Barack Obama: the Prince who was promised, and failed.
Barack Obama is central to modern American political mythology. He was the Prince who was promised. The promise was memorialised by Obama in his presidential memoir, A Promised Land.
Assessments of Barack Obama are as yet passionate and partisan. They range from the “worst president in history” to hagiographies of a political saint. There is a reason for these polarised views; they are all animated by the political mythology that the “American Experiment” will be redeemed by the Prince who was promised.
You are he who must stand against the Other. The one whose coming was prophesied five thousand years ago. The red comet was your herald. You are the prince that was promised, and if you fail the world fails with you.
—Melisandre, to Stannis Baratheon, George R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
But Barack Obama disappointed and failed.
A new Prince who was promised emerged, followed by an opposing group of faithful. But belief in the prophecy of a Promised Land in the USA did not die.
Barack Obama’s Many Autobiographies
Barack Obama has written not one, but three memoirs.
In Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) he told his origin story, and how he fashioned a political identity, as the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother. His story spanned Hawaii, Indonesia, Chicago, and Kenya. He presented himself as the promised prince who, at the right moment, would reveal his destiny to the world.
In The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006) he declared that destiny to the world, as part of his run for President. The Prince who was promised dared to hope and dared to dream of One United States of America.
Four years after leaving office, Obama published A Promised Land (2020). This first volume of his presidential memoirs covered his early political career, 2008 presidential campaign, and first term in office. It is the book that I recommend this week on my world history tour.
A second volume of presidential memoirs is planned to cover his second term and post-presidency reflections. Reportedly, Obama played a major role behind the curtain during Biden’s Presidency. He will have more time now to complete his memoir. My guess is it will be published in 2026, in the lead-up to the midterm elections.
A Promised Land can be read in awe of the legend of Barack Obama. The writing is skilful; the mythology can be mesmerising. But I read Obama’s memoir as a historical source document to assess the legacy of this unique American who has decisively shaped how the world perceives America.
How Obama Defaulted on His Promise
American readers will have many passionate views about Barack Obama. American historians and commentators have weighed in with similar vehemence. The scholarship is not really in, especially since the rival claimant to the prophecy came to power. Julian E. Zelizer edited a collection in 2018, The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment. But to be frank, since Obama still plays a major role in American politics, it is too early to make a true historical assessment.
I do not want to get into the details and the debates. My assessment is an outsider’s view, like a falcon viewing a threat from above. I am not a citizen of the USA, but, here in Australia, a subject of its empire. In the early Roman Empire, the term peregrinus (Latin for foreigner, one from abroad) was a free provincial subject of the Empire who was not a Roman citizen. In this circling peregrine falcon’s view, Obama failed as the prince who was promised on three counts.
The first failure was in foreign policy.
Notoriously the Norwegian committee of ex-politicians and dignitaries who bestow the Nobel Prize awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama before he had even taken office. It was a statement of belief in the Prince who was promised. This act of faith symbolised a communal emotion, the audacity of the world’s hope in a genuine American peacemaker. Obama soon broke his promise with the world.
He never closed Guantanamo. He killed foreigners and Americans with drones. He kept the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going. He destroyed Libya and began the unravelling in Syria. The ruin of Ukraine began on his instigation, as USA agents engineered the Maidan coup of 2014. He crushed European sovereignty during the long Eurozone financial crisis. He pivoted to Asia, to launch a Second Cold War against China. Then in his last lame year in office, he enabled, for petty partisan reasons, the RussiaGate hoax that has poisoned relations with the nuclear superpower Russia ever since.
The second failure was in domestic policy.
His response to the 2008 financial crisis rescued the banks and entrenched economic inequality. In retrospect, it was an enormous grant of wealth from the people to the super rich. He wrung his hands and shed his tears after every mass shooting, but did nothing major on guns. The opioid crisis escalated under his watch. Education, cities, crime worsened. Most of all, he failed in his eponymous act, Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act left the USA with the worst health system in the world.
The third failure was how he governed.
His supporters complain that he failed to receive credit for his many achievements. But that is the job of politics. He was big on vision, bad on delivery; and Obamacare was the magic pudding proven in the eating. He mismanaged the conservative backlash, and lost his Congressional majority. After eight years, the Democratic party dreams had crashed. In 2008, they believed the Prince who was promised had delivered them to a Promised Land of a Permanent Governing Coalition. By 2016, they were thrown out by a mob of deplorables.
Margaret Thatcher was once asked what was her greatest success. Her answer was “Tony Blair.” The history books might record that Barack Obama’s greatest failure was Donald Trump.
When I write “he” failed, of course, Obama, as a person, is just a symbol. He represents the American Presidency and the American state. I will discuss all three failures – foreign, domestic and governance - and its implications for the Presidency and the nature of the American State in my deep dive this week, drawing from Obama’s own memoirs in A Promised Land.
Pity the Country that Needs Heroes
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!…
Galileo: No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes.
Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo (1939) scene 13
The failure of the Prince who was promised should not be interpreted as an individual failure of Barack Obama. He is clearly in the top decile of abilities as a political leader, if most likely also in the top decile of some of those leaders’ faults, such as vanity and over-estimation of his ability to control events.
It is also a failure of the presidency, and in that way the American political system. The Presidency is vested with symbolic power. The State is sometimes named after Madison or Truman. Perhaps historians of the future will describe the state composed of the Washington Gang, a coordinated information and academic complex, and an ideology of repressive liberalism as the Obamian State.
My deep dive will examine in more depth the failure of the Presidency and how, if you realise this failure crashes over institutions and culture, you can break the spell of American Democracy.
In the preface, Obama reflected on his fluctuations between doubt and audacious hope about how he led “us in the directions of the America we’ve been promised.” He came down on the side of the prophecy of the prince who was promised:
“What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America - not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.”
A Promised Land, p. xvi
Obama’s vision falls flat before me. He appears as just another insular American ignorant of world history. “And so the world watches America,” Obama claims. The USA, he says falsely, is “the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice.” In this way he speaks like too many Americans who conflate America with the world, and the world with America.
His point, however, is an old one: that America is the light on the hill, the innovators from the frontier, the New World freed from the sins of the rest of the world, the new homeland of Western civilization and democracy.
“And so the world watches America… to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.”
A Promised Land, p. xvi
This is a mythology that even the grand oligarch Elon Musk buys into and gives his own meaning. The Trump Hopers and MAGA enthusiasts believe in this American fantasy as much as neo-conservatives and patriotic progressives.
Barack Obama says the jury is out on his implied question. He might answer it with a resounding, “Yes, we can.”
The world responds with a mocking, “No, you don’t.”
But Obama needs to realise that much of the world no longer watches America.
The world is weary of American ignorance of the world’s many more successful experiments in democracies and other governing institutions.
The world knows many nations have done what America has failed to do, including delivering universal health care, organising a decent welfare state, and cultivating multilingual, multifaith tolerant societies.
The world is finished with watching its citizens die in the endless wars fuelled by the real creed of the USA.
That creed has many names, all taste like bitter ash. American Greatness. America First. American Empire. American Primacy. Manifest Destiny. American Supremacy. America Über Alles.
That is the darkness in the heart of the prince who was promised.
The problem with both Obama and Trump is not the individual President
It is the belief that the Presidency can take the USA to a Promised Land.
That will be the subject of my deep dive on Wednesday, as well as sharing more with you from A Promised Land on the three counts of Barack Obama’s failure.
Next week: The Great Gatsby and American Modernism.
The schedule for the World Tour is right here.
