I titled it to the Promised Land because even though we may not get there in our lifetimes and we experience hardship and disappointment along the way, i still have faith we can create a more perfect union. Good morning and welcome to a very special edition of Washington Post live. Im opening and columnist for the Washington Post and founding director of the race card project. For the special conversation to see morning im joined by my dear friend elizabeth alexander, poet, scholar and president of the Andrew W Mellon foundation. Good morning, elizabeth. Good morning. Its wonderful to be together. And together with we both welcome our guest for the conversation, the 44th president of the United States, barack obama. Good morning, sir. Washington post brought out the big guns for this one. We are so excited to see you. Im three grateful that you guys took the time. We are so excited to talk to you about your book but this is a News Organization so we do have to begin with a bit of news. Weve learned astrazeneca has joined to other Drug Companies in their success. Based on your experience i wonder what you think of the challenges of distributing a vaccine and if you are concerned about the drift to worlds the new world hierarchy for some its easy access and some people dont. Thats going to be the big challenge. I think we are all excited about the results that are even better than i think a lot of scientists anticipated. And now the challenge becomes how do we distribute it rapidly and make sure people actually are willing to get vaccinated. Thats both a logistical and economic public messaging challenge. And it hasnt been made easier that weve had a incoherent federal Communications Strategy to say the least when it comes to science and the whole science around covid. My understanding, and im not a scientific expert, part of the challenge at least for the first two vaccines that were developed is that they have to be stored at certain temperatures that puts a little additional challenge on distributing it widely. I think one of the big tasks for the Biden Administration coming in will be to make sure we have protocols about who gets it first. Whether its frontline workers, people that are the most vulnerable and move forward from there and then we have International Issues because historically what has happened when we have drugs like this they are expensive and often times poor countries are the last to get it if they get it at all. International coordination is going to be important and then finally as i said, the public messaging counteracts whatever suspicions and conspiracy theories are pretty powerful and we 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 the joe Biden Administration will look like. Youve seen some names familiar to you including anthony blinking to be named soon as the secretary of state. Will he be able to quickly convince european allies that the trump pompeo period was an aberration and try to restore trust and a working relationship that right now have a rather close armed view of the United States . I know tony. He was my Deputy National security advisor and the Foreign Policy advisor who was part of our circle in all of our key meetings throughout the presidency. Hes outstanding, smart, gracious, a skilled diplomat wellregarded around the world and i know hes going to do a great job. The reports are that Jake Sullivan will serve as the National Security advisor young and energetic which is going to be outstanding. So you are seeing a team develop that i have great confidence in. I think its going to be important to recognize that the confidence that our allies have and the world had in American Leadership isnt going to be restored overnight. They will be greatly relieved and pleased to see people like tony at various conferences around the world returning to the traditional leadership role the u. S. Has played. But there is going to be a lingering sense that america is still divided, that some of the shenanigans going on right now around the election that that is making the world question how reliable and steady the u. S. May be. The reversal of u. S. Positions of things like the ai that airen deal and paris accords are going to create some inhibitions in terms of entering into agreements, not always being certain whether or not they will be reversed by future administrations, so theres been some damage done thats going to take some time to dig ourselves out of. But theres no doubt that joe has the right people to do it and i have every confidence they will be able to do it its just may not happen instantaneously. Will you participate in the campaign or help in any way the Democratic Candidates that are running for senate in georgia . I think its a huge critically important election if in fact they were able to win those seats they would have a sliver of the majority in the senate with the Vice President , a tiebreaker, so i will do what im asked to do in terms of being helpful. At the end of the day that will be determined by the people of georgia. I am always flattered when people say its going to make all the difference. Ultimately i think what makes a difference is people like Stacey Abrams who has been working for years in the trenches, galvanizing and mobilizing people to recognize their own power. I am a huge believer in grassroots bottomup work and i and i think what started with the Gubernatorial Campaign that she perpetuated and others got involved with, thats the reason that georgia went for joe biden, and i think thats what its going to take for us to be able to sustain this down the road. If im doing some robo calls or guest appearances, it gets people excited, but its the people recognizing their own power that makes all the difference. A. We want to get to a discussion about the book and im going to turn over to elizabeth who will start the questioning. Let us talk about hello there. Let us talk about the writing of this wonderful book, and i want to put out to you the idea that autobiography is a Great American genre. I think because