奥巴马出版新回忆录《应许之地》，反思白宫岁月
In ‘A Promised Land,’ Barack Obama Thinks — and Thinks Some More — Over His First Term
JENNIFER SZALAI
2020年11月17日
The most audacious thing about Barack Obama’s new memoir, “A Promised Land,” is the beaming portrait on its cover: There he is, the 44th president, looking so serenely confident that it’s as if the book weren’t arriving on the heels of a bitter election, amid a cratering economy and a raging pandemic.
贝拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)的新回忆录《应许之地》(A Promised Land)的最大胆之处，就是封面上他那容光焕发的肖像：这位第44任总统看上去是如此平静自信，仿佛这本书并非是在一场痛苦的选举之后，在经济萧条和疫情肆虐的情况下出版的。
The ebullient image also stands at odds with the narrative inside — 700 pages that are as deliberative, measured and methodical as the author himself. Obama says that he initially planned to write a 500-page memoir and be done in a year; what he ended up with instead is a hefty volume (now the first of an anticipated two) that stops in May 2011, shortly after his roasting of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30 and the killing of Osama bin Laden the day after.
他兴高采烈的样子也与书中的叙述格格不入——这700页的作品与作者本人一样审慎、有分寸、有条不紊。奥巴马说他最初计划写一本500页的回忆录，并在一年内完成；但他最终完成的是一本长篇巨制（现在上市的是预计的两卷本的上卷），时间线停止在2011年5月，即他在4月30日的白宫记者晚宴上嘲讽唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)以及次日奥萨马·本·拉登(Osama bin Laden)被击毙后不久。
Obama’s extraordinary first book, “Dreams From My Father,” was published in 1995, a year before he was elected to the Illinois senate, and traced his family history alongside his own coming-of-age. “A Promised Land” is necessarily less intimate and more political, offering close-up views of the major issues that Obama faced during his first term, including the economic stimulus, health care, immigration, the environment and the forever war in Afghanistan.
奥巴马的杰出处女作《我父亲的梦想》(Dreams From My Father)出版于1995年，那是他当选伊利诺伊州参议员的前一年，他在追溯自己成长历程的同时，也追溯了他的家族史。《应许之地》必然没有那种亲密，而更具政治色彩，对奥巴马在首个任期内面临的主要问题提供了近距离描写，包括经济刺激、医保、移民、环境和永无止境的阿富汗战争。
Presumably left for the future volume are, among other fraught subjects: the 2016 election, his abdication of his own “red line” in Syria, the entrenchment of the surveillance state and a discussion of drone strikes. This isn’t to say that “A Promised Land” reads like a dodge; if anything, its length testifies to what seems to be a consistently held faith on the part of the former president — that if he just describes his thinking in sufficient detail, and clearly lays out the constellation of obstacles and constraints he faced, any reasonable American would have to understand why he governed as he did.
可以推测下卷的内容将包括其他令人困扰的话题：2016年大选、放弃了自己在叙利亚的“红线”、强化国家监视、以及对无人机袭击的讨论。这并不是说《应许之地》写得像一种开脱；如果有什么问题，也是它的长度证明了这位前总统似乎一贯秉持的信念——即若能详细描述自己的想法，并列出他所面临的一系列障碍制约，那么任何一个理性的美国人都必然能明白他为什么会那样治理国家。
Nearly every president since Theodore Roosevelt has written a memoir that covers his years in office; this one contains some inevitable moments of reputation-burnishing and legacy-shaping, though the narrative hews so closely to Obama’s own discursive habits of thought that any victories he depicts feel both hard-won and tenuous. An adverb he likes to use is “still” — placed at the beginning of a sentence, to qualify and counter whatever he said just before. Another favorite is “maybe,” as he reflects on alternatives to what happened, offering frank confessions of his own uncertainties and doubts. At a time of grandiose mythologizing, he marshals his considerable storytelling skills to demythologize himself. He addresses the book to the “next generation,” to young people who seek to “remake the world,” but the story he tells is less about unbridled possibility and more about the forces that inhibit it.
