just in America but around the world that night was, at least in part, an excitement born of the realization that what it meant to be an American had forever changed.

Such moments occur rarely in a nations history. And when they do, the people behind them inevitably become the focus of our intense attention. While we might not want to literally explore the contours of Barack Obamas brain, we do very much, as a culture, want to understand how that brain works, what passions animate the forty-fourth president, what ideas and which individuals inhabit the mental recesses of this enigmatic figure. Thats why Obamas every move is so obsessively scrutinized.