A curious aspect of A Promised Land is the way Obama intermittently feels the need to defend himself against his critics. It hardly seems lost on him—no stranger to the academy—that future histories of his administration will be written by a younger generation of scholars well to his left, who may be less forgiving of his record as his aura dissipates. Obama’s response to the financial crisis will take center stage in any historical judgment. In his account, Obama toggles between two defenses: first, that he did everything he could; second, who said he ever had a radical agenda in the first place? There is a scene where Marlowe Obama gently mocks a group of bankers visiting the White House before entering on a reverie of his grandmother, a mid-level banker of the Protestant-work-ethic variety. But the main argument Obama makes is that while it would have been tempting to break up the big banks and wreak vengeance on Wall Street, such passions would have upset capital markets. Everything would have been worse for almost everyone. It was not a chance for foundational rethinking, but a time for tinkering. Even if Obama were correct that a financial crisis was not the most propitious moment to challenge Wall Street’s veto over American society, he made no attempt to integrate his response to the crisis into a wider strategy to dislodge that veto at any point in the future.
Obama accuses his critics of basking in the easy conspiracy theory of elite bankers plotting against Main Street. But reading along, one begins to wonder whether conspiracy theories are in fact always a hindrance in a democratizing society. Abraham Lincoln, as Seth Ackerman has pointed out, exhibited something like the “paranoid style” when it came to America’s slave owners, whom he depicted as a “slavocracy” cabal, pulling the strings behind the scenes of government. Obama’s confrontation with the financial elite is revealing. When the administration readies to get behind the Volcker Rule—a minimal piece of legislation that required banks to be more capitalized—Obama wonders whether the public will appreciate the subtle rule change. “They don’t need to understand it,” replies Robert Gibbs, his press secretary, who went on to fulfill the same role for McDonald’s. “If the banks hate it, they’ll figure it must be a good thing.” Much of the essence of Obamaism is captured in the democratic contempt of that sentence: a watered-down regulation (already now rolled back), hyped into “change we can believe in,” and passed off as red meat to the howling masses.