I titled it the promise land because even though we may not get there in our lifetimes, even if we experienced hardships and disappointments along the way that i at least still have faith we can create a more perfect union, not a perfect unit union but a more perfect union. Good morning and welcome to a very special edition of Washington Post life. Im an opinion columni for the wasngton post and founding director of the race card project. For this very special conversation this mning i am ined by my dear friend elizabeth alexander, poet, schor and president of the Andrew Mellon foundation for good morning, elizabeth. Goo morning. It is wonderful to be together. It is wonderful to be together and together we bh welcome our gue for this conversation. The 44th president of the unitedtates, barack obama and i assume you recognize that guy in the mide. Good morning, sir. Hello, guys Washington Post brought out t big guns for thi one. [laughter] we are so excited to see you. We are. I am very gratefu you took the time. We are so excited to talk to about your book but this is a news organizatns we do have to begin with a little bit of news and overnight we learned that astrazeneca has joined two other Drug Companies a their success for theaccine trial and 90 success rate based on your experience in running when you think about the cllenges of just repeating a vaccine and if you are all concerned about our drift towards a new world for some people have easy access to the vaccine and some peoe dont . That will be the big challenge. I think we are all excited about the results and they are better even then scientists anticipated and now the challenge becomes how do we distribute it rapidly and make sure the people are willing to get vaccinated and that is a logistical and economic public messaging and look, it has not been made easier by the fact that we have had a incoherent federal Mitigation Strategy to say the least when it comes to science and the whole science around covid. My understanding and im not obviously scientific expert here is that part of the challenge at least four the first two vaccines that were developed is they have to be stored at certain temperatures and they have to put additional challenge on distributing it widely and one of the first tasks for the Biden Administration coming in is going to be to make sure that we have clear protocols about who gets it first and whether its frontline workers, people most vulnerable and then move forward from there and then we have to, you know, consider the International Issues because historically what is happened is that when you have drugs developed like this they are expensive and oftentimes poor countries are the last to get it if they get it at all. International coordination around that process will be very important and then finally as i said we will have to make sure the public messaging counteracts whatever suspicions my conspiracy theories and, you know, the anti fax internet is pretty powerful and we will want to make sure we roll that out in a way that elicits trusts from the public as much as possible. Are starting to get a sense of what joe Biden Administration will look like and youve seen some things that are familiar to you, including anthony expected to be named soon as the new secretary of state. Will he be able to quickly convince european allies that the trump pompeo time was an aberration and try to restore trust and a working relationship with some of the allies that right now have a rather closed arm view of the United States . Yeah, i know tony. He was my Deputy National security advisor. He was joes Foreign Policy advisor when joe is Vice President and he was part of our inner circle in all our key meetings throughout my presidency. He is outstanding. Smart, gracious, skilled diplomat and wellregarded around the world and i know he will do a great job. Reports are that Jake Sullivan will serve as National Security advisor, wicked smart, young, energetic and i think will be outstanding. So you are seeing a team develop that i have great confidence in and i think it will be important to recognize that the confidence that our allies had in the world had an American Leadership is not going to be restored overnight. They will be greatly relieved and pleased to see people like tony at various conferences around the world and returning to the traditional leadership roles that the u. S. Has played but there will be a lingering sense that america is still divided and that some of the shenanigans going on right now around the election that is making the world question how reliable and steady the u. S. May be in the reversal of u. S. Positions on things like the iran deal in the paris accords will create some inhibitions in terms of entering into agreements not always been certain whether or not they will be reversed by future administrations but there has been some damage done that will take some time to dig ourselves out of but there is no doubt that joe has got the right people to do it and i have every confidence he will be able to do it but it may just not happen instantaneously. One last question before we turn to the book about your role in public life Going Forward. We saw you active in the president ial campaign for your former Vice President so we participate in the campaign or help in any way the Democratic Candidates that are running for senate in georgia . Look, i think there is a huge critically important election. If in fact, the democrats are able to win those two seeds than they would have a