In his exhaustive biography, “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” David Remnick seeks to illuminate Obama’s role as racial hero and lightning rod, and to discern the president’s own mixed feelings about it.
Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, examines how race made Obama, how it almost unmade him and how he has managed to straddle as well as exploit one of America’s great tender spots. Remnick moves across a wide canvas, writing about slave narratives and Chicago ward bosses; about the white women Obama dated and Frederick Douglass’ difficult relationship with Abraham Lincoln.
In the hands of other writers, Obama has proved to be something of a murky character study: a self-made man in the grand American political tradition, but one who has largely been allowed to romanticize his own story.
Remnick efficiently strips some of the gloss off the version Obama offered in his best-selling 1995 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” charitably and accurately describing that effort as “a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, re-creation, invention and artful shaping.”
A less admiring author could spin this tale more harshly. Instead of Obama the heroic change agent, we might have seen more of Obama the cagey political animal.
Those qualities are certainly present in “The Bridge.” Remnick writes that as a political neophyte in Chicago, Obama had no problem becoming “multilingual” — learning to speak in different ways to different groups.
Obama is revealed to be, of all things, a politician. Remnick finds evidence of this hard- nosed streak in everything Obama has done, from his time in the Illinois Senate to his surprisingly efficient dispatch (and later embrace) of Hillary Rodham Clinton to his choice of a church in Chicago. And of course, the world saw how happy he was ultimately to pick up the brass knuckles to get his health- care bill enacted.
“You can’t interpret what Obama does without thinking of the power factor”” one old Obama acquaintance, Mike Kruglik, tells Remnick. He may be doing things not only for the right reasons, Kruglik suggests, but also because he wants to make sure his hands are on the levers.
Obama confesses to this as well. When Democrats took control of the Illinois Senate, he remembers, he went from back-bencher in his sixth year to passing 26 bills in a row in his seventh.
“In one year, we reformed the death penalty in Illinois, expanded health care for kids, set up a state earned income tax credit,” he says.
“It wasn’t that I was smarter in year seven than I was in year six, or more experienced; it was that we had power. … You can have the best agenda in the world, but if you don’t control the gavel you cannot move an agenda forward.”
Lacking power, Obama is shown to be the ultimate pragmatist. If he can’t be in control, he is ready to move on. Remnick mentions frequently how easily Obama can get bored. He was bored at Occidental, the first college he attended; bored at the University of Chicago, where as a teacher he focused on writing his first book; bored in the Illinois Senate; and even bored in the U.S. Senate, where he was more interested in writing his second book.
Remnick obviously admires the president, so he does not interpret such lofty boredom as peevish or self-absorbed, as critics might. Perhaps it is that generosity to Obama — gushy praise, Nobel Peace Prizes — that drives his political competitors nuts.
Bobby Rush, the congressman and former Black Panther, is apparently still disdainful of the young Harvard Law School transplant who had the nerve to challenge him in 2000 (Obama lost, badly, in part because black voters were suspicious of his racial bona fides).
Obama’s critics also complain that the newcomer got an easy ride from the news media.
Mark Salter, John McCain’s campaign adviser, co-author and alter ego, is more blunt: Obama won because his race played into reporters’ romantic notions about the arc of civil rights history. “The truth is, all that will be remembered of the campaign is that America’s original sin was finally expunged,” he says. The McCain forces, Remnick concludes, saw Obama as absurdly fortunate.
There may be something to that. Obama was elected to the Senate only after not one but two credible contenders had contentious divorce papers unsealed. He was elected president because Clinton’s campaign was chaotic, but also because Americans were eager to reverse course from a deeply unpopular Republican president.
It takes an arms-length biographer to fill in Obama’s gaps; Remnick is not quite that.
But Remnick deserves credit for telling Obama’s story more completely than others, for lending a reporter’s zeal to the task, for not ducking the discussion of race and for peeling back several layers of the onion that is Barack Obama.
NONFICTION
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
by David Remnick, $29.95
