[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

I'm getting Obama's book in a couple of days. (Take that, Magabillies!!!) In excerpts and interviews so far, you begin to realize the magnitude of the completely different "set of facts" that the two halves of the country are exposed to. (Or let themselves be exposed to.)

SPOILER ALERT (if you haven't read the book yet...)

“The first time I met Barack Obama, he struck me as different from any other politician I had ever met,” Fareed Zakaria writes in his latest Washington Post column—and the former president’s uncommon curiosity “comes through clearly in his new book, ‘A Promised Land.’ It is well written, certainly the best-written presidential memoir I have read.”

But Obama’s new memoir does not dwell on what Fareed calls “the central political dynamic in his years in office—the rise of an enraged, utterly obstructionist, Manichean opposition to his presidency, and himself personally, that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump.” Despite his conservative, compromise-inclined temperament, Obama’s centrist proposals were met with grassroots hostility and rage.

In the book, “Obama talks about these hysterical reactions to him intelligently but briefly, never offering deep analysis or passionate anger,” Fareed writes. “He admits he wasn’t focused on the ominous undercurrents that were growing in strength. ‘My team and I were too busy,’ he writes. But it might also be that it would take him into deep and dark waters that are so different from the hopeful, optimistic country he so plainly wants to believe in. America remains for him a promised land.”