Sometimes timing plays a decisive role in shaping one’s life and future. A move a little earlier or a little delayed may make or mar one’s life. This, by hindsight, seems to be true about the US President-elect Joe Biden. As raving reviews with excerpts from former US President Barack Obama’s latest book, A Promised Land, are appearing in the media worldwide, here comes a startling revelation by Obama that might have dashed to the ground Biden’s hope of becoming President had the book been published before the first vote was cast.
For, in the book, Obama graphically describes the moments when he ordered the raid on Osama Bin Laden hiding in Pakistan. He made the final decision alone in the Treaty Room at the White House, with a basketball game on in the background. The book confirms that Joe Biden advised against the raid. Had the book been out during the run-up to the US Presidential election, the disclosure would undoubtedly have hurt Biden’s prospect. But, the fact that it has been published after the electoral fate of both Biden and Donald Trump is known, this revelation is being construed differently. The Guardian remarked: “Now the fact offers some assurance of Biden’s relatively sober approach in wielding US military power.”
Biden’s moderation while dealing with Laden is also in keeping with his political convictions that have been guiding his political career performing the balancing act trying to build bridges between his own party leaders and his opponents, the Republicans. The US SEAL’s strike at Laden’s hideout at Abbottabad, Pakistan could have been interpreted differently had the US electorate learnt about it from Obama’s book just before the Presidential election.
In the preface, Obama writes he set out to tell the tale of his presidency in 500 pages and finish it within a year. But, an additional three years and 200 pages later, he was able to map only some of his Presidential journey. The book takes readers from his childhood to the May, 2011 killing of Osama, filling the pages with frank disclosures and pen pictures of events and prominent political leaders he met across the world. One more volume is planned that will encompass the second term of his presidency. It’s not the portraiture of the characters of politicians across the world that forms the core of the narrative. Behind the chronology of the Obama years, the inherited economic crisis, the fight over affordable healthcare and repositioning the USA in global scheme of things, lurks the theme of racist resentment and hate-mongering that marked Trump’s presidency. This is most relevant in post-Trump life in the USA when, as the President-elect has already said, his task would be to ‘heal’ the festering wounds of divisive politics practised by Trump.
All the same, Obama’s thumbnail sketches of political personalities are both damning and glowingly appreciative. Vladimir Putin is compared to a party boss from the dark age of Chicago machine politics, “except with nukes and a UN security council veto.” David Cameron is delineated as urbane and confident, though imbued with “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life.” He humorously describes Hu Jintao’s propensity to read out from written texts all the time making him wonder whether it would have been a better idea to collect his speeches rather than wasting time in meeting him.
Obama’s panegyrics of Manmohan Singh and dismissive remarks about Rahul Gandhi are as candid as his concern about the BJP’s brand of politics that prompted him to observe whether impulses like violence, greed, corruption, nationalism and racism are ‘too strong’ for any democracy to permanently contain. On Manmohan Singh he writes: “The Prime Minister said in uncertain times the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.”
Most autobiography writers have this advantage of holding on to a holier than thou attitude when discussing others whom they might have met in the passing and very casually. Obama’s book, which hit the stands yesterday, Tuesday, may turn out to be the same. And it may be noted that India and its politicians have a very small mention overall in the book.