sliver of a majority in the senate and with the Vice President as a tiebreaker so i will do what im asked to do in terms of being helpful. At the end of the day that wil be determined by the people of georgia. You know, im always flattered when people say barack, we need you in here and will make all the difference but ultimely, you know, what really makes a difference for people like stacy abrams have been working for years in the trenches galvanizing in bilizing peoe to recognize their own power and i am a huge believer in grassroots bottomup work and i think that what started with stacy and her Gubernatorial Campaign and that she perpetuated and others got involved with that is the reason that georgia went for joe biden and that is what i think will take for us to sustain this down the road. If im doing robo calls or some guest appearances it gets people excited but ultimately it is the people of georgia recognizing their own power that makes all the difference. Thank you. We want to get to a discussion about your book and i will turn it over to elizabeth will start our questioning their. Let us talk about hello there. Let us talk about the writing of this wonderful book. I wanted to put out to you the idea that autobiography is a Great American genre and i think that because america believes in the self and in the eye in the we isnt what we get with the collective picture in an autobiography so im wondering as you are writing a Promised Land how you thought about genre and how you thought about writing autobiographies and how the tone developed as you were writing. Thats interesting. Part of it is america believes in self and part of it is one of the essential elements of being american, i think, is this idea of self creation that we are not bound by whatever station we were born into. Whether that is mythological or whether that is fully reflected in the reality of class barriers and raise barriersut it is part of us that we have internalized in that, you know, i am going to getut there and make something of myself and certainly my first book dreams from my father reflected that kind of story of me as a young person trying to figure out racial identity and how i fit in to this new world first in hawaii and then in places like new york and chicago and there is no doubt i learned to write also in part from the personal narrative and you know, if you ask me whats a book that taught me to think about how i would like to write what i would aspire to write, even though i cant write that good it would be probably the fire next time byames baldwin, autobiographical essay that tells a story and shares internal pains but complai paints a complete ptrait of new york and harle and raise and, younow, preachers and pimps and there is an entire world from a few square blocks that suddenly giv you a picture of all of america and a sweeping history a you know, i re books like that and tha was my creative writing quest. There is no doubt when thought about the writing that this president ial memoir and those were my models as opposed to a traditional president ial memoir with, you know, and then i met with king such insults or Prime Minister such and such and how well i succeeded in tracking that kind of a more literary approach to it and you know, it will be up to the readers but that was certainly part of what i was trained to do and of course, James Baldwin did not have to stick in long vaccinations of the financial crisis or Nuclear Negotiations so that was the disadvantage. Everyones amount you would get in that poetic flow and relies ive got to do a little history and a little work here and trying to find that balance was sometimes tough. Thank you. Michelle, could i ask some mor now . When we were writinghis book during a time of tumult and transformation in america and you had this conversation but theres also ts noise happening in the world and you have to jt decidehat degree you are in or this is a time when your policies were under interrogation and in se cases been fully erased or the Current Administration and how much does it influence you when you are writing is book . I imagine it was almost like having a 500pound element elephant on your shoulder while you are working on your own wo work. Ce, its interesting. I dont think it affects it that much. Really because i even though i ended up breaking this up into two volumes i had a clear sense of the arc of the store story and i know how the story ends at least at the end of my presidency with donald trump coming into office and i had already internalized and understood that what his presidency was going to do and what he stood for and all the stuff that was happening while i was writing wasnt really shocking or surprising to me but i would say that if anything what probably influenced the book as i was writing may have been a growing sense of optimism based on, for example, what happened the summer in the wake of the george lloyd murder and seen young people mobilize and activate themselves the way they did and it actuall strengthened my conviction that in fact, despite the backwards movement that my successor represented on things like Climate Change or Voting Rights or Economic Equity that there was still this underlying Forward Motion that was going to be carried on by future generations that have been affected by my presidency and that would help lead us Going Forward so if anything, i probably would be more convinced about the story i was telling as a consequence of what i saw particularly over theast year is there anything