Nathan Robinson, The Obama Boys: On the many memoirs out and about now and what can be learned from them
Intro:
If you want to understand why leftists look back on the Obama years with such a sense of frustration and disappointment, all you need to do is pick up one of the White House memoirs written by members of Obama’s staff. I’ve now poked through three of them, David Litt’s Thanks Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, Dan Pfeiffer’s Yes We (Still) Can, and Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, plus a collection of first-person testimonies called Obama: An Oral History.* But the genre is expansive, and also includes Pat Cunnane’s West Winging It (with a front cover almost indistinguishable from Litt’s book), Alyssa Mastromonaco’s Who Thought This Was A Good Idea? (which at least asks the right question), and a second oral history volume called West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House.
I can’t say that once you have read one of these books, you have read them all. But if you read Litt, Pfeiffer, and Rhodes, you may get a sense that you have met the same man three times. Not only does each tell the same story, but they share common habits of mind, common interpretations of the same events, that reveal a lot about what “Obamaism” as a political mindset is. They have their differences: Litt’s book is breezy and jokey, Pfeiffer is obsessively focused on “fake news,” and Rhodes is slightly more cerebral and worldly (he was a foreign policy guy, after all). But each of them looks at politics through roughly the same lens, and reading their accounts can help to show why the left dislikes this kind of politics.