[music] i titled it the Promised Land because even though we may not get there in our lifetimes, even if we experience hardships and disappointmentsalong the way , i at least still have faith we can create a more perfect union, not a perfect unit but a moreperfect union. [music] good morning and welcome to a very special edition of Washington Post live. Im michelle noris, opinion columnist for washington pos and founding director of the race cd project and for this special conversation this morning i enjoyed by my dear friend elizabeth exander, poet, scholar and president of theandrew w mellon foundation. Good morning elizabeth. Good morning michelle, its wonderful to be together. It is wonderf to be together and together we both welcomed our guest for ts conversation, the 44th president of the United Statesbarack obama. I assume you recognize that guy there, good moing. Hey guys. The Washington Post brought outthe big guns for this. Are so excited to see you. I am very gratef that you have the time. Were so excited to talk to you about your book. This is a neinnovation so we have to beginith a little bit of news, we learned astrazeneca has joined two other compans with their success in a vaccine trial. What do you think about the challenges of distributive of vaccine and if youre concerned about a drift where some people have access to the vaccine and some people dont. Thats going to be the big challenge. Ithink were all excited about the results. There better even than a lot of scientists anticipated and now the challenge becomes how do we distribute it rapidly and how do we make sure people actually are willing to get vaccinated. That is both a logistical and economic and public messaging challenge. It has not been made easier by the fact that weve had a incoherence federal Mitigation Strategy to say the least when it comes to science and hold science around covid. My understanding and obviously im not a scientific expert here is that part of the challenge at least for the first two vaccines that were developed is that they have to bestored at certain temperatures. That puts a little additional challenge on distributing it widely. I think one of the first tasks for the Biden Administration coming in is going to be to make sure that we have clear protocols about who gets first, whether its frontline workers, who are most vulnerable and then move forward from there. Then we have to consider the International Issues because they are historically whats happened is that when you have drawings developed like this they are expensive and often times very poor countries are the last to get if they get it at all. An International Coordination around the process is going to be there important and finally as i said, were going to have to make sure the public messaging counteracts whatever suspicions and conspiracy theories the anti vaccination internet is pretty powerful and were going to want to make sure we roll that out in a way that elicits trust from the public as much as possible. We are starting to get a sense of what joe Biden Administration will look like and you seem some things that are familiar to you including lincoln expected to be named as new secretary of state. Will he be able to quickly convince european allies that the trunk pompeo period was an aberration and try to restore trust and a working relationship with some of the allies that right now after a rather close view of the United States . I know tony. He was mydeputy of National Security advisor. He was joes or in policy advisor when joe was Vice President and he was part of our innercircle and all our key meetings throughout my presidency. Outstanding. Mark, gracious , a skilled diplomat wellregarded around the world. And i know hes going to do a great job. The reports Archie Sullivan will serve as National Security advisor. Wicked smart, young, energetic and i think hes going to be outstanding so you are seeing a team develop that i have great confidence in. I think its going important to recognize that the confidence that our allies had and the world had in American Leadership is not going to be restored overnight. They are going to be greatly relieved and pleased to see people like tony at various conferences around the world and returning to the traditional leadership roles that the us has played but there is going to be a great sense that america is still divided. Some of the shenanigans that are going on right now around election, that is making the world question how reliable and steady the us maybe. The reversal of us physicians on things like iran deal and the paris courts are going to create some inhibitions in terms of entering into agreements, not always being certain whether or not they will be reverse by future administrations so theres been damage done that is going to take time to dig ourselves out of. But there is no doubt that joe has got the right people to do it and i have every confidence he will be able to do it, it just may not be able to happen in one session. One last question before we turn to your role in public life, we saw youactive in the president ial campaign for your former vicepresident. Will you help in any way the Democratic Candidates running for senate in georgia . I think its a huge critically importantelection. If in fact the democrats win, we will win those two seats, they will have a sliver of a majority in the senate. With the Vice President tiebreaker. So i will do what im asked to do in terms of the hopeful. At the end of the day, thats going to be determined by the people of georgia. Im always flattered when people say barack, we need you here, its going to make all thedifference. Ultimately, i think what really makes a difference is people like stacy abrams who been working 4 years in the trenches galvanizing and mobilizing people to recognize their own power. I am a huge believer in grassroots, bottomup work and i think that what started with stacy and he Gubernatorial Campaign and that she perpetuated and others got