Barack Obama laid out his concerns about picking Joe Biden as his running mate in the summer of 2008. The senator from Delaware loved to hear himself talk, he didn’t have a filter, and ''he wasn’t always self-aware,'' Obama writes in his new memoir.
While ''we couldn’t have been more different,'' Obama writes, he ''found the contrast between us compelling,'' along with what he called Biden’s good heart, foreign policy expertise, and appeal to the working class.
So, with the choice finalized, Obama and Biden awaited Republican nominee John McCain’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick. Biden learned of the decision in a meeting with Obama from a text message on an adviser’s BlackBerry.
''Who the hell is Sarah Palin?'' Biden said.
The story of the competing vice-presidential choices is one of many anecdotes in Obama’s new book, ''The Promised Land,'' in which he defends his legacy and explains what motivated him and at times left him distraught.
As Palin created a surge of interest in the Republican ticket, Obama briefly worried that he had been outfoxed by McCain, and that Palin would pull away enough undecided voters to swing the race to the GOP. But he soon figured the choice would backfire because ''on just about every subject relevant to governing the country she had absolutely no idea what the hell she was talking about.''
In the end, Obama writes, the most troubling aspect of the Palin pick was what it said about the devolving direction of the nation’s politics. Obama found Palin’s ineptitude ''troubling on a deeper level... her incoherence didn’t matter to the vast majority of Republicans,'' who saw questioning her knowledge of issues ''as proof of a liberal conspiracy.''
In response, Palin on Friday posted a comment on her Facebook page in which she thanked Obama for crediting her with shaping Republican politics, adding, ''It’s pleasurable to know I’ve lived rent free in your head these past twelve years.''
The book, the first of an expected two volumes on Obama’s presidency, will be publicly available on Tuesday. An advance copy was provided to The Washington Post by publisher Penguin Random House.
Obama writes of both the job’s loneliness and the importance of a trusted circle of confidants who saw him through it, including his wife, Michelle, and Biden, adviser David ''Axe'' Axelrod, campaign manager David Plouffe, and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. He heaps praise on all of them.
At the same time, he settles scores, scorns Republicans, and directs some unexpected zingers at fellow Democrats. Sizing up his 2008 primary rival Senator John Edwards, for example, Obama writes that he was never impressed; the North Carolinian’s ''newly minted populism sounded synthetic and poll-tested to me, the political equivalent of one of those boy bands dreamed up in a studio marketing department.''
Throughout the book, as Obama elaborates on the roadblocks he faced in pushing his agenda, he acknowledges that his inspirational campaign talk of hope and ''yes, we can'' was privately accompanied by bouts of doubt, despair, and regret. Time and again, he writes, he wondered whether he was the man for the moment, whether he was driven too much by ego and not his lofty ideals, and whether he was sacrificing too much of his family life for the political mire.
''I confess,'' Obama says in the preface, ''there have been times during the course of writing this book, as I reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we been promised.''
The book was completed in August, before Biden became president-elect. Nonetheless, read in the aftermath of the 2020 election, it serves as a preamble, laying out the divisions that resulted in the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the pitfalls that Biden is bound to encounter after taking office.
Obama recounts the difficulty of dealing with Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican then and now. Obama writes that Biden told him how McConnell had blocked one of his bills. When Biden tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell responded, ''You must be under the mistaken impression that I care,'' according to Obama, recounting the Kentucky senator’s ''shamelessness'' and ''dispassionate pursuit of power.''
Obama came into office vowing to work with Republicans, but he tells with increasing fury and frustration how the opposition party was just that — almost always in opposition. He recounts how he spent countless hours seeking to woo Republicans to support his health care plan.
In an atmosphere poisoned by false charges that he was not born in America, that he was a Muslim, and that he supported ''death panels'' that would determine the fate of older Americans, Obama says, it was hard enough to win GOP support. But he thought he had a chance with some Republican moderates such as Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, who supported the health plan in committee but voted against it on the floor.
He writes how he asked Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, whether any changes in the bill would win the Iowan’s vote. ''I guess not, Mr. President,'' Grassley responded, according to Obama. Grassley’s office released a statement Friday that said, ''Neither Sen. Grassley nor his senior staff at the time have any record or recollection of that and it’s unlikely that is something Sen. Grassley would say.''
The legislation passed without support from Republicans, many of whom have spent years trying to kill it.
Similarly, writing of efforts to court the support of Senator Lindsey Graham for climate change legislation, he said the South Carolina Republican ''liked to play the role of the sophisticated, self-aware conservative, disarming Democrats and reporters with blunt assessments of his party’s blind spots'' but then found ways to ''wriggle out'' of proposed compromises. He was like the character in a spy movie ''who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin,'' Obama writes.
Edwards, McConnell, and Graham did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.