about yourself they learned in particular when he wen back to write the story andevisited the first four, eight years i office . You know, i think i came to realize how much i loved the people i worked with and i knew that but the more i wrote, the more i appreciated how gifted hardware game just remarkable people who were part of my campaign and then part of my white house work and you guys have read the book so you know that i devote an entire chapter to iowa, for example and my state director for iowa is a guy named paul who remains a friend of mine but as i was writing about it and as i was talking about this guy who comes from a small midwestern town, conservative who you know is not a flashy guy and grumpy and in his external behavior but deep down you know theres as hugely idealistic guy and leads us came of team of kids to win the state for me and essentially launch us on the path to the white house and as im writing about him and he would be embarrassed if he heard me say this because he still a grump sometimes or sarcastic and sardonic but you know, i realized how much i appreciated them and how rerkable he was and he was on a big flashy figure. I think time again as i wrote it just made me appreciate t degree to which any worthwhile endeavor is a colleive effort. Particularly the president of the United States tends to b elevated as this singular individual hero or villain depending on yr take of any particular president and really he and hopefully she at some point, is just the fnt man for the frt person to a much broader endeavor of a bunch of people who are making enormous sacrifices and bringing huge scales to bear in trying to just move this big, you know, behemoth of a federal government in a direction that can help more people that is currently it is doing and i loved writing about others probably more than i love writing about myself. There was great excitement for 70 reasons including that u are the first africanameran president but what you may not know is that there wereany people who work cited that the first African American wrir has become president. It is the truth. Dreams for my father was already bein taught in African American literature classes and taught ongside books like Frederick Douglass narrative a the autobiography [inaudible] where reading and literacy as self making and freedom are very important ideas that we completely carried through in dreams from my father. Also, we saw y there was a picture of you a few ds after that election carrying a bk of collected poems while going to youraughters school so there wereeople who said the poet cheered and said that there is something out holding complexity simultaneously that poetry does. We thought he does that too. So, when i would love to know is what has your being a writer, a writer writer, how is that informed your government and your leadership . It is an interesting question and i think a timely one. The essence to me of writing is being able to use your imagination to stand in someone elses shoes and see through their eyes. To engage in this radical act of empathy and shape shifting where you can say all right, i can imagine what it might be like to be, you know, a young girl who is enslaved in the south or i can imagine myself as a elizabethan duke or whatever and my politics i think has always been premised on this notion that if, in fact, america is to work it will be because we are unique among great powers and being able totitch together one people out of all these diverse strands of people who showp from everywhere with different cultures and foods in music and somehow it works. E pluribus unum, out of many one. In that sense that is, to me, at least consistent with a writers sensibility and walt whitman is to me desibing, not just the american countryside, but describing americas best politics. Abrahamincoln when he writes second inaugural and that is a work of literature as he is imining fullsize through this great conflict and what it means and ultimately ends with malice towards none and Charity Towards all. Right . So that i think has informed erything i did but what has been interesting and you saw this during my presidency and you see it in some of the responses to the book into a Promised Land that in our current political environment we have a lot of impatience with that kind of being able to see the other side and i think there been a couple of reviewers and commentators who say look at obama hes on one side on the other hand and hes overthinking things and the invocation i think is that if you can see the other side then somehow you are paralyzed and that the writers sensibility means that you cant make decisions that you are stuck because you dont know which way to turn and the irony ishat in fact for me it was the opposite. I tried to explain this in the book and maybe some folks are just impatient with it but its precisely because i could see both sides or all sides to a problem or an issue that i would then feel as if i was making a good decision. I had seen it from different angles. This idea that overthinking problems was or is a weakness in politics i think is indicative of a culture in which we want to supply and eliminate all gray areas and just our way and beat the other team as opposed to solving problems and figuring out how, in fact, we come together. In part i suspect, at least on the democratic side, seeing donald trump eliminate all compxity and just do whatever he wants regardless of the consequences and demonizing the other side prompts this sense of