involved with, thats the reason that georgia and for joe biden and thats the reason, thatswhat i think its going to take for us to be able to sustain us down the road. Doing robo calls for some guest appearances, it gets people excited but ultimately its the people that of georgia recognizing their own power that makes all the difference. We want to get to a discussion about your book and im going to turn it over to elizabeth. Hello there. Lets talk about the writing of this wonderful book and i wanted to put out to you the idea that autobiography is a Great American genre. I think because america believes in themselves and the i in the week is what we get with the collective fiction picture of ourselves in biographies so i wonder if you were writing Promised Land how have you thought about the genre and how have you thought about writing autobiography and how a tone developed as youwere writing . Thats interesting, part of it is america believes in itself and is one of the essential elements of being american i think is this idea of self creation. That we are not bound by whatever station we were born into. Whether thats mythological, whether it is fully reflected in the reality of class barriers and race barriers, is part of us that weve internalized and i am going to get out there and make something of myself and certainly my first book dreams from my father reflected that kind of story of me as a young person trying to figure out racial identity and how i fit in to this new world first in hawaii, then in places like newyork and chicago. Theres no doubt that ive learned to write also in part from sort of the personal narrative. If you asked me whats a book that taught me to think about how i would like to write, what is buyer towrite even though i cant write that good , it would be probably the fire next time by James Baldwin. An autobiographical essay that tells a story and is internal also paints a portrait of new york, harlem and race and preachers and pimps and theres an entire world from few square blocks that suddenly gives you a picture of all of america. And of seping history. I read books like that and that was my creative writing class. There is no ubt when i thought about writing this president ial memoir, those were my models as opposed to a traditional pridential memoir with, and that then i met with things such and such and theprime minister such and such. And how well i succeeded in tracking that kind of a more literary approach toit , it will be up to the readers but that was certainly part of what i was trying to do. Of course James Baldwin didnt have to stick in long explanations of the financial cris or Nuclear Negotiations so that was the disadvantage. Every time once in a while you get in a poetic flow a you realize you know what, i got to do little history, a little work here and try to find that balance was sometimes tough. Thank you. Michelle is going to ask some more now. When we were writing this book during a period of total and transformation in america and when youre writing a book having a conversation withyourself theres also other noise thats happening in the rld and you have to decide to what degree do i too met outwardlin , this is a period when new policies wereunder interrogation or being fully raised by the cuent administration. How much did a that influence you when you are writing this book . I imagine it was almost like having a 5000 pound elhant on your shoulder whi you are writing your own work. Its interesting, i dont think it affected that much partly because even though i ended up writing this stuff into two volumes, i had a clear senseof therc of the story. And i know how the story ends , at least the end of my presidency with donald trump coming into office and i had already internalized and understood that what his presidency was going to do and what he stood for so all the stuff that was happening while i was wring wasnt really shocking or surprising to me. I would say that if anything, what probably influenced the book as i was writing may have been a growing sense of optimism based on for example what happened this summer in the wake of the George Floyd Murder and seeing young people mobilize and activate themselves the way they did. It actually strengthened my conviction that in fact despite the backwards movement that my successor represented on things like Climate Change or Voting Rights or economic equity, that there was still this underlying Forward Motion that was going to be carried on by future generations that had been affected by my presidency and would help lead us going forward. So if anything i probably got more convinced about the story that i was telling as a consequence of what i saw particularly over the last year. Is there anything about yourself that you bought in particular when you went back to write the story, your first four or eight years in office . You know, i think i came to realize how much i loved the people i worked with. I knew that, but the more i wrote, the more i appreciated how gifted, hardworking , just remarkable that the people who were part of my campaign and part of my white house were. You guys have read the book so you know that i devote an entire chapter to iowa for example. And my state director for iowa is a guy named paul seuss who remains a friend of mine but as i was writing about it, as i was talking about this guy who comes from a small midwestern town, conservative, who is not a flashy guy, kind of grumpy in his external behavior, but deep down is this hugely idealistic guy and he leads this team of kids to win the state for me and eventually launch us on the path to the white house. As im writing about it, and he would probably be embarrassed if he heard me say this because hes still kind of a grump sometimes or sarcastic, sardonic. I just realized how much i appreciated him. And how remarkable he was and he was not a big flashy figure. And i think time and again as i wre, it just made me appreciate the degree to which any