Original subtitles

Barack Obama left office in 2017,

and almost immediately began work

on a memoir of his years in the White House.

The writing of presidential memoirs is an American tradition,

but few are as eagerly anticipated as this.

We will go out and remake America, and then we will change the world.

President Obama looks back at his first term in office

in his new memoir, A Promised Land.

Because of you, tonight I can stand here and say

that I will be the Democratic nominee

for the president of the United States of America.

Obviously, I'd love to have your vote.

CROWD CHEER

If there is anyone out there

who still questions the power of our democracy,

tonight is your answer.

Obama writes with measured candour and often in granular detail

about the many challenges that confronted him

during his time in office,

and he also writes about the deepening

of America's many historic divisions.

I've come to Washington to talk to Barack Obama,

US president from 2009 to 2017,

and ask him to reflect on his presidency

and how it changed America.

The Obama presidency began with crisis,

much of the global banking system and much of the American economy

teetering on the edge of collapse.

But those eight years in the White House also witnessed the emergence

of what was to become a global movement for racial justice.

Yes?Yep. Thanks, then.

Mr President. It's wonderful to see you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Can I ask you about the timing of A Promised Land?

You were writing it, as the preface says,

you were putting the final touches to it in August... Right.

..during the summer,

during the summer of Black Lives Matter -

an enormous explosion of debate

and discussion and protest, and what you called righteous anger

that's been compared to the civil rights movement.

How did those events and that atmosphere, how did that impact

on your views of where America stands right now

in this long journey in its relationship with race and racism?

Well, obviously, a running thread,

through not just this book but also my presidency,

was the question of race.

That's been one of the central faultlines in American history,

our original sin.

And I think as I was watching the events unfold this summer,

both the... the...

..death of George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd,

but also the response,

it was a mixture of despair and optimism.

PROTESTOR: Enough is enough!

Despair that the chronic lingering role of race and bias

in our criminal justice system

continues in such a blatant form.

Enormous optimism that you saw an outpouring

of protest activism and interest

that far exceeded

anything we had seen previously,

and was peaceful, was thoughtful, was well-organised

and was multiracial.

Traditionally, after Ferguson, after Trayvon Martin, you know,

there was still, I think, resistance

on the part of large portions of the white community in America

to push back against the notion

that this was more than just one incident or a case of bad apples.

"The issue of black folks and the police was more polarising

"than just about any other subject in American life."

No justice! No peace!

"It seemed to tap into some of the deepest undercurrents

"of our nation's psyche, touching on the rawest of nerves."

"Who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded

"and against whom still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds,

"much more than we cared to admit."

What you saw this summer was some communities

that had a very negligible black population,

folks going out there and saying black lives matter

and embracing the notion that real change has to come.

And that, I think, is consistent with the themes of this book, which,

you know, I call it A Promised Land because in biblical terms, you know,

Moses doesn't get there.

You're wandering for 40 years.

It's full of trials and tribulations and travails.

But the notion that if we are persistent and hopeful,

we can make things better, if not for ourselves,

then certainly for future generations, I think,

is what propelled me into politics

and it's what I saw on display this summer.

And you hold true to that belief

in what you call the possibility of America,

and you're yet candid about the contradictions of America,

this nation conceived in liberty but by men who were themselves,

in many cases, the owners of enslaved Africans.

How do you balance your belief in the possibility of America

with your candid assessment of the nation's flaws?

I think it's useful to hold two ideas in your head at the same time,

which is that, um, America

is full of flaws and contradictions, and yet...

..despite the cruelties,

despite the obvious violations

of our professed ideals - slavery, Jim Crow,

the treatment of Native Americans,

the internment of Japanese during World War II,

so forth - um, this remains an experiment that matters

not just for Americans, but for the world.

You don't have an example in history

of a great power

whose population is made up of people who come from everywhere

and are functioning as a democracy

and are trying to figure out, "Can we live together peacefully?

