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One of the things missing from former president Barack Obama’s memoir “A Promised Land” is a chapter dedicated to race — one that is thick with his detailed thoughts about how America’s. A Promised Land is the first volume in the memoir or biography series penned by American President Barack Obama. It was published in 2020, just after the 2020 USA Presidential Elections ended. In this book, Barack Obama wonders what the outcome of that election would be and starts his biography with that theme in mind.

Book club questions and discussion for A Promised Landby Barack Obama provides an in-depth look at each important aspect of this memoir.

A Promised Land is the first presidential memoir that I’ve read. It’s a huge book with so many rich details. It seemed people expected this memoir to come out earlier but you can tell that Obama put so much thought and time into getting this right. I learned quite a bit while reading it.

Since A Promised Land is so lengthy and covers a wide variety of topics and time periods, I’m breaking down the questions by each part.

Book Club Questions for A Promised Land

Part One

• First, let’s talk about why President Obama named his memoir A Promised Land. How do you define a promised land?
• What do you think about the fact he wrote this book by hand? Why do you think he decided to write about his presidency in two parts?
• Obama writes this after Trump has taken office—someone who is against literally everything Obama was for. Let’s try to put ourselves in the mindset of Obama working on this book knowing that a lot that he worked for might be overturned.
• Part One of the book features insights into Obama’s past and his eventual road to politics. What was some of the more surprising aspects of his younger years? Did you learn anything new about him?
• In Chapter 2, Barack talks about meeting Michelle. Why do you think they make for such a good match? What do you think are some of the key lessons he learned from his relationship with Michelle?
• Obama hit some road blocks into his first foray into politics. Let’s talk about how the initial failures ended up shaping his way he approached politics in the future.
• Michelle has not concealed the she has no love for politics. When Barack is considering a run for president, she’s upset as it completely turns the life they had upside down and they will never be able to go back to how it used to be. On page 70, Michelle asks Barack, “God, Barack…When is it ever going to be enough?” Let’s discuss Michelle’s hesitation with her husband running for president.
• Why do you think Obama continued to move forward with running for the presidency? Was it simply just inevitable with his huge popularity as a senator that he could win and make a difference? Was there also ego involved?

Part Two

• This part covers his presidential campaign. And he’s pretty honest with how he felt about it—campaigning is tough and tiresome. What did you find are some of the more surprising aspects of campaign life?
• Why was Obama initially not such a great debater?
• What did you think about the rivalry with Hillary Clinton?
• South Carolina was an important primary win for Obama. At his victory speech, people were chanting, “race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!” But Obama writes, “I didn’t have the heart to correct those well-meaning chanters—to remind them that in the year 2008, with the Confederate flag and all it stood for still hanging in front of a state capitol just a few blocks away, race still mattered plenty, as much as they want to believe otherwise.” Let’s discuss what Obama is saying here.
• Obama talks about how the internet and digital networks help him secure the democrat nomination and eventual presidency. He initially was inspired by it but wrote how he could not anticipate “how one day many of the same tools that had put me in the White House would be deployed in opposition to everything I stood for.” In viewing how technology was used back then to how it is now—would it have helped or hinder an Obama campaign if he ran today? Would he still have been able to secure the nomination? What do you think could be done about all the misinformation on the internet and social media?
• “Clinging to guns or religion” is something that is brought up this day. Obama still seems frustrated how this is still misunderstood. Why do you think this phrase has had a lasting impact? What does it say about some of the white voter base in this country?
• Why do you think Obama won over Hillary?
• It’s interesting that Joe Biden wasn’t the overwhelming first choice for VP. Why do you think it ultimately ended up being the right decision?
• This section also goes into Obama’s campaign against McCain. What were the key takeaways from this presidential race?
• Let’s talk the significance and the pressure of being the first black family to live inthe White House.
• Did you watch Obama’s acceptance speech when he won the presidency?