自西奥多·罗斯福(Theodore Roosevelt)以来，几乎每位总统都写过回忆录，涵盖自己的执政岁月；这本书有不可避免的声誉营销和塑造遗产的内容，尽管叙述手法与奥巴马自己的散漫思维习惯非常类似，以至于他所描述的任何胜利都让人感觉来之不易且很脆弱。他喜欢用“still”（不过）这个副词，放在句子开头，对他之前所说的加以限定和反驳。另一个他最爱用的词是“maybe”（也许），在对已发生事件的其他选择进行思考时，他会坦白自己的不确定和怀疑。在这个充满宏大的神话叙事的时代，他用自己超高的讲述技巧消除了自身的神话色彩。把他这本书献给“下一代”，献给那些想要“重塑世界”的年轻人，但他讲述的故事与其说是关于无限可能，不如说更多是关于抑制这种可能的力量。
He periodically reminds us how he inherited a state of emergency. As one of his friends said after Obama’s historic win in 2008, when the economy was getting devoured by the Great Recession: “Two hundred and thirty-two years and they wait until the country’s falling apart before they turn it over to the brother!”
他不时提醒我们他如何接手了一个处于紧急状态的国家。就像一位朋友在2008年经济正被大萧条吞噬时、奥巴马历史性赢得大选胜利后所说的那样：“232年过去了，他们一直等到国家处于崩溃，才把它交给了我们的兄弟！”
Once in office, Obama sought the help of experienced insiders instead of “fresh talent,” deciding that the dire circumstances “demanded it.” Obama says he had ambitious ideas for structural change, but that his team insisted that any attempts to mete out some “Old Testament justice” to the banks whose avarice and recklessness had pushed the financial system to the brink would send skittish markets into a full-blown panic.
上任后，奥巴马寻求经验丰富的内部人士的帮助，而不是寻找“新人”，他认为这么做是“迫于”严峻的形势。奥巴马称他对结构性改革有雄心勃勃的想法，但他的团队坚称，让贪婪且鲁莽地将金融体系推到悬崖边的银行付出一些“旧约式正义”的任何尝试，都将使动荡不安的市场陷入全面恐慌。
But quelling markets did little to quell anger and fear — something that conservatives, Obama noticed, were quick to seize on and use to their advantage, while the president deemed it perilous to tap into such incendiary emotions. (This seemed to be an ingrained sensibility: David Maraniss’s 2012 biography of Obama has one of his mentors recalling with a touch of exasperation how even when they were doing community organizing in Chicago, Obama was “reluctant to do confrontation, to push the other side because it might blow up.”) What could have been politically beneficial to him, Obama takes pains to spell out, would have risked degrading the institutions that needed to be repaired, not demolished.
但平定了市场并不能平息愤怒和恐惧，奥巴马注意到保守派很快就抓住并利用了这一点，而这位总统认为，利用这种煽动性情绪是危险的。（这似乎是一种根深蒂固的敏感：在大卫·马拉尼斯[David Maraniss]2012年的奥巴马传记中，他的一位导师带着些许恼怒回忆称，即便是他们还在芝加哥做社区组织工作时，奥巴马就“不愿采取对抗行动，不愿向另一派施压，因为担心可能闹大”。）奥巴马煞费苦心地解释称，一些事或许在政治上对他有利，但也可能让那些需要整顿而非摧毁的体制蒙受损失。
There’s a dynamic that Obama describes again and again in “A Promised Land”: establishment Republicans shrewdly finding ways to appropriate and exploit the feelings of helplessness and resentment that their own deregulatory policies had helped to bring about in the first place. “If all this seems obvious to me now, it wasn’t at the time,” Obama writes. “My team and I were too busy.” He recalls a Republican senator telling him, “I hate to say it, but the worse people feel right now, the better it is for us.” (This senator may have hated to say it, but he loved to see it.) The result was a drubbing in the 2010 midterms, when Democrats lost an astounding 63 seats in the House.
