A Promised Land, by Barack Obama

“Fly and never tire, Fly and never tire, There’s a great camp-meeting in the Promised Land.” FROM AN AFRICAN AMERICAN SPIRITUAL

“Don’t discount our powers; We have made a pass At the infinite.” _ROBERT FROST, “KITTY HAWK”

The book starts with the dedication to Michelle as love and Life Partner, his 2 daughters: Malia and Sasha as Dazzling Life makes everything brighter.

PART I

• Presidency is just a job and our federal government is a human enterprise like any other, and the men and women who in the White House experience the same daily mix of satisfaction, disappointment, office friction, screw-ups, and small triumphs as the rest of their fellow citizens.
• There are people in this world who think only about themselves, they don’t care what happened to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important. Then, there are people who do the opposite, whoever imagine how other people must feel, to make sure they don’t hurt other people. So, what kind of person you want to be?
• American Ideal: What country was? and What it could become? The promise of America? –> “All men are created equal”
• Tremendous energy of the movement couldn’t be sustainable without the structure, organization, and skills and governance.
• The Conflicts: Between working for change within the system, and pushing against it…The world as it is and the worlds as it should be.
• Description about Michelle:
  • Original,
  • She constantly challenges me and keep me honest.
  • Make each other laugh and share the same basic values,
  • Complement each other, have each other’s back, guard each other’s blind spot, team
  • In another way of saying, we were very different in experience and in temperament.
• For Michelle: The road to the good life is narrow, and full of hazard. Family was all what you could count on. OUTWARD SUCCESS, a good job, a nice house, never makes you feel ambivalent because failure and want were all around you, just a lay off were shooting away. No matter how well you did, you belong in a room…Prove not to those who doubt at you, but to yourself.
• What’s the point to have a fancy law degree if you can’t take some risks? if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
• Have you ever noticed? when there is a hard way and easy way, you always chose the hard way. What do you think that is?

** Inspirations for Obama to run for the presidential election
– There are people looking for something different
– His colleague said:, ” 10 more years in the senate, it won’t make you a better president.”
– people’s expectation

Michelle asked: “Why do you need to be the president?”

Obama:
– It’s for new kind of politics.
– For New generations to take part in politics
– On the day I raise my right hand to take oath to be the president, the WORLD WILL START LOOKING AT AMERICA differently.
– Kids all around this country, black kids, Hispanic kids, the kids who don’t fit in, they’ll see something differently, too. The Horizon left in, the Possibility Expanded.
– For personal reason: If I win, I can say: the America that I believed in was possible.
. The Democracy I believed in was within reach.
. I wasn’t alone in believing that the world doesn’t need to be a cold and unforgiving place, the strong pranked the weak, enabling us to fall back into the clance, tribes, rushing out against the unknown, hurdling against the darkness.

End Part I