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As progressives survey President Obama’s first year in office with mounting dismay, Sasha Abramsky’s new book, Inside Obama’s Brain, attempts to understand the man behind the hype, through a careful analysis of publicly available documents and interviews with family and friends. Abramsky has written many books including “American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Ageof Mass Imprisonment,” “Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It,” “Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation,” and “Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to The White House.” Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a Senior Fellow at Demos. In his latest book he doesn’t present as much a biographical portrait of Obama, rather a psychological profile, to try to understand where the President has come from and where he may be going. That his election was one of the most historic moments in American history is not debatable. But does that mean his actions will actually differ greatly from other presidents, particularly other Democrats?

GUEST: Sasha Abramsky, freelance journalist and a Senior Fellow at Demos, author of many books including Inside Obama’s Brain

Sasha Abramsky is speaking on Thursday January 7th at 7 pm at Book Soup, 8818 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Find out more at www.sashaabramsky.com.

Rough Transcript:

SK: Thanks so much for joining us. So, as I said, this president’s election itself is absolutely historical and you go through that in your book and before we get to his actions and where he is today, let me just ask you in terms of this book, why judge Obama by his brain, if you will, rather than by his actions? Why ask what makes him tick instead of simply analyzing him through the things that he’s doing on a day-to-day basis?

SA: I think that’s a great question. I think you have to analyze everybody whether they’re a politician – or whatever they are in their walk of life – both by their actions and also by the way they approach problems, by the way they think, by what their references are, by what their ambitions are, by what their ideals are. And I think that’s particularly true with Barack Obama. This is a man who is an extremely complicated character and when you look at him, you’re seeing somebody who is a very proficient writer, a very good lawyer. You’re seeing somebody who spent years as a community organizer, you’re seeing somebody who spent years as a teacher at the University of Chicago and then came into politics and I think, you know, I’ve done a lot of reporting over the years. I’ve been a political journalist for about 15 years and oftentimes you meet a politician and you think, well, they’re a skilled political operator but there’s really not much beneath the surface. They’re fairly superficial, they might not be particularly intellectually stimulating. You follow someone like Barack Obama’s career and you talk to people who know Obama and you look at what he says and you look at the way he approaches problems and I think you see somebody who actually doesn’t fit the traditional mold. He isn’t easy to pigeonhole. He isn’t easy to one-dimensionalize, if you like. And that’s why I found him a fascinating character and that’s why when the opportunity came to write this book I thought, you know what, this is a brain I actually do want to explore. There are many brains I’ve no interest in exploring but Obama’s is one I really enjoyed trying to get inside of.

SK: Well, his background as a community organizer is certainly one that sets him completely apart from other presidents and the fact that he wasn’t born into the sort of American aristocracy that almost, I think, all other presidents really have been born into absolutely makes his background quite different. Let’s talk about the community organizing aspect of it, which you rightly point out in your book, was really derided by Republicans but it really has made Obama who he is. What should we as Progressives – and many of our listeners are community organizers – know about Obama’s community organizing background?

