A Promised Land, the most recent of Barack Obama’s multiple memoirs, naturally provided lots of inside perspectives on familiar aspects and episodes from his background, campaigns and terms as President.
The last event he described was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and the lack of personal satisfaction he might have expected it to produce. He pondered:
“Was that unity of effort, that sense of common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? The question nagged at me. For all the pride and satisfaction I took in the success of our mission in Abbottabad, the truth was that I hadn’t felt the same exuberance as I had on the night the healthcare bill passed. I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. And the fact that this was the case, the fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be—and how much work I had left to do.”
Upon examining the chart above, this failure—not unique to Obama’s administration, of course—is no surprise.
The Truth is in the Middle 