yet, thats what we should be doing to we dont need some fancy overthinking poetic sensibility but we just need ts is what we want and we will concatenate and i think thats a mistake because the outcome in terms of policy ends up being reall bad. But at didnt stop me from ultimately saying thats what we are going to do, and it mayot work. So i actually think the sensibility is critical and useful, so long as you recognize that once you have seen the complexities of any problemou still have to make a decision and then be willing to bear the burden that your decisio is not going to be perfect and tt there may be some tragic unintended consequences and you have to be comfortable with that as well. Its interesti i keep hearinglso i contain multitudes. I contradict myself. There is nothing wrong with that. You have given us so many wonderful descriptions of rummaging through your grandparents garage and sidewalk sas in new york citynd columbia reading and reading. Talk to us about another book that h been transformative to you. I mention toni morrison. The song of solomon w another book i wanted to write its one of those things if you ask me what is the kind of talent that seems like its magic dust sprinkled on someone and then suddenly they can write a book like that it was the kind of book that after reading it i said my goodness, how does somebody do that. I have to confess shakespeares tragediei wasnt somebody who was raised on that. I decided to take a class in college and just reading those tragedies it was that same kind of feeling where i thought how is it somebody can capture so much of what is essential about a human life andet still have a story and a plot and interesting things happen so that you are carried forward. When i think about the great works of american writers whether it is falconer or hemingway or langston hughes, i also see what i mentioned earlier, that part of myself that is constantly dissatisfied and restless and wanting to see whats next and leaving the past behind but always being drawn back to it. So what i think about my own work, ive been shapedust as my character has in the case of somebody like Frederick Douglass looking north to see whats next but either way, wanting to break the chns of whatever constraints we were born into an bound to. Thank you it ends with a second call on theigh wire and would suggest you are not sure if it has yielded dividends and its easy the notion being the way of looking ayour presidency and your life and perhaps the question whether a naon that was built around a culturalefault and people who ok a certain way could holdn its hand democracy if that democracy is willing to elect someone fromutside of the minority culture. How did you use that and is that where this wholstory began . You were talking about my litera influences. T one of my profound political influences that i write about in the book is gondhi and he famously titled one of his books my experiments in truth. So if you track his career, hes basically starting in south africa where hes advocating on behalf of collards and develops some of his techniques that he then takes to india for their independence movement. He keeps trying stuff and seeing if it is going to work and developing a set of principles around not violence and nonviolent resistance. I thought about that when i started getting into politics not because i thought i could mimic his extraordinary life and success, but because i thought that it was a good way of thinking about a political career. I had gotten a good education. I knew i could support a family. If i failed there was only so far i would fall. I wasnt going to be on the streets. I could afford to take some risks. The bet that i was making from the getgo, even driving to chicago to become a Community Organizer and then running for the state senate and u. S. Senate and ultimately for the presidency was this belief that it was possible both to have a progressive politics that actually won the elections and you could put together multiracial coalitions and despite the racial divides, it was both possible and necessary to bridge the divides in the agenda. Somebody with as weird a background as mine and a funny name could help lead such a coalition. And ma maybe the biggest bet ofl i could participate in politics at the highest level without losing my soul. I think the cultural stereotype is not just that power corrupts absolutely, but political power particular is inherently a game of shady deals and insider maneuvering. So all of those gambles i took, and i think that first part of the book describes the nature of that bet and its a bet on america and americas place in the world. This volume ends not with it having been decided. I end up making a particular bit about whethebetabout whether big to be because if i get that wrong i may end up being a one term president. But as i pointed out in the book, there are despite the success of that particular endeavor not the kind of political world and public life and trust im hoping for. The contrast between this incredible collective endeavor that was this rate with the circus and it is an indicator that it isnt at all clear which is the more prevalent trend in american politics. Is it that conspiracy mongering, racially charged spectacle, or is it and the professional, analytically robust process of solving problems and getting stuff done. And at the end of the book we dont know yet. A quick question about the circus spectacle when you heard the early rumblings of that, what you describe is sarah