SA: Well, Obama, when he was a very young man in his early twenties graduates from Columbia University in New York and he has the opportunity to go corporate. He has the opportunity to make a lot of money. He has the opportunity to stay in New York and he decides that this really isn’t what he wants to do in his life. And he writes in his book that he’s searching for a way to recreate the idealism that he saw in his mother and in his mother’s story. His mother had traveled all over the world and she’d worked with the poor in Indonesia, she’d studied micro-financing and Obama wanted to do something different. And for him, what was different yet idealistic was the world of community organizing and he’d done an awful lot of reading at this point – he’d read a lot of philosophy, a lot of history, he’d read Martin Luther King, he’d read Mahatma Gandhi, he’d read a lot of the great ethical politicians and philosophers of our century – and he wanted to find a way to insert himself into that story. And he gets this opportunity. He meets a man called Jerry Kelman, who I talked to quite a lot when I was writing my book and Kelman offers him a job as a community organizer in a very, very poor part of Chicago. And, Obama goes to Chicago and he earns a pittance – I think it was about $10,000 a year, and I spoke to a few of the organizers and they sort of laughingly said, yeah, and we threw in $3,000 so he could buy a second-hand car. And he would get up at about 5:00 in the morning and he’d be working, pounding the sidewalks, organizing people, going to church meetings, going to meetings of the unemployed by 7 or 8 in the morning, and he’d stay doing that until 10 or 11 at night – 12, 13, 14 hours a day for years and years and years. And, I’ve spoken to a lot of people and they’ve said, well, it was all part of a “grand plan” to make Obama a sort of charismatic politician. And I think there are so many easier ways to go the route of politics. If he was always just thinking about rising up that greasy pole, rising to the top politically with no other sense of purpose, he had the talents, he had the skill sets, he had the educational background to have done it in many, many easier ways. And this is why when I look at Obama – I don’t agree with all the policy decisions he’s made as President – but I look at Obama and I think, this is someone who has a story that proves that he cares about people. He has a story that proves that he’s able to empathize with people because if he didn’t, if he really was all words and no action, he wouldn’t have spent years of his life doing something as monetarily unrewarding and as difficult and as challenging as community organizing. He did that for reasons other than money and other than ambition.

SK: And, it’s remarkable to see in your book the interviews with people who worked closely with him, really working-class, activists, grassroots people who really have a profound sense of admiration and affection for the man. So, here’s the main question: how is it that somebody who has this background that no other President has had, who has worked on the streets of Chicago, who has really been able to empathize with the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society, now comes into the White House at such a young age and literally gives billions of our tax dollars to corporations, sides with pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and within the very first year of his presidency just, I think, violates so many people’s sense of understanding and, in a way, ownership that they had over him and his campaign?

SA: The word you’ve just used, I think, is absolutely appropriate. There was this sense of ownership in the Obama candidacy in a way that there hadn’t been for a generation. I think the last time that millions of people across the country and across the age groups and across the socio-economic spectrum felt that empowered by a candidacy was probably Robert Kennedy in the primaries in 1968 before he was assassinated. I think Martin Luther King, obviously, had that ability to make people feel a part of the movement…

SK: …but he didn’t run for office…

SA: …but he didn’t run for office. There aren’t very many figures in American political history who an audience feels that proprietorial towards. I think from the conservative wing, Reagan had that same ability – that people looked at Reagan, listened to Reagan and felt a part of his movement if they were conservative. I think there’s a risk and an opportunity in a movement based around an individual like that. The opportunity is: it empowers an awful lot of people, it brings people into the political process in a way that they haven’t for generations and so, when Obama runs his campaign, the three-word mantra is respect, empower, include. And they run these camp Obamas which are very much modeled on community organizing principles where they train volunteers to tell stories – narratives, they call it – about their own lives, about the ordinary lives of ordinary people and they use those narratives to build up a rationale for the Obama candidacy. And that’s the opportunity. The risk is that because there’s such a sense of ownership, everybody feels that Obama represents exactly what they want him to represent. So, they glom their dreams onto him and this is what I found absolutely fascinating both when I was reporting on the primaries and the caucuses and also when I was writing this book – that there was this sense that whether you were a progressive in L.A. or Berkeley, let’s say, or whether you were a conservative rancher in New Mexico or Nevada – that Obama belonged to you. And one of the things that I found so interesting was, there was an incoherence there – there was no way Obama was both the anti-war candidate that someone in Berkeley, let’s say, wanted him to be and the libertarian candidate that someone working a ranch in Nevada thought he was and a candidate of inner city issues that somebody in, let’s say, south side Chicago wanted him to be and a candidate of suburban middle class interests that so many millions of people wanted him to be. He couldn’t be all of those things. And I think one of the things we’re seeing, now that he’s in office, is that he isn’t all of those things. He has his own views and some of those views are very radical and transformative and others of those views are pretty conservative. And I think if you read the small print – if you didn’t get carried away by the rhetoric and by the national emotion in 2008 – but if you read the small print, there were many signs that, on economics in particular, Obama was actually fairly conservative and a lot of his closest friends, people I talked to when I was writing the book, they said to me it’s a misreading of Obama to think he’s all idealism, that if you read him that way, you’re going to be in for a shock because he is pragmatic, he’s conservative and, in some issues, he’s extremely cautious and I think that’s the lesson of the last year.

