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    The Promise: President Obama, Year One
    The Promise: President Obama, Year One
    The Promise: President Obama, Year One
    Audiobook21 hours

    The Promise: President Obama, Year One

    Written by Jonathan Alter

    Narrated by Jonathan Alter

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Barack Obama’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of “Change We Can Believe In” was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama’s historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery.

    In The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Jonathan Alter, one of the country’s most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama’s difficult debut.

    What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and off-hours, using what his best friend called “a Rubik’s Cube in his brain?" These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office.

    The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone—“feeling lucky”—who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who admitted that “I begged him not to do this.”

    Alter takes the reader inside the room as Obama prevents a fistfight involving a congressman, coldly reprimands the military brass for insubordination, crashes the key meeting at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, and bounces back after a disastrous Massachusetts election to redeem a promise that had eluded presidents since FDR.

    In Alter’s telling, the real Obama is an authentic, demanding, unsentimental, and sometimes overconfident leader. He adapted to the presidency with ease and put more “points on the board” than he is given credit for, but neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public. We see the famously calm president cursing leaks, playfully trash-talking his advisors, and joking about even the most taboo subjects, still intent on redeeming more of his promise as the problems mount.

    This brilliant blend of journalism and history offers the freshest reporting and most acute perspective on the biggest story of our time. It will shape impressions of the Obama presidency and of the man himself for years to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMay 18, 2010
    ISBN9781442334465
    Author

    Jonathan Alter

    Jonathan Alter is an award-winning historian, columnist and documentary filmmaker. An MSNBC political analyst and former senior editor at Newsweek, he is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies; The Promise: President Obama, Year One; and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.

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    Reviews for The Promise

    4.5/5

    11 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Very good book. Covers the Obama from the Sept 2008 to roughly March 2009.Provides a nice inside view of Obama and his advisors. Easy read.
    • 5/5
      Insightful and informative look inside the first year of the Obama administrative. Best part was the look inside Obama's personality through how he deals with those in his inner circle to how he treats the American people. Extensive coverage of the economy, foreign policy and the health care bill. It took a while to read but was worth it!

      Proud to have finished this a few hours before Father's Day because it was my father who introduced me to American politics (Aaron Sorkin did have a hand in it as well but Dad explained all the political insides that I didn't get). Happy Father's Day, Dad!
    • 5/5
      Barack Obama is not a saint. What a relief. "The Promise: President Obama, Year One", written by Jonathan Alter, a "Newsweek" reporter, is a refreshing change from the worshipful treatment of President Obama in "Game Change". Mr. Alter provides an even-handed treatment of the first year of the Obama presidency. He shows us a president who is all too human, making mistakes in both personnel and policies but mostly getting it right. The reader is provided with thorough background information on all of the major players in President Obama?s administration. I was especially fascinated by the description of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel?s agonizing decision whether to take the job as Chief of Staff or remain in the House, eventually succeeding Nancy Pelosi to become the first Jewish Speaker of the House. First Jewish Speaker? I had no idea that anyone thought that way in the 21st century. I thought that we had put silly religious issues behind us. I?m old enough to remember when (Catholic) JFK was running for the presidency and voters (including my Goldwater Republican parents) were terrified that if he were elected, the Pope would be running the country. As history reminds us, JFK was elected and governed the country without the Pope.First Lady Michelle Obama is treated respectfully. I was surprised to learn that despite her husband never having been subject to rumors of infidelity, she is described as ?a tiger when it came to Barack and other women?, the example of Halle Berry?s enthusiasm in campaigning for Obama prompting the future First Lady to forbid her husband to appear with her. Mr. Alter?s previous book, "The Defining Moment: FDR?s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope", dealt with FDR and the New Deal. Not surprisingly, he frequently draws parallels between President Obama?s first year in office and FDR?s first year in office. Both entered office faced with a collapsing economy. Both were forced to clean up the messes left by the previous administrations. And both passed landmark legislation in their first year, Social Security by FDR and health care reform by Obama.It?s often difficult to end a book of this length and breadth, especially with the protagonist still early in his administration and still likely to continue making history, but I found the ending to this book very satisfying. The long, drawn-out battle for health care reform takes up most of the book, but in the end the reader is reminded of President Obama?s other first year accomplishments such as banning pay discrimination against women (always close to my heart), health insurance for millions of children, tightened rules governing credit cards and the crackdown on predatory lending, achievements that have become lost in the noise and confusion of the battle over health care, but which are huge victories in their own right.
    • 4/5
      I've never been a fan of instant history books or instant biographies, but my fascination with the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing of politics, and, I admit, my admiration for President Obama, caused me to read The Promise as soon as it was published.Through first and second hand interviews with hundreds of subjects in and out of government, Jonathan Alter has assembled a compelling portrait of Mr. Obama's first "year" in office. Starting with his acceptance of the Democratic Party nomination in August 2008 and concluding with the passage of healthcare reform in March 2010, the timeline includes brief passages on the campaign, but truly focuses on the governance of the administration and the interactions between its members with each other and Congress.I've been disappointed by some of the results of Obama's first year; as a progressive I was hoping for policies that matched my worldview more closely. However, Alter has reminded me that, as a candidate, President Obama never described himself as a progressive, and that he has to deal with a deeply partisan political environment where the opposition's platform is to oppose everything vigorously, even when it contains substantial input from them. As an example, healthcare reform closely matches the Republican proposals from 1994 and includes mandates similar to those espoused and signed into law by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. Now that the same package is presented by a Democrat, the same people are against the proposals. Even when the Democrats had a 60 seat majority, enough to overcome filibusters, the egos of various Senators and the wide political viewpoints from far left Bernie Sanders of Vermont to centrist (some may describe as Democrat in Name Only - DINO) Ben Nelson of Nebraska made getting anything passed a back and forth negotiation as complicated as an arms control treaty.While many of Alter's sources are inside government, and he readily illustrates the poisonous political environment, he also levels criticisms at the administration. President Obama is criticised for not taking the lead on various issues, instead opting to let Congress do so in an effort to give them "ownership" which he believed would make them more likely to actually get something done.Overall, the book reads like an extended Newsweek (the magazine which publishes Alter's column) article or well-written blog, which is probably what was intended. However, due to the nature of the book's timeline, it does not contain the analysis one would expect to see in a historical review of President Obama which can only come with more time having passed.I'm not sure if Alter intends to produce a new book for each year of the Obama Presidency, but then, I'm not sure I'd want to read another book summarizing each year either. The Promise stands out from other instant history books, probably because its gestation lasted nearly two years and included sources known to Alter from his coverage in Newsweek.
    • 4/5
      Excellent analysis of Obama's first year. The chapter treating his relationship with the military is especially well handled.
    • 5/5
      Full of information which helps us appreciate the complexities of many major works we took for granted or didn't even know about at the time. Behind-scenes explanations are elucidating and sometimes inspiring. Well-written, thorough, and genuinely interesting.