palin who talks about it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern republican party, antiintellectual, conspiracy theories and antipathy towards black and brown folks were finding their way to the center stage. And if we push harder against those and if you heard something more loudly and if you did push harder what would that have looked like the nominee on the other side we won enough by sizable margins testing the worldview it is repeatedly within the party that refused to work with you. In visiting this did you think about how you might have the optimism and hope that you might appeal to their better angels with a different use of power. What i should probably note, and i tried to d so in the book, but maybe in interviews because people remember sarah palin, but they are less likely to remember, for example, pat buchanan who was peddling the same kind of politics back in 1992 and before that theres a long history of this. The difference i think was that she became the nominee whereas with pat buchanan, despite him doing well in the party, George Hw Bush tried to sideline him as much as he could and so this was the first act of that kind of approach becoming central to the republican identity and consuming and overwhelming to that point would had been viewed as more establishment responsible brand of republican conservatives. Post election theres no doubt by the time im writing this i wonder are there steps i could have taken to counteract and challenge more directly with ese kinds of attitudes that were lurking in the republican party. Im always wrestling with this. There is a school of thought that i think describes in the book that there were critics within the Democratic Party who felt as if i tried too hard for too long to reach out and to be bipartisan, to accommodate republicans, to assume the best as opposed to calling them out and going after them. And i understand that impulse. What it never described for me was what exactly that was going to do in terms of me actually getting stuff done and as opposed to just feeling good. An i perhaps the argument is that i would haveallied my side and we would have seen higher turnout in midterm ections and so forth because people ultimately are motivated by that sense as opposed to we are trying t cut deals. Part of my goal in writing this book is to clarify for people the degree to wch the country really is dived. This is a big complicated country and in order to get any thing done certainly legislatively, you have to figure out how to pick up and accommodate folks that are significantly more conservative than the base in chicago or San Francisco and me denouncing or decrying attitudes that were not sufficiently woke and wasnt going to get me more votes in healthcare or trying to deal with Climate Change, whatave u. Certainly when itill had a majority of th the rul that arot of the decisions creating a super majority requirement in the sate, given that that was a reality at the time, the oy way i could get stuff done needed ben nelsons vote. He was a conservative decrat from nebraska. He had to be conservative to get elected. I had the vote of Robert Bergen my first three years the states economy was based on coal, and Joe Lieberman who was a part of the caucus and endorsed john mccain in the race against me but he was part of the caucus. So, part of what i want people to come out of the book understanding is there is a voice as we are talking about James Baldwin earlier, there is a voice a writer or civil rights leader or activist or Movement Leader can use to motivate and mobilize and change society and that voice often times is the thing that will open up possibilities for politics because its changing peoples hearts and changing peoples minds. But the language of politics itself is very rarely moved or shaped by that kind of prophecy. Because ultimately, you need votes and that is a much more in the terms poetry. Part of my challenge was campaigning in some high poetry using the writers sensibility to describe who we are and what we might be. But then im dealing with Mitch Mcconnell and ben nelson and robert berg. Sometimes progressives in particular overestimate the degree to which the high rhetoric is going to actually move the quotes. What i want to add to that and where i want to go from there you said you were writing this book explicitly to younger people, so what i your diagnostic for the unfinhed business that they have toick up as they move along side us and as they come to lead us. I am so excited to see this generation coming up. If us old folks would get out of the way. [laughter] its true culturally and in terms of politics. I think their instincts are good. It is Second Nature for them to believe all people have intrinsic worth and dignity. Its Second Nature for them not to discriminate against people because their differences in race or gender intity or who they pray to. They are sophisticated, they are smart, they take the culture not just from around the country but l around the world and they are highly idealistic. The question is how do we build institutions that wil work in this modern era and reflect those good impulses. The big work for the next generation is to channel tir natural idealism as well as skepticism about existing institutions in the through a rebuild of those institutions to work for them in the current challenges. Lets just take the criminal justice system. I think young people understand the need to remake that in a pretty significant way. The challenge is going to be