Part Three

• This section starts off with Obama filling in all the cabinet positions. He seemed focused on experience above all else. What did you think about his initial cabinet selections?
• He details his inauguration day, including there was a potential planned terrorist attack. Obama said that he realized that was now part of his job: “maintaining an outward sense of normalcy, upholding the fiction that we live in a safe and orderly world, even as I stared down the dark hole of chance and prepared as best as I could for the possibility that at any given moment on any given day chaos must break through.” Let’s talk about what it must be like to have that pressure.
• It seems that Obama really went in hoping for collaboration and bipartisanship from the GOP. But he quickly learned that there would be a refusal to work with him and members of his administration. Do you think Obama was naive in thinking that he could work with the GOP or do you think it’s admirable that he tried to find common ground with them? Can bipartisanship exist in today’s politics?
• The early criticism against Obama was that he was trying to do too much and change should just be a slogan. Why are people in general so resistance to real change?
• Overall, what’s your impression of how the Obama administration handled the economic crisis?
• There’s several sections dedicated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the same note, do you think his administration did the best they could with those situations or how could they have handled those wars differently?

Part Four

Promised Land Barack Obama Book

• This part starts off with Obama’s first G20 summit with other world leaders. What did you think about his assessments of the other world leaders?
• Combating terrorism became a huge part of the job, which including ordering people to be killed. He writes, “I took no joy in any of this. It didn’t make me feel powerful. I’d entered politics to help kids get a better education, to help families get healthcare, to help poor countries grow more food—it was that kind of power I measured myself again.” But he goes on to say the other work was necessary. What is your impression of how Obama handled this area?
• The rest of the section is dedicated to passing healthcare reform and showing all the impacts of the rise of the Tea Party. Why was there (and still is) a struggle to get the message of healthcare reform across to voters? Why are voters resistant to change in this area?
• Did you get any additional insights on what it’s like to pass a bill?
• Many people questioned if it was the right move for Obama administration to focus on healthcare reform in his first term. What are your thoughts on this?
• There’s a brief mention of the H1N1 virus and how that was handled. Let’s compare the Obama response to the Trump response to COVID-19.
• Do you think the passage of the Affordable Healthcare Act was one of Obama’s proudest accomplishments?

Part Five

• This section is more in-depth on foreign policy including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Will there be an end in sight to the wars?
• Much of this chapter is prelude to what was to come such as the Iran nuclear treaty and the Paris Climate Agreement. Let’s discuss both of these important areas.
• Obama says that when he first ran for office, climate change wasn’t much on his radar compared to better housing, education, healthcare and jobs. What were the key factors for him to take notice that climate change is a huge issue?
• Why do you think it took so long for the U.S. to take more meaningful actions against combating climate change?

Part Six

• This section is dedicated to many of the rough patches that Obama faced in his first term. Let’s first talk about the public outcry over the bailouts.
• At one point, Nancy Pelosi encourages Obama to talk with the American public about how Republicans are blocking his administration on everything. Do you think Obama and his team should have called out the Republicans more? Would it have made a difference?
• The midterms were devastating for the Obama administration and the democrats. Why did voters turn away from democrats that year?
• Obama writes that the dominant storyline in the post election coverage was that “I’d attempted to do too much and hadn’t stayed focus on the economy; that Obamacare was a fatal error: that I’d tired to resurrect the kind of big-spending, big-government liberalism that even Bill Clinton had pronounced dead years ago.” Do you feel any of these statements are true? Could the administration have communicated the policies better to the American people?
• After the midterm loses, the administration pulled of a successful lame-duck session. In six weeks, the House and Senate had enacted 99 laws. Obama writes that for a space of a month and a half, democracy was normal again. “What more might we have accomplished, I wondered, and how much further along would the economic recovery be, had this sort of atmosphere prevailed from the start of my term?” What are your thoughts on this?

Part Seven

• This section is focused on foreign policy and military operations. What did you think about the sections dedicated to the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his death? Did you gain any more insights from those sections?
• Donald Trump makes multiple appearances in this section with a big focus on him spouting “birtherism” and other lies. Why do you think Trump was able to get so much media attention for this? How did this set the stage for what was eventually to come?
• What was your overall impression of Obama’s memoir?
• How do you think history will view Obama’s first term?
• What do you hope will be included in Part Two?

Additional recommendation

Hope you enjoyed book club questions for A Promised Land! Here’s another recommendation along with a link to book club questions.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

If you haven’t read Becoming yet, you should add it it to your list immediately!

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.

You can order the book on Amazon here. Check out my book club questions here.

Promised Land Barack Obama Free Download

In 2000, Barack Obama was invited by his friend to join the Democractic National Convention in Los Angeles. This was his friend’s way of encouraging him to “get back on the horse” after losing a Congressional race that his wife Michelle advised against participating in.