america he believes in the south and the i and we is what we get in the collective picture in the autobiography. So i wonder if you were writing a Promised Land how have you thought about the genre or the autobiography and how the tone developed that you were writing . Part of it is america believes itself, and part of it is one of the essential elements of being american is this idea of self creation. That we are not bound by whatever station we were born into. Whether that is methodological or fully reflected in the reality of class barriers and race barriers and others. Its part of us that we have internalized. I am going to get out there and make something of myself. And certainly my first book dreams from my father was that kind of story of me as a young person trying to figure out racial identity and how i fit into this new world, first in hawaii and places like chicago. Theres no doubt that i learned to write also in part from sort of the personal narrative. If you ask me whats a book that taught me to think about how i would like to write what i would aspire to write, even though i canwrite that good, it would be probably by James Baldwin, an autobiographical essay that tells a story thathares his internal and complete portrait of preachers andheres an entire world in a few square blocks that suddenly gives a picture of all of america in a sweeping history. I read books like that. That was my creative writing plan so theres no doubt when i thought about writing this memoir, those were my models as opposed to the traditional president ial memoir when i became such and such or met with Prime Minister such and such. And how well i succeeded in tracking that kind of literary approach it will be up to the readers but that certainly part of what i was trying to do. Of course James Baldwin didnt have to stick in such long explanations of the financial crisis or nuclear negotiations. Every time once in a while you would realize ive got to do a little history and work here and try to find that balance and it was sometimes tough. Thank you. Can i ask more now . We were writing this period there was also all this noise happening and you have to decide what degreeou will lead to that in. This is when the policies were under interrogion and being fully arranged. How much of that influenced you i imaginet was almost like having an element o elephant onr shouer when you were wking on your off work. Is interesting i dont think it actually affected it that much partly because i, even though i ended up breaking this into two volumes, i had a pretty clear sense of the bulk of the story, and i know how the story and at least the end of my presidencyith donald trump coming into office and i had already internalized and understood what his presidency was going to do and stood for s all this that was happening wasnt shocking or surprising to me. I would say if anything, what probably influenced the book when 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 the way they did. It strengthened my conviction that in fact despite the backwards movement my successor represented on things like Climate Change or Voting Rights or ecomic equity tha there was still this Forward Motion that would be carried out by those that have been affected by my presidency and that would help lead us Going Forward so if anything i probably got more convinced about the story. I came to realize how much i loved the people i worked with. The more i wrote, the more i appreciated how gifted, hardworking, just remarkable the people who are part of the campaign and part of my whitehouse work. Youve read the book so you know that i devote an entire chapter to iowa for example, andy state dector for iowa, paul who remains a friend of mine, but as i was writi about it and talking about this guy who comes from a small midwestern town, conservative who isnt a flashy guy, kind of grumpy in his external behavior but deep down hugely idealistic. He would lead this team of kids to win the states for me and essentially launch us on the path to the white house. As im writing about him, and he would be embarrassed if he heard me talking about this because hes a grump sometimes still, but i realizedow much i appreciated h and how remarkable he was. He wasnt a big flashy figure and i think i am and again as i wrote made me appreciate the degree to which any worthwhile endeavor is a collective effort particularly the president of the United States tends to be elevated as a singular individual, hero or villain depending on your take of any particular president. But he and hopefully at some point she is just the front person to a much broader endeavor of a bunch of people making enormous sacrifices and bringing huge skills to bear trying to just move this big behemoth of a federal government in a direction that can actually help more peoplehan it is currently doing. But i loved writing about others probably more than i loved writing about myself. With great excitement for so many reasons including you were the first africanamerican prident but what you may not know is there were many people who were excited the first africanamerican writer had become president. Its the truth. Dreams from my fatheras already being taughtn africanamerican literature classes and alongsi books like Frederick Douglass narrative, the autobiography ofalcolm x, books where reading and literacy self making and freedom were very important ideas that were completely carried through in dreams fro my father. Alsohere was a picture of you a few days after the first election carrying a book of collective poems while going to ur Daughters School so there were people who said the poets all cheered and theres something abou holding complexity simultaneously th poetry does and we thoht he does that, tomac. What i would wt to know is what has your being a writer, how has that informed your government and leadership . Its an interesting question and i thk a timely one because the essence to me of writing is being able to use your imination to stand in somebody elses shoes and see