SK: Well, it’s interesting to think about the fact that Obama came after Bush and that’s one of the things you’ve discussed in your book, Inside Obama’s Brain. You’ve said that Obama’s presidency is transformative but it couldn’t have been possible without the horrific Bush legacy. Why?

SA: Well, I spoke to a presidential historian called Douglas Brinkley and Brinkley said to me, in American history, for many reasons, and probably reasons too complex to get into in a short interview but for many reasons, the good and the bad tend to form pairs. So, you have a series of presidencies over the last 220, 230 years where there are some awful presidents and then they’re followed by very good, transformative presidents who sort of reestablish American credibility, reestablish a sort of sense of moral purpose in politics. And I think that one of the things that happened under Bush was, regardless of one’s ideology – conservative, liberal, left-wing, right-wing – there was a growing sense of dismay about the direction of politics in this country. The economic status quo had broken down, our international reputation was in the toilet, there was this growing sense of disjunct between the needs of everyday citizens and a sort of bubble-oriented White House that really just wasn’t interested in ordinary experiences of ordinary people. And then, on top of that, there was Hurricane Katrina. And I think it’s impossible to overestimate the significance of that. Here you have a natural disaster magnified by manmade incompetence and it was the destruction of one of America’s most iconic cities and the loss of a huge number of lives. And I think in the wake of that, there was just this absolute disgust with the incompetence and the dishonesty and all of the other bad aspects of the Bush administration. And Obama represents, at least oratorically, at least symbolically, a 180 degree change from that and in 2007, when there’s this sort of growing momentum for Obama as president – and he’s a young senator, he’s in his mid-forties at that time, he’s very inexperienced on the national stage – but the momentum becomes unstoppable. And people all over the country start writing to Obama, urging Obama to run for the White House and, again, these are people who, some of them are very liberal and very radical and others of them are instinctually very conservative. But they see Obama, they’ve listened to Obama’s speeches in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. They’ve seen him in action and they see that he represents a different face to politics and I think that that gives him an opportunity. And a lot of Obama’s advisors – people I spoke to, behind-the-scenes advisors said to me, we told him to sit it out. We said to him you’re too young. We said to him, America’s not going to be ready to elect an African-American president. We said to him, your name’s going to be a hindrance. There were all kinds of people telling him that the moment was wrong. And Obama turned to them and he said no, you’re wrong, the moment’s right and he would detail this sort of historical analysis of why he thought that this was the election, the one election, where someone with a name like him, someone with the color of skin he had, someone with the views he had had a realistic shot at the presidency. And I think that, you know, that’s probably why you have to say you needed Bush to get to Obama. That doesn’t make Obama the perfect president by any stretch but it does make him a very, very different president or a very, very different candidate for president than anything we’ve seen in the past.

SK: I’m speaking with Sasha Abramsky who is a freelance journalist and a Senior Fellow at Demos. He’s written widely for The Atlantic Monthly, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York Times and many other publications. He’s also written several books and his latest, which we’re discussing, is Inside Obama’s Brain. Let’s talk about race and the fact that Obama, as you mentioned, given the color of his skin, in the grand scheme of American history, becomes an unlikely candidate, but in the context of Bush certainly more possible. He has always struggled, given his ethnic background, given the fact that the term African-American is something that people have challenged when being used with him – his father was Kenyan. Was he not black enough? Was he too black? How do you analyze the speech on race that he gave last year during his presidential campaign, when he in fact became “too black”, as you put it, for many conservative Americans?