When Obama landed in LAX and tried to rent a car, his credit card was declined. He somehow found a way to get himself to the Staples Center but the credentials his friend secured for him did not allow him to enter the stadium. He ended up watching the convention on mounted T.V. screens. Afterwards, he went back to the hotel to sleep on his friend’s couch, and then flew back to Chicago. He was nearing forty, broke, all his supply of energy and optimism drained, even his marriage strained.

“I recognized that in running for Congress I’d been driven not by some selfless dream of changing the world, but rather by the need to justify the choices I had already made, or to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of those who had achieved what I had not,” Obama writes in his best-selling memoir, “A Promised Land.” The story arc of his pre-presidential journey, as well as the hype and excitement that came along his road to the highest office in the land may very well be the only truly compelling part of the book. As soon as he reached the White House, the spark of “hope and change” seemed to fizzle.

Obama ran on the promise of “hope and change” — a promise that Americans and even citizens across the globe, including me, vouched so hard for. I remember being in my dad’s house, watching “Capitalism: A Love Story” when the filmmaker Michael Moore showed clips of Obama’s presidential campaign, with Occupy movement activists holding Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” poster, and thinking, “I’m sure the world will be in good hands.” I remember being in my senior year in high school, confused about my own future, but suddenly becoming energized after watching the first African-American president of the United States, the leader of the free world, talk in front of a camera as if he is talking to me: “YES, YOU CAN!”

Years later, I’ve found myself turning to his speeches (“The audacity of hope!”), his turns of phrases in his books (“How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?”) when I contend with my identity, my politics, my place in the Philippines, my place in the world. Like any writer worth their salt, his ability to string words helped me clear my head, his own thoughts served as my own refuge. His first book, “Dreams From My Father,” became a seminal resource for my education not only on politics, power, and racism, but also on writing and introspection. It is a book about coming to terms with an absent father; about reconciling multiple identities that seem to pull him in different directions; and about finding a community that enabled him to locate his place and purpose in the world.

In “A Promised Land,” however, I found it hard to sense the tenderness and brooding that were essential to his previous work. His prose, of course, has always been limpid; one that is as clear, precise, and elegant as a geometric proof. His wit and facility for language cannot be questioned. He knows when to inject a much-needed levity to cut through paragraphs heavily infused with political shoptalk. However, there was a detachment in his narrative of his presidency that stalled the storytelling’s progress. “The bigger the politician gets, the harder the writer has to struggle to stay in command of the story,” wrote George Packer about the memoir. Perhaps it’s in the overly detailed justifications of Obama’s presidential decisions, his triumphs and failures, that became tiring — why they chose a certain recovery stimulus during the economic crisis; why Republicans seemed hell-bent to block any progress Obama wanted to see; and why he sent more young Americans to war, among others. What may read as self-assessment often only look like a defense, or an apology.

I’ve found myself turning to his speeches (“The audacity of hope!”), his turns of phrases in his books (“How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?”) when I contend with my identity, my politics, my place in the Philippines, my place in the world.

It seemed as though he wrote the book to explain his motives to his critics, or to show that indeed he did everything he could to act on the promise that he campaigned on. He recalls how a group of college students were very persistent about getting AIDS funding for Africa. “Didn’t we increase AIDS funding?” he asked his press secretary Gibbs. “We did. They’re saying you didn’t increase enough,” Gibbs said. It’s unnecessary anecdotes like this that put me off — as if the burden shouldn’t be on him; that he’s doing enough with his influence, his power.

“I felt compelled to disregard overly broad claims about the need to tear things up and remake society from whole cloth,” he writes, a sentiment that is central to his book, his presidency. It was indeed a presidency of appeasement and accommodation, but maybe that was what was needed for America to survive; for the world to maintain peace. Nonetheless, Barack Obama the president seemed to have lost the revolutionary spirit of Barack Obama the community organizer and even Barack Obama the senator; the spirit that once roused and inspired young people like me. It may be a function of power; once he had it, he would (inadvertently or not) want to preserve it, and with it, comes the tempering of idealism, of hope, of change. Obama essentially joined and continued the legacy of an establishment he promised to change.