through their eyes, to engage in thi radical act of empathy and shape shifting before you can say i would imagine what it might be like to be a young girl whose enslaved in the antebellum south or i couldmagine myself as a duke or whatever. My politics i think have always beenremised on this notion that if in fact america is to work its going to be because we are unique among the power being able to stitch togethe one people out of all of these diverse strands of people who show up with different cultures and foods and music and somehow it works. Walt whitman to me is describing not just to the american countryside. Hes describing americas best politics. Abraham lincoln whene writes the second inaugal and that is a work of literatures he is imagining both sides to this great conflict and what it means and it ultimately ends with malice towards none, so that i think infoed everything i did. Whs been interesting and use all this during my presidency and you see it in some of the responses to the book, to the Promised Land in the current political environment we have a lot of inpatients and i think thereve been a couple of reviewers and commentators who say look at obama hes overthinking things and the implication i think is if you can see the other side then somehow you are paralyzed, that the writers sensibility means you cannot make decisions because you dt know whichay to turn. The argument is for me it was the opposite and i try to explain this in the book may be some folks are just inpatient with it. Itsecause i can precisely see both sides or all and i would feel as if i were making a decision because had seen it from different angles and this idea that overthinking problems was or is a weakness in politics i think it is indicativ of a culture in which we want to simplify and eliminate all gray areas and beat the other team as opposed to solving problems and figuring out how in fact we come gether. In part i suspect at least on the democratic side seeing donald tmp eliminate all complexity and just do whatever he wants regardless of the consequences and demizing the other side prompts i think this sense that thats what we should be doing, tomac. We dont need a fancy overthinking poetic sensibility. St at this is what we want and we are going to go get it. I think thats a mistake because as the outcome in terms of policy is really bad you end up making poor decisions and i and the book with bin laden, hugely complex and informed by us looking at a whole bunch of different angles to the problem. A bunch of exhausted discussions and meetings but that didnt stop me from ultimately saying thats what we are going to do and it may not work. So i think that the writers sensibility is critical and useful so long as you recognize that onceouve seen the complexities of any problem you still have to make decision and then be willing to bear the burden that yourecision isnt gog to be perfect and there may be some tragic unintended consequences and you have to be comfortable with that as well. I keep hearing also i contain multitudes. I would love to talk about the fire next time but youve given descriptions of rummaging inour grandparents garage and going to a Sidewalk Sale wn you are in new york city and columbia reading. Talk to u about another book that has been transformative for you. I mentioned toni morrison. The song of solomon that was another book i wanted t write. Its one of those things if you asked me whats the kind of talent it seems magic dust sprinkled someone and suddenly they can write a book like that it was the kd of book after reading it i have to confess shakespearesragedies i wasnt somebody that was raised on the. I decided to take a shakespeare class in college and just reading those tragedies it was the same kind of feeling where i thought how is it somebody can capture so much growth what is essential about a human life and yet still have a story and a plot and interesting things happen so that u are carried forward. When i think about the great works of american writers, whether its falconer or hemingway or Langston Hughes i see what i mentioned earlier, that part of myself that is constantly dissatiied and restless and wanting to see whats next and leaving the past hind but always being drawn back to it. When i think about my own work i am shaped by the quintessential open road looking westeeing whats next or in the case of somebody like ederick douglass lookg north to see whats next but eitr way, wanting to break the chains of wtever constraints we were born into and bound to. Id like to ask about the organizing structure. The book begins with a section called the vet and ends with a seion called of the high wire where you are n sure ift has yielded dividends and its interesting the noti being looking at your presidency and your life and perhaps the question whether the nation built on the cultural deflt and people who look a certain way could holin its hand democracy if it w willing to elect someone from outside of the minority culture. How did you use that as a sort of organizing pnciple and is that where this whole story begins . You were talking about my literary influences but one of my profound influenc influencese about in the book is on gandhi and he famously titled one of his works my experiments in truth. So if you track his career, hes basically starting in south africa advocating on behalf of collards and develops some of the techniques. He keeps on just trying stuff seeing if it is going to work and developing a set of principles around nonviolence and nonviolent resistance and i thought about that when i started getting into politics not because i thought i could mimic his extraordinary life and success but because i thought it was a good way of thinking about a political career. I had gotten a good education and i knew i could support a family if i failed theres only so far i could fall. I wasnt going to be on the streets. I could afford to take some risks and the bet that i was making from the getgo even driving to chicago to become a Community