This is a tough sit for me, like I've already said, for a few different reasons and in a few

different ways. One, and, you know, I do want to just get this on record in case, you know,

you're a new listener, you weren't listening to me, descend into madness, I don't know,

four years ago, however long it was ago, when I co-wrote a 10,000 word review of Barack Obama's memoir, his third memoir, that is, A Promise Land, which is like

eight or 900 pages, okay? I've also read dreams from my father. I've read The Audacity of

Hope. I have spent so much time inhabiting the Obama lore, the Obama universe. So you've given

him a fair shake. More than a fair shake. But I mean, I've spent so much time thinking about Obama.

The Obama lore and his life story, his style of oratory, all that stuff.

I feel like I kind of know what he's doing by this point on like a deep structural level.

There is a universal grammar to every Obama paragraph, every Obama

speech, every Obama story, they all have the same underlying logic.

And no matter how kind of soaring or how banal the subject matter is, there's always a dialectical

opposition of some kind.

Maybe it's red America and blue America. Maybe it's people

who like one thing, people who like another thing. Maybe it's different kinds of American culture,

whatever. Every Obama speech, every single one of them, steadily deconstructs whatever kind

of conceptual or ideological or aesthetic opposition exists between these two polls and creates a perfect

synthesis from all of it. Well, also noting that it's your problem, the well-meaning liberal

listener, for not having listened to the other side enough. That is central to his worldview,

and it's central to what he's doing, and in all these speeches and anecdotes and all his memoirs, all of it. It's always like, well, look, you want this one thing and a lot of people

want this one thing, but you know, we got 50 states here where they all want other things. Now we've got

to find a way. We got to find a way to make those 50 states come together on a new thing. That's right. And on some fundamental level, he believes, or I don't know

...