Preface

Barack Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004 vaulted him into national promise and four years later, into his election as President of the United States. Having watched the speech, I decided to learn more about this intriguing young leader, who became the nation’s first Black American president. Over the years, I have read extensively on his life and political career, including his memoirs and those by other senior administration officials as well as his speeches and public papers, newspapers, magazines, and contemporary journals.

What became clear about the forty-fourth president’s life was his commitment to a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society. Obama was, however, also an economic conservative, something more generally ignored in the existing literature, which emphasizes instead his pragmatism and progressivism. His conservativism explains why he became so criticized both by Democrats on his political left and Republicans on his political right and accounts in part for the congressional deadlock that he encountered throughout much of his administration after the congressional election of 2010. In this biography I seek to explain and elaborate on this conservative aspect of his political views. I also try to explain why and how Obama made the decisions he did throughout his life, but especially during his presidency.

I do not deal at length on the background for each of the important decisions that Obama made, although I attempt to provide enough context for the reader to understand the issues he faced. I focus, for example, on why in 2009 he decided against the advice of many White House officials, to make passage of the landmark Affordable Care Act (ACA) his highest domestic priority and why he responded so enthusiastically to the so-called Arab Spring beginning at the end of 2010 despite the outbreak of violence, the overthrow in Egypt of a long established government and ally of the United States, and the civil wars taking place in Libya and Syria that accompanied the Arab Spring.

While I have sought not so much to pass judgment on the Obama presidency as to understand it, I make clear throughout the book and, more explicitly, in my conclusion my belief that future historians and biographers will evaluate Obama as one of the nation’s best post–World War II presidents along with Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.