Organizer and then running for the state senate and u. S. Senate and ultimately writing for the presidency was this belief that it was possible both to have a progressive politics that actually won the elections and garnered a majority of people that you could put together multiracial coalitions that despite the racial divides it was both possible and necessary to bridge the divides in order to advance a progressive agenda. A bit somebody with as weird a background as mine and a funny name could help lead such a coalition. And may b maybe the biggest betl that i could participate in politics at the highest level without losing my soul and the cultural stereotype is that not just that power corrupts absolutely, but political power in particular is inherently game oshady deals and insider maneuvering. All of thoseere some gambles that i took. And i thinkhat first part of the book describes the nature of that debt and ameris place in th world. This volume ends not with it hang been decided. I end up making a particular bad about whether bin laden is going to b because if i get that wrong i may end up being a one term president , but as i point out in the book, there are despite the success of that particular endeavor the broad question of whether or not the kind of political, world and public life and public trust that im hoping for is achievable, that is still open to question because i deliberately and the first volume with the contrast tween this incredible collective endeavor with the circus of Birther Donald trump has concocted andts an indicor that itsnt at all clear which ishe more prevant trend in american politics. The conspiracy mongering, racially charged spectacle or is is this deliberate, thoughtful, professional analytically robust process ofolving problems and getting stuff don at the end of the book we dont know yet. A quick question aut that spectacle. When you heardf the early rumbling of that, senator palin talked about as if the dark spirits that had been lurking on thworking onthe edges of e moden Republican Party xena phobia, antiintellectualism, conspiracy theories andere finding their way to the center stage. When you first heard tt, you have a chance to revisit that in this book and im wdering if you feel like you should have pushed harder against those forces and if you did, what would that have lked like, would that earlieorthat earlierh yourself looked like in that part of the book . Sheas the nominee on the other side of a contested president ial race and i pushed pretty haragainst by beating her and john mccain. We won by sizable margins contesting that worldview and the opposition that plays repeated with the party and we are thinking about how they might appeal with the use of wer. Look, a couple of observations, first of all i should note, and i try to do so in the book people are able to remember sarah palin but less likely to remember pat buchanan, who was peddling that same kind of politics back in 1992 and before that. Theres there is a long history. The difference i think with palin is that she became t nominee whereas with pat buchanan despite doing well in the republican primary, George Hw Bush tried to sidelined him as much as he could and so this was the first act of that kind of approach becoming central to republican identity and consuming and overwlming what to that point had been viewed as more of establishment establishe brand of the conservatism. Post election theres no doubt im wondering are there steps i could have taken to counteract or challenge more directly these attitudes that were lurking in the Republican Party. Im always wrestling with this. There is a school of thought i think i describ in the book there were critics within the Democratic Party who felt as if i tried too hard for too long to reach outnd to be bipartisan, to accommodate republicans, to assume the best as opposed to just call them out and be more aggressive in going after them. And i understand that impulse, but what those critics never described for me was what exactly that was going to do in terms of me actually getting stuff done as opposed to just feeling good. Perhaps their argument is i would have rallied my side and weould have seen higher turnout and so forth because people ultimately are motivated by tt sense of theres a fight as oppos to we are trying to cut deals. Part of my goal was to clarify to people the degree to which the countr really is divided and ere are, this is a big complicated country and to get anything done certainly legislively you have to figure outow to kick off and accommodate more conservative thany base in chigo or manhattan or San Francisco and denouncing or decrying attitudes that were not sufficiently woke wasnt going to get me more votes to pass healthcare or deal with Climate Change or what have you and certainly at least in my first two yearshen i had the libuster ithis nonconstitutional rule that aros out of a bad decision by aaron byrd that ends up creating a super majority requirement in the senate given tt that was a reality at the timthe only w i cou get stuff done,en nelson was a conservative democrat from nebraska. He had to be conservative and i had to get the reality in my first two years venerated in the senate and also a former clan leader whose states economy were based on coal and Joe Lieberman wa part of the caucus and had endorsed mccain in the race against me but he was a part of the caucus and so part of what i want people coming out of writing this book understanding is there is a prophetic voice as we talk about mes baldwin earlier theres a voice a writer can or civil rights leader or activist or Movement Leader can use to motivate and mobilize and change society and that voice often times is the thing that will open up possibilities politics because its changing peoples hearts and minds but the language of politics itself is very rarely moved or shaped by that kind of prophecy because ultimately, you need votes and in terms it is prose and not poetry so part of my challenge was campaigning in some high poetry