Biden Should Have Said Obama Is Articulate for a Politician

A clear and engag­ing mem­oir, Dreams From My Father reads noth­ing at all like the writ­ing of a man run­ning for the Pres­i­den­cy. Oba­ma has a tal­ent for being simul­ta­ne­ous­ly plain-spo­ken and eru­dite; this comes through his prose as well as his ora­tion. I con­fess I’ve become a bit of a fan of his pod­cast because I enjoy lis­ten­ing to him. He unrav­els con­tro­ver­sy with­out didac­ti­cism and whether speak­ing from the heart or the mind he dis­plays uncom­mon sense. Right or wrong, the man is coherent.

This is the book to read if you want to get to know some­thing about the man, but not if you want to know how he would lead. This is all about his Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence and while there’s quite a bit to point in the direc­tion of his pol­i­cy lean­ings, it’s much more per­son­al, the sto­ry of a man find­ing his place in Amer­i­ca, in the world, in his cul­ture, his race, his fam­i­ly and his self. I get the impres­sion of a man who under­stands the Amer­i­ca that isn’t strict­ly Amer­i­can, the melt­ing pot that nev­er gets ful­ly blend­ed but leaves us con­nect­ed even as we are apart. This is nei­ther the immi­grant Amer­i­ca nor the home­stead­er Amer­i­ca. I think it may be the real Amer­i­ca, the one that is both but nev­er either.

Of spe­cial note is the fam­i­ly his­to­ry as relat­ed by his grand­moth­er. Over the course of some thir­ty pages near the end we’re giv­en an out­line of Barack­’s African lin­eage. The sto­ry has enough con­text to inform our under­stand­ing of his­to­ry. Some­times sto­ries from the past seem as though they are hap­pen­ing now but with an antiqued back­drop, oth­er times his­to­ry over­pow­ers the per­son­al. Even bet­ter though, when we get to see the con­ti­nu­ity, how the times affect the peo­ple who affect the atmos­phere that the next gen­er­a­tion will breathe. I found this to draw some of Oba­ma’s con­nec­tions in a way that I’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing while read­ing Free­dom and Uni­ty, the Ver­mont His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety’s his­to­ry of Ver­mont. I’ll go into that more lat­er, but now I’ll just say that I appre­ci­ate the con­nec­tion to place and what comes along with the sto­ries of those who came before.