"Can we bind ourselves to a common creed even if we don't look alike,

"don't have the same last names,

"don't necessarily worship in the same way?"

And what is the source of optimism is, you see a trajectory

in which American democracy becomes more and more inclusive,

starting with the abolitionists and the suffragettes

and the union movement.

And later in our history, the LGBTQ movement

systematically saying,

"You know what? When we describe we, the people,

"it's not just a handful of folks. It's not just property owners.

"It's not just white males. It's all of us.

"We have a seat at the table."

And there is a powerful

and beautiful story to tell in that progression.

But as I point out, and as I think our recent history indicates,

that history doesn't move in a straight line.

It zigzags and can go backwards.

You know, if you were a African-American

right after the Civil War, during reconstruction,

you might feel pretty optimistic.

15 years later, you'd feel very pessimistic

because there was a massive retrenchment.

And that, I think, is the thing

that always makes me cautiously optimistic

as opposed to Pollyannish about America,

and, for that matter, about the world.

"Of all the rooms and halls and landmarks that make up

"the White House and its grounds, it was the West Colonnade

"that I loved best. For eight years, that walkway would frame my day.

"A minute-long, open-air commute from home to office and back again.

"The place where I'd gather my thoughts,

"taking through the meetings that lay ahead,

"girding myself for this decision or that slow-rolling crisis."

The book, including its title, is loaded with symbolism,

symbolism from the Bible, from the words of Martin Luther King,

from Abraham Lincoln. You can feel the weight of American history

in lots of the language that you use,

and that symbolism was always there as part of your journey.

You began your journey to the White House in 2007,

announcing your candidacy, as you remind us in the book,

at the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois,

where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous,

legendary "A House Divided" speech.

In 2020, is America once again a house divided?

We are very divided right now,

certainly more than we were when I first ran for office in 2007

and won the presidency in 2008.

Even more divided than when I ran for re-election in 2012,

and more divided than we were four years ago

when Donald Trump first won the presidency.

And some of that is attributable

to our current president,

who actively...

..er, fanned division

because he felt it was good for his politics,

but it preceded him and it will outlast him.

And I discuss in the book some of the trends

that have created that kind of division.

Some of it has to do with broad socioeconomic factors,

growing inequality,

the growing division between rural and urban America,

people feeling as if they're losing a grip

on the ladder of economic advancement and so react,

and can be persuaded

that it's this group's fault or that group's fault -

it's immigrants' fault,

it's folks who are taking advantage of the system.

So some of that was there.

It has been greatly magnified by the course of media.

Here in the United States, you start with older media forms like Fox News

and talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh,

whose business model is premised on fanning a certain kind of anger,

resentment, a certain story about people who are not like us,

are taking advantage of us and we have to fight back.

That has been turbo-charged by social media.

And, you know, I think the debate that's been taking place here about,

you know, the kinds of crazy conspiracy theories

and what some have called truth decay, right?

Where facts don't matter, er...

You know, everything is fair game, everything goes.

That has contributed enormously to these divisions,

and it's going to take more than one election

to reverse those trends.

It's going to require work

at a local level, as well as national level.

It's going to require not just political work, but cultural work

to get people to listen to each other, think more critically

in evaluating information.

I think at some point, it's going to require a combination

of regulation and standards within industries

to get us back to the point

where we at least recognise a common set of facts

before we start arguing about what we should do about those facts.

You've said in the past that Americans, at the moment,

can't recognise each other.

Look, if you are somebody who exclusively watches...

..you know, er, right-wing media,

um, I am unrecognisable as a figure

because what's portrayed of me is just a caricature.

It doesn't compute with what I believe, what I say, etc,

but there are millions of people who subscribe to the notion

that Joe Biden is a socialist,

you know, who subscribe to the notion

that Hillary Clinton was part of a evil cabal

that was involved in paedophile rings.

What's been interesting, obviously, and sad during this election

is that, um, that kind of lack of fidelity to the truth

has consequences when it's being promoted

by the most powerful elected official in the country.