using the writers since ability to describe who we are and what we might be. Sometimes progressives in particular underestimate the degree that the rhetoric is going to actually move quotes. What i wanted to add to that and where i wanted to go from there you sai you were writing the book explicitly to younger people so what is yr diagnostic for the Unfinished Business that they have depth as they move along se us and as they come to leads . Im so excited tsee this generationoming up with usld folks would just get outf the way. Thats true in terms of our politics and i think the instincts are really good and its Second Nature for them to believe they have intrinsic dignity and its Second Nature for them to not discriminate against people because of their differences in race or gender identity. They are sophisticated and smart and taking in culture from not just all across the country, but all around the world and they are highly idealistic. The question for them is how do we build instutions that work in this modern era and that reflect those good impulses and the work for this next generation is to channel their idealism as well as their skepticism into a rebld to work to meet the challenges. Lets just take the criminal justice system. I think young people understand the need to remake that in a pretty sigficant way and the challenge is going to be how do we get gralar about reimagining with the policing would look like so that for example we are not sending Police Officers with live ammunition and Mental Health services and an intervention and theres a way to deescalate but how do y practically do that. And how do we create on the Climate Change front how do we actually create anconomy that can still provide jobs for young people and keep the enge of the economy going but actually is going to preserve the planet for our kids and grandkids and how do we me the politicshat is responsive because i think they recognize whether its arou Immigration Reform theres whole bunch of things the majority believe in and if you cant get the congress to do anything about it, theres all kinds of institutional reboots that have to be done and thats going to require not just imagining Better Outcomes but its actually going to be some reengineering, some tinkeng to make thesenstitutions work better. Thats hd to do. The best example of that is the fact w are not going to be able to getood voting reform so that everybodys vote is coued and sots easier for everybody to vote and everybos votes count to influence congress. We cant get that donentil we get over the hump of having the majorityn congress to pass a new Voting Rights law and in each of the ces you have these barriers you have to get over the hump in order to create the institutional changes necessary to keep this going in a better direction. I know elizabeth has a question abt an observation and we had chance to dive into this and theres things we both really particularly appreciat in the use of character and language and the way that y explain really diffilt topics and make them accessible. I appreciate your willingness to talk about flaws and the steps that youve made and since you want young people to read this i know we donhave a lot of time but if you could quickly address whether that was done for the next generation know most people dont come out into leadershipully formed and its harder and harder to work in public life, if theres reason you did that. Bombarded because of the froze looking at instagram or how Mark Zuckerberg w a billionaire by 27. They are comparing themselves against which they assess themselves are so out of whack for most of us are experiencing in our twenties and thirties i worry about that somimes. I want young people to see somebody who ended up having a fairly successful career didnt know what the heck he was doing at 23 or 24 or 25 or well into his thirties still experiencing doubt and confusion and making mistakes. Even when i was running and on the cover of Time Magazine attracting huge crowds i would make gaffes and watch it. Thats okay. I probably cant transmit th through the book. I think it has to beoved but i try to describe one of the great gifts to be my age im just not afraid of much have been knocked out a bunch of times i ve embarrassed myself i have publicly failed. People have read articles about my feelings and i have been criticized and ostracized and demonized. But i am so here. Im okay. Thats a hard thing to internalize in your twenties or thirties but to the extent the book can help the young president say okay its worth me taking a chance and trying hard things and when i screw this up because that is part of the process i think its worth it. The most beautiful moment in the book youve won the Nobel Peace Prize you look out the window and to see if People Holding candles to use your words whatever you do wont be enough but try anyway. What do those words mean to you now . I think thats we tell ourselves hopefully every morning when we get up. Thats not unique to politics life wl throw stuff out you in there will be disappointments there will be pain and loss and we know at the end of the day we die. That is the one certainty that we have that this is temporary but yet there is a massive possibility of joy along the way as long as we try and are open to it. As long ase experience and more than anything as long as we reach out and are sharing this with others that we love and care about. And hopefully we continually expand the circumference of that love and concern to reach more people. Thats just not a political point of view thats a life and spiritual point of view ultimately thats how we get through the tough times and enjoy the good ones. We are out of time we have to say goodbye. This has been so fun to conduct this conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you. And president obama thank you for joining us to help us understand your writing process and writing the book. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much
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