SA: Well, this is one of the great ironies of Obama’s entire adult life really. If you go all the way back to his first run for elected office in the Harvard Law Review, race has hovered in the background. And there’s always been this question: Is he too black? Is he not black enough? A lot of African-American politicians, at least in the early days of Obama’s political career in the State senate in Illinois in particular, were very hostile to Obama and they thought that he didn’t have enough credentials, that he hadn’t fought the good fight and that he wasn’t “black enough” for Chicago politics. And then on the national stage, he’s faced the opposite charge. He’s faced the charge that Hillary Clinton continually raised, that he wouldn’t be able to get white working-class votes. At one point, Hillary Clinton made a sort of faux pas when she accidentally said that she was the candidate of white Americans, of hard-working white Americans. I don’t think Hillary Clinton’s a racist but I do think that that slip was indicative of how hard it is for a man like Obama to navigate all the different racial tensions, all the different expectations in American politics. On the other hand, he’s a man who has such an unconventional story, and he says time and again that his story is improbable, that he is the product of a mixed-race marriage – a white woman from Kansas, a black man from Kenya, in the early 1960’s, at a time when mixed-race marriages were illegal in about 19 or 20 states. And when they weren’t illegal, they were seen as one of the ultimate social taboos. And Obama says time and again, that the very act of getting married, the very act of having a child was something profound. It was an improbable act of resistance or act of thinking outside the box or act of bravery. And I think that Obama has worn that very heavily, that he’s known throughout his life that his story is different. He’s known throughout his life that there are expectations about who he is and he’s also sought very, very hard to create his own identity. He doesn’t like being pigeonholed. And I think it’s made him a very transformative character in a way because it allows him to bridge ways or divides in a way very few politicians, white or black, have been able to do in American history.

SK: Sasha, I want to quote from Rahool Mahadjin’s commentary, Empire Notes, from this week when he very critically said this about Obama: “Obama is passionate about only two things: the idea that reasonable people can always find technocratic solutions somewhere in the muddled middle and that his personal biography is not just a matter of world historic import but of profound moral principle. Interestingly, these are exactly the two passions that Hillary Clinton has making one wonder, once again, why we wasted all that time following the primaries”. How do you respond to that?

SA: Well, I do think it’s true that Obama is instinctually a consensus builder and you can take that two ways: you can say it’s a good thing because he goes the extra mile to reach a consensus or you can say it’s a bad thing because it results in this sort of muddled serious compromises. I tend to think it depends on the issue. You look at what he did with reforming the death penalty in Illinois when he was a state senator – going that extra mile to get conservatives onboard was very, very effective. It resulted in better legislation. It resulted in a bipartisan consensus. On the other hand, you can make a very good argument, I think, that the Obama administration has gone somewhat overboard in seeking consensus around, let’s say, health care reform. Your previous guest was just talking about that. So, I do think there’s a danger that if you always seek consensus, at the end of the day that works if you’ve got willing partners. It doesn’t work if you have opponents who believe they have more to gain by stonewalling than by participating in negotiation and compromise. And, coming to the second point, this idea that Obama sort of has an over-hyped sense of self, sense of destiny. I think it’s certainly true. When you talk to friends of his, when you talk to Obama observers who’ve known him for years, he clearly thinks his story is an important part of his political identity and he clearly thinks that the unconventional nature of his story, in a sense, has the ability to kick-start the American dream again. You can argue that it’s overblown. I think it’s a very powerful rhetorical tool, that it allows him to access a lot of different people’s experiences and he uses it to enhance this sense of empathy. So I would argue it’s actually a very effective part of his political persona but it’s definitely something that’s there.

SK: Sasha Abramsky, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

SA: It’s a pleasure.

Special Thanks to Julie Svendsen for transcribing this interview