And the pandemic is a classic example of reality biting back

if you ignore it for too long.

Obviously, the same would apply in a more slow-rolling

but ultimately perhaps even more damaging way with climate change.

"In my own mind, those dark cyclones of oil came to symbolise the string

"of constant crises we were going through.

"More than that, they felt alive somehow. A malevolent presence.

"Actively taunting me.

"Even Sasha came into my bathroom

"one morning while I was shaving to ask,

"Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

And it began, in some ways, your presidency was the experiment

for these ideas with birtherism, again involving Donald Trump.

It was your person, to an extent,

that was the first target for this wandering from the truth.

You know, I won't say that I was the first target, but I think

that what you started seeing with Sarah Palin,

who John McCain selected as his running mate

and sort of liked to swim in these waters,

and then with the Tea Party, its emergence, birtherism,

which Donald Trump promoted,

what you started seeing was a systematic effort

to not just demonise me, paint me as the other,

but I think more profoundly, the realisation that,

um...

..the old rules about paying a price for being caught lying

or making stuff up no longer applied, that you could,

because of the multiplicity of media outlets out there,

you could just put out whatever you wanted.

Instead of honest debate, we've seen scare tactics.

"As I debunked the phoney claim

"that the bill would insure undocumented immigrants,

"a relatively obscure five-term Republican congressman

"from South Carolina named Joe Wilson leaned forward in his seat,

"pointed in my direction and shouted, his face flushed with fury,

"'You lie!'"

The reforms I'm proposing would not apply

to those who are here illegally. You lie!

"For the briefest second, a stunned silence fell over the chamber.

"As far as anyone could remember, nothing like that had ever happened

"before at a Joint Session address, at least not in modern times."

And I will not accept the status quo as a solution.

Not this time. Not now.

That breakdown in some of our conventions

around public discourse began to change

and, you know, we notice it...

People, I think, noticed it more with things like birtherism.

But it actually applied in less obvious ways,

for example, during the debate around health care, you know,

when the Republican Party starts saying

that the health care bill we had proposed,

which was actually modelled

on a bipartisan approach,

championed by Mitt Romney

when he was the governor of Massachusetts, a Republican,

along with Ted Kennedy, a Democrat,

that still involved private insurance,

you started getting these crazy stories about,

"Well, this is going to legalise euthanasia."

"They're going to kill your grandma," and so on and so forth.

Stuff that was clearly not true.

But, you know, if you've repeated it often enough,

it began to get traction

within certain segments of the American people.

And these ideas used to be on the fringes,

and then they moved very much to the centre... Yes.

..of both Republican policy and politicking. Yes.

That makes bipartisanship, which is one of the lubricants

that makes this system work, in theory, very difficult.

Is bipartisanship possible today?

It is very challenging.

A lot of the old bipartisanship was premised on, um,

you had southern Democrats who were quite conservative.

You had liberal Republicans from north-eastern states.

You know, those Dixiecrats, Southern Democrats,

abandoned the Democratic Party

right after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act

and African-Americans become more empowered politically.

Conversely, a lot of Republicans who are pro-civil rights

or pro-environment, they get driven out of their party,

and it makes it much more difficult

to find the outliers, the iconoclasts,

those who are willing to break party ranks.

I'm signing this reform bill into law on behalf of my mother,

who argued with insurance companies

even as she battled cancer in her final days.

I'm signing it for 11-year-old Marcelas Owens.

Marcelas lost his mom to an illness and she didn't have insurance

and couldn't afford the care that she needed.

We are done.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

It's going to be very rare where either party in America

has that big a majority to get things done,

and what I worry about is,

on everything from a pandemic to a major economic crisis

to climate change, it is...

it's hard for this big, creaky system to move quickly enough

to respond to the very real needs of the American people.

And I think that there are going to be some structural reforms

that have to happen in...

Because part of the cynicism people feel about government is,

if government's gridlocked, that's good for people

who want to protect the status quo.