worthwhile endeavor is a collective effort. Particularly the president of the uned states tends to be elevated as this singular individual, hero or villain depending on your take of any particularpresident. But ally, he and hopefully at some point she is just the front man read the front person. To a much broader and that her of a bunch of people who are making an enormous sacrifice and bringing huge skills to bear in trying to just move this big behemoth of a federal government in the direction that can actually help more people than is currently doing. Andi really , loved writing about others,probably a little bit more than i love writing about myself. There was great excitement for so many reasons including you were the first africanamerican president but what you may not know is there were many people who were excited about the first africaamerican writer to become predent. Dreams from my father was in africanamerican literature classes, taught alongside Frederick Douglasss narrative, malcom x books were reing and literacy and freedom were very important ideas that wer completely captured in dreams from myfather. So also we saw a picture of u a few days after that first election carrying a book of Walt Whitmans collected poems while going to your Daughters School so there were people who said the poets cheered and said theres something about the complexity simultaneously that poetry does. And so what i would like to know is what has your being a writer, how has that informed your governance . Its an interesting qution and i think a timely one. Because the essence to me of writing is being able to use your imagination to stand in somebody elses shoes and see through their eyes. To engage in this radical act of empathy and shape shifting where you can say all right, i can imagine what it might be like to be a young girl whos enslaved. And gone south and i can image myself as a elizabethan duke or whatever. Both as a reader and as a writer. And my politics i think has always been premed on this notion that if in fact america is to work, its going to be because we are unique among rate powers in being able to stitch together one people out of all these diverse strands of people who show up from everywhere with differentcultures and foods and music somehow it works. E pluribus unum, out of many, one. And in that sense, that is to me at least consistent with a writers ssibility. Walt whitman is to me describing not just the american countryside. Hes describing americas best polits. Abraham lincoln when he writes the second inaugural, that is a work of literature and hes imagining th sides to this great colict and what it means. And ultimately ends with malice d Charity Towards all. So that i think informed everything i did. Yosaw this during my presidency and you see it in some of the responses to the book, to a Promised Land. In our current political environment we have a lot of implications with that kind of be able to see the other side. And i think there have been a couple of reviewers and commentators who say look, obama is one side on theother hand the things. And location i think that you can see either side somehow you are paralyzed. At the sensibility means that you cant make decisions that you are because you dont knowway to turn. And the irony is that in fact for me it was the opposite. And i tried to explain his in the book, maybe some folksare impatient with it. Its precisely because i had people i had an issue and i would then feel as though i was making a gooddecision. The cause ive seen it from different angles. And this idea that overthinking problems was or is a weakness in politics i think is indicative of a culture in which we want to amplify and eliminate all gray areas and just have our way the other team as opposed to solving problems and figuring out how in factwe come together. And i, in part i suspect at least on the democratic side, donald trump eliminate all mplexity and just do atever he wants regardle of the consequences and demonizing the other side props i think this says that thats what we should be doing. We dont need some fancy overthinking poetic sensibilit we just need to, this is what we want and were going to go get it. Think thats a mistake because the outcome in terms of policy and being really bad. You end up making poor decisions and look, and the bookith bin laden, the raid into a monopod, hugely complex. It formed my is looking at a whole bunch of different angles to the problem. A whe bunch of exhaustive discussions andmeetings. But thatidnt stop me from then ultimate saying all right, thats what were going to do and it may not work so i actually think the writer sensibility is critical and useful so long as you recognize that once youve seen the complexities of any problem, you still have to make a decision and then be willing to bear the burden that your decision is not going to be perfect, that there may be some tragic unintended consequences to this issue. And you have to comfortable with that as well. You mention ths so intereing, you mentioned whitman so i am large, i contain multitudes of lines so well. I contradict myself, theres nothing wrong with that. There youo. I would love to hear about the fire next time youve given us so many wonderful descriptions of your grandparents going to a sidewalk sale, in new york. Tell us about another book that has beentransformative to you. Its one of those things where you were, if you ask me what the kind of talent that it seems like its just magic dust spriled on someone and suddenly they can write a book like that. It was the kindf book that after reading it i said my goodness, how do somebody do that . Iave to confess, shakespeare, shakespeares tragedies, i wasnt somebody who was raised on that. I i decided take a shakespeare class in college, and just reading those tragedies, it was that same kind of feeling where i thought, how is it that somebody can capture so much of what is essential about a human life quacks and yet still have a story,