Even his thoughts on racism felt measured, seemingly careful of alienating white readers that could still prove useful for his political career. I expected, maybe naively, that his rumination on being the first Black president of America would be given more space in the book. Given what happened with George Floyd in May, it’s surprising that he did not think it necessary to weigh in more on the racist rhetoric that has given rise to the white supremacists, the same types that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

For all its centrist posturing and its cautious retelling of America’s story, “A Promised Land” still provides an important insight on the brewing disillusion and disempowerment of the working class, the unemployed young people not only in the U.S. but around the world. The book tells of the Tea Party movement that fostered full-blown conspiracy theories about Obama: that he was born in Kenya, making him ineligible to be president, or that he was a Muslim socialist who was groomed to infiltrate the U.S. government. Obama also shares the eerie support that Sarah Palin got for her effective populist narrative and her ability in “drawing big crowds and enthusiastically gassing them up with nativist bile.” Later, Trump’s ascent to popularity via his embrace of birtherism, propped by media outlets that would attach news with entertainment, slowly but surely spilled into real-life households, communities, and ideologies. If anything, Obama’s initial disregard for these bizarre accusations does warn us that these falsities should not be ignored; that a person with a platform, that a publication or a newsroom should and has the duty to correct lies — accurately and instantly.

It is at least heartening that we are gradually seeing these lessons being learned, especially in the media. In October, a New Zealand journalist called out a politician’s incorrect statements on television on the spot, sending waves of online adulation for the reporter. In November, a local reporter was called out on Twitter for parroting President Duterte’s lies, without context or clarification. Now it seems reporters are more conscious of the ramifications of a purely “he said/she said” narrative, more acutely aware of the importance of fact-checking, a process that should’ve been fundamental to journalists in the first place.

Moreover, besides the book’s useful warnings, Obama sought to tell the reader the reality of how democracies have not been kind to the most vulnerable. How fruits of the free market only benefit a few. How it is not so much about Left versus Right, Democrat vs Republican, Sunni vs Shiite, (or if I may add, Dilawan vs DDS) — but top versus bottom. But that despite these realities, for all of man’s power and privilege, there is only so much one man can do. His retelling of his presidency seemed to be generally marred by constant jousting with politicians and candidates of the Republican Party (“promoting a story that fed not trust but resentment had come to define the modern Republican party,” he writes), world leaders of autocratic regimes (of Putin, he says: “I couldn’t shake the fear that Putin’s way of doing business had more force and momentum than I cared to admit, that in the world as it was, many … activists might soon be marginalized and crushed by their own government — and there’d be very little I could do to protect them”), and a press that was not always fair and critical (“at no point did [the media] simply and forthrightly call Trump out for lying or state that the conspiracy theory he was promoting was racist … the more oxygen the media gave [the conspiracy theories], the more newsworthy they appeared”).

For all its centrist posturing and its cautious retelling of America’s story, “A Promised Land” still provides an important insight on the brewing disillusion and disempowerment of the working class, the unemployed young people not only in the U.S. but around the world.

While Obama did not exactly manifest the “hope and change” that many people were expecting, he held on to a value that many great leaders cannot sustain: empathy. His capacity for empathy was not without its critics, of course. Advisors would tell him it was a bad idea to visit injured soldiers when deciding if America should send more troops to the Middle East. But he argues that it is in knowing exactly the true cost of war, the lives lost, the families broken that he is able to make rational decisions. His habit of stepping back to imagine other people’s lives, to provide perspective is peppered throughout the book. His ability to continuously harness his empathy despite being in the confines of an 18th century house and a full security detail may also be in part thanks to his daily practice of reading 10 random letters from constituents, and writing them back when he could. He writes, “I imagined them getting the official envelope from the White House and opening it up with a look of puzzlement, then a smile. They’d show it to their family, maybe even take it to work. Eventually, the letter would fall into a drawer somewhere, forgotten under the accumulation of the new joys and pains that make up a life. That was okay. I couldn’t expect people to understand how much their voices actually meant to me — how they had sustained my spirit and beat back whispering doubts on those late, solitary nights.”

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I imagine these human voices — sometimes bursting with happiness, oftentimes tinged with sorrow — are ones that hum in Obama’s head for every economic legislation, for every young uniformed man sent to Afghanistan. Obama’s empathy, his measured words and temperament, are a stark contrast to his successor Donald Trump, who often acted on impulse, irreverent to the consequences of his tweets.

On January 21, after a tumultuous four years under a president that consistently lied to Americans and disrespected the international rules based order for which the world has depended on, Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, will be inaugurated. There is again a promise of “hope and change,” and while this promise may fall short of the ideals that young people like me believe to be necessary, for now, and as I often do, I still take comfort in Obama’s words: there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.