You know, I experienced this during my presidency.

Things I wanted to get done that I couldn't get done

because of these problematic features in the government

and how it functions would dishearten and discourage my base,

which then leads them not to vote,

which then leads me to then lose more seats

during a midterm election,

which then makes it even harder to get things done.

And you start getting into that vicious loop.

Can I ask you about part of what's happening in America

that you draw a lot of hope from?

You write at the beginning of the book

about the attitudes of the young, of your daughters' generation,

and especially when it comes to issues of race and equality,

that those attitudes are profoundly different

to their parents' and their grandparents' generation.

Is America, is perhaps the world, at a great inflection moment

between generations with very different views of the world?

They are. And it's not just around race.

It's around gender. It's around sexual orientation.

My daughters and their peers

cannot conceive of treating somebody differently

because they're gay

or bisexual or transgender.

And I'm not saying that they are representative of all young people,

but it doesn't matter whether I'm in Johannesburg

or Buenos Aires or Ho Chi Minh City.

You talk to these young people, they share that common attitude.

They are more sophisticated.

The collision of cultures is something they are comfortable with.

And the folks who resist are us old folks,

who want to fasten ourselves to our old attitudes.

So the spirit that is prompting nationalism

and nativism and xenophobia in some cases,

it's not that suddenly people are mean

or automatically looking to harm others.

I think they feel uncertain, unmoored.

There are those who've said that the sight of a black president,

the sight of an African-American first family,

while certainly an historic achievement for America,

may also have been the event that revealed the depths

of America's historic problem with race.

What they say, in short, is that your presidency,

not for what you did but for who you are in the end,

made these situations, the race relations issue worse.

How do you respond to that line of argument?

Yeah. That doesn't make much sense.

Um... the idea that it made it worse.

I do think that it exposed

some faultlines in our culture

that we have to work through, but, er,

the fact that you saw all those protests this summer

indicate the degree to which

we have the capacity to work them through.

You know, I was never of the view

that somehow, my election signified a post-racial America.

What I was of the view, and I still am,

is that the majority of Americans

have very different attitudes

than their parents and their grandparents did,

and that's indisputable.

By the way, 2008 wasn't an accident.

I then got re-elected in 2012

and left office in 2016 in a pretty good position

if there weren't term limits

and had not Michelle put the kibosh on things, you know,

even without the Constitution.

I certainly had the majority of the American people

still approving of the job I was doing.

So that indicates a change in attitudes.

It also allowed, for eight years, children growing up - black, white,

Hispanic, Asian, Native American - to learn to take for granted

that a black person could occupy the highest office in the land.

And they internalised that.

And now another generation will be able to take for granted the idea

that a woman of Indian and Jamaican heritage can be Vice President.

That's exactly right. Right? And that's how progress gets made.

But along the way, there's going to be pushback.

There's going to be resistance.

And I don't think it's unfair to say that Donald Trump's election

was in some ways in part fuelled by anxieties

around these changes that are taking place.

He was very explicit about that, right? "Make America great again."

And so there was... there was this interim period

when things aren't great. Um, and...

You know, I can't, er, change

or apologise for those reactions and that backlash.

That's the nature of progress.

But what I can say for certain

is that as a consequence of the work we did,

the indisputable fact that the country was better off

eight years later than it was when I took office, it moved the needle.

Young people felt as if,

"You know what? Government is not separate from me."

And that will have ripple effects

that go beyond the particular challenges

that we're facing right now

and makes me, again, cautiously optimistic

as long as we're all vigilant.

And that's part of what A Promised Land is about,

wanting young people to cultivate that cautious optimism

that the world can change, but you have to be a part of that change.

Mr President, thank you very much for your time.

I look forward to volume two. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you very much.

With the interview at an end, what he left behind

was his unshakeable sense of optimism,

that belief in the promise of America,

even in the aftermath of an election and a transition like no other.

And... action!

Good? That's beautiful.

You know what, I can take direction. Great. There's no doubt about it.