Now that the first term of the Obama presidency is nearly over and another presidential election campaign is approaching, this book is especially timely. It summarizes the promises that then candidate Barak Obama made and analyzes President Obama's accomplishments in terms of delivering on those promises. Obama's Broken Promises ventures across the total scope of the U.S. economy, factually and statistically documenting the administration's impact on unemployment, the national debt, poverty, health care, education, housing, energy, trade, foreign relations, and more. Everyone who is planning to vote in November and feels impelled in an era of negative campaigning to base his or her choice on facts rather than attack ads should read this book. It is a bold excursion into the reality of America's most pressing needs.

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND PEOPLE NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times • NPR • The Guardian • Slate • Vox • The Economist • Marie Claire In the stirring first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office. Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.

“The Mendacity of Hope should help wake up all those Obama-voters who've been napping while the wars escalate, the recession deepens, and the environment goes straight to hell.” —Barbara Ehrenreich From the former editor-in-chief of Harper's Magazine comes a bold manifesto exposing President Obama's failure to enact progressive reform at home and abroad. National Magazine Award finalist Roger Hodge makes a hard-hitting case against Obama's failure to deliver on the promises of his campaign. The first book-length critique of the Obama's presidency from a prominent member of the left, The Mendacity of Hope will strike a chord with anyone stirred by the words of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Frank Rich. It's the book that every frustrated progressive in America has been waiting to read.

Invoking America's greatest leaders, Robert Kuttner explains how Obama must be a transformative president--or a failed one--a president who must succeed in fundamentally changing our economy, society, and democracy for the better.

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 realizes that a Senate candidate’s gaffe about baseball in a Massachusetts special election will dash the big dream of his first year. 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.

No President in living memory has entered office with a greater amount of goodwill and broad, bi-partisan support than Barack Obama. And few Presidents in living memory had arrived in Washington proclaiming such dramatically articulated vows to change the tone of politics, to usher in an era of post-partisanship in an effort to rally the nation behind his plan of enacting an ambitious program of social and economic change. He vowed to enact a broad bi-partisan agenda for health care reform, energy transformation, economic revitalization, job growth and restoration of America's standing in the world. And no President in living memory has more quickly and more completely abandoned his promises. He enacted a health care plan that far more resembled plans he had bitterly criticized his opponents for supporting rather than the one his campaign outlined His promised job growth through economic stimulus measures drove up the unemployment rate to double digits leading to millions of job losses His vows to restore fiscal probity resulted in the most ruinous deficits and public debt in U.S. history He 'green energy' program collapsed into a cesspool of crony political favoritism His vows to restore relations with hostile nations like Iran and North Korea had only deepened those nations' disdain for America Despite his harsh criticisms, Obama adopted nearly every plank in the Bush-era anti-terror policy His promise to restore science to its rightful place resulted in the most rigidly inflexible program of ideological extremism in modern memory Even more noteworthy was the fact that the new era of post-partisanship he had vowed to create in Washington resulted in the worst political gridlock in living memory. This book examines in detail hundreds of campaign promises Obama made while running for President, contrasting those with the record of failure and broken promises left in his wake. It is a story that has received too little attention - until now."

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Barack Obama’s lucid vision of America’s place in the world and call for a new kind of politics that builds upon our shared understandings as Americans, based on his years in the Senate “In our lowdown, dispiriting era, Obama’s talent for proposing humane, sensible solutions with uplifting, elegant prose does fill one with hope.”—Michael Kazin, The Washington Post In July 2004, four years before his presidency, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Obama called “the audacity of hope.” The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama’s call for a different brand of politics—a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces—from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media—that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment. At the heart of this book is Barack Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats—from terrorism to pandemic—that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy—where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, Obama says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes—“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”