how do we get granular about reimagining. We are notending the Police Officers with live ammunition to deal with the homeless person who might need a Mental Health service and intervention and there is a way to deescalate. But how do you proactively do that and how do we create the Climate Change front and create an economy that can provide jobs for young people and keep the engine and the economy going. But it actually is going to preserve the plane for our kid and grandds. And how do we make up a politics that is responsive because i think we recognize thawhether its around minimum wage laws or gun laws and theres a whole bunch of things the majority of americans believe in and you cant ge congress to do anything about it. There are all kinds of institutional reboots that have to be done for some reengineerinand some tinkering make these institutions work better, and thats hard to do. The bt example of that i the facte are not going to be able to get good votingeform so everybodys vote is countedo that its easier for everybody else to vote so the votes actually cnt in terms of being able to influence congress. We are not going toe able to get at done until we get over the hump of having the majority in congress to pass the new Voting Rights law and in each of the cases you have these barriers you have t get over the hump in order then to cree the institutional change as necessary to keep things going any better dection. A. We only have a little bit of time left, and i know theres a question about an observaon in the book. As early readers we bothad a chance to dive into this and there are things we th appreciaten your use of aracter and language and the way that you explain difficult topics and mak them acceptable. One of the things i appreciate is your ability to talk about flaws and the steps that youve made. Since you wanyoung people to read this i know we dont have a lot of time but if you could just quickly address whether that was don to leavehe bread crumbs for the next genation as they dont come out fully formed and its harder to work in public life. I dont know if there is a reason you did that because you are one of the more confident people i know. But this case you sort of let people underand the missteps at youve made. We all have kids who are roughly the same age and they are remarkable and far superior than i was at their age but they are also bombarded with this message, partly because of their phones and they are seeing People Living there bt lives on instagram and hearing about homarc zuckerberg was a billionaire by 27. And they are comparing themselves. The baselines against which they assess themselves and what most of us are experiencing in our 20s and 30s that i worry about sometimes and i want young people to see that somebody that ended up having a fairly successful political career didnt know what he was doing at 22, 23, 25 and well into his 30s but still experienc doubt andonfusion and making mistakes will. On the cover ottracting these huge crowds we watched the debatend i cant transmit this thugh a book. I think it has to be lived but i tried to describe it. One of the gifts of getting to be my age now is im just not afraid of much because iv been knocked down a bunch of times and i embarrass myself. Ive publicly failed and people have written entire articles and ive been criticized and ostracized and demonized. That is a hard thing to internalize in your 20s or 30s. But to the extent the book can help a young person say okay you know what it is worth me taking a chance. Its okay when i screw this up because thats part of the process and i think it is worth it for me to be able to. The most beautiful moment is when you won the Nobel Peace Prize and theres a sea of People Holding candles and use a whatever you do wont be enough. What do those words mean now . I think thats what we tell ourselves hopefully every morning when we get up. Thats not unique to politics. Life will throw stuff at you. There will be disappointments. There will be pain and loss and we know at the end of the day thats the one certainty that we have but this is temporary and yet there is a massive possibility of joy along the way as long as we try and we are open to it. As long as we experience it and more than anything as long as we reach out and are sharing this time on earth with others that we love and care about and that hopefully we are continually expanding that the circumference of that love and concern to reach more and more people because that fills us up. Thats not just a political point of view. Thats a writerly point of view and a spiritual point of view. Thats how we get through the tough times and enjoy the good ones. Unfortunately, we are out of time. We could go on but the clock says we will have to say goodbye. Elizabeth, its been fun to conduct the conversation with you. Thank you so much. I want to thank you and michelle and president obama thank you for joining us and helping us understand the writing process. Thank you for joining us. Talks about his life and political career with former Florida Governor jeb bush. In an hour the prosecutor and cohost of the view talks about her life and her personal experiences with identity and injustice. Hello everyone. My name is autumn and i will be the host. On behalf of the Publishing Group i want to thank you all for coming. I also want to thank the rest of the team for making the event possible and for joining us live tonight. I have the privilege of introducing
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