在《应许之地》中，奥巴马反复描述了一种趋势：建制派的共和党人精明地找到办法来利用这种无助感和怨恨感，而这种感觉首先恰恰是他们自己放松监管的政策导致的。“现在这一切对我来说可能显而易见，但在当时却并非如此，”奥巴马写道。“我和我的团队都太忙了。”他回忆起一位共和党参议员曾对他说：“我不想这么说，但人们现在感觉越糟糕，对我们来说就越有利。”（这位参议员可能不愿意这么说，但他乐见其成。）其结果是2010年中期选举的惨败，当时民主党在众议院失去了惊人的63个席位。
About the substance of those first two years in office, Obama expresses few regrets. “We had saved the economy,” he writes. “We had stabilized the global financial system and yanked the U.S. auto industry from the brink of collapse.” The Affordable Care Act made health care available to another 20 million Americans. The midterms “didn’t prove that our agenda had been wrong. It just proved that — whether for lack of talent, cunning, charm or good fortune — I’d failed to rally the nation, as F.D.R. had once done, behind what I knew to be right.”
对于执政头两年的实质内容，奥巴马几乎没有表示遗憾。“我们拯救了经济，”他写道。“我们稳定了全球金融体系，并把美国汽车工业从崩溃的边缘拉回来。”《平价医疗法案》又使2000万美国人获得了医保。中期选举“并没有证明我们的议程是错误的。这只是证明了——无论是由于缺乏才能、狡猾、魅力还是好运——我没能像富兰克林·罗斯福(F.D.R.)曾经做到的那样，团结全国人民，支持我心目中正确的事情。”
The tone that Obama strikes in lines like these is almost mournful. He shows how a certain kind of blunt candor seemed all but unavailable to him as the first Black president. After he offered the mildest rebuke of the police officer who arrested the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. on his own front porch, saying that the officer acted “stupidly,” his support among white voters plunged. In public, Obama was unfailingly conciliatory, telling reporters he “could have calibrated my original comments more carefully,” even as he began to realize that the issue of Black people and the police was a reminder “that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people.”
在这样的段落里，奥巴马字里行间的语气几乎是悲哀的。他展现出身为第一位黑人总统期间几乎用不上的那种直率坦诚。那一次，他对那名在小亨利·路易斯·盖茨(Henry Louis Gates Jr.)自家门廊逮捕这位学者的警察做了最温和的斥责，说他表现得很“愚蠢”，随后他在白人选民中的支持率大幅下降。在公开场合，奥巴马总是表现出和解的态度，他告诉记者，他“本可以更谨慎地调整我最初的言论”，尽管他开始意识到，黑人和警察的问题是在提醒人们，“我们国家社会秩序的基础从来都不是简单的知情同意；它还涉及到几个世纪以来白人对黑人和棕色人种的国家支持的暴力。”
As much as he knew this, he couldn’t say it. His almost zealous commitment to moderation rankled some progressives, who had assumed that his soaring campaign rhetoric meant he was a visionary bent on overturning the status quo. Whenever he felt stuck, he fell back on empathy and “process.” They sound like incommensurate traits — one is inventive and literary, the other is bland and technocratic. But for Obama — who in this book demonstrates an almost compulsive tendency to imagine himself into the lives of others (whether it’s Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or, in one passage, a Somali pirate) — a sound process “was born of necessity.” Decisions that were made after taking into account a variety of perspectives reassured him that he wasn’t blinkered by his own.
虽然他知道这一点，但他不能说出来。他对缓和态度的承诺近乎狂热，这激怒了一些进步人士，他们曾经以为他高调的竞选言辞意味着他深具远见，一心想要改变现状。每当他觉得陷入困境时，他就会求助于同理心和“程序”。二者看上去是两种完全不相称的特质——“同理心”是创造性的、文学性的，“程序”则是乏味的、技术性的。但对奥巴马来说——他在这本书中表现出一种近乎强迫性的倾向，去想象自己过着他人的生活，无论是希拉里·克林顿(Hillary Clinton)、约翰·麦凯恩(John McCain)，还是其中一段中提到的索马里海盗——一个健全的程序“源于必要性”。考虑到各种观点后做出的决定让他确信，他没有被自己的观点所蒙蔽。
“A Promised Land” isn’t entirely about the presidency. The first 200 pages move (comparatively) briskly through Obama’s early years to his life in Chicago, when his burgeoning political career put a strain on his marriage to Michelle, who had curtailed some of her own ambitions so that one of them would be present for the couple’s daughters. Of course, becoming president didn’t yield anything that resembled a work-life balance, though it did mean that rather than commute between Chicago and Springfield, Ill., or between Chicago and Washington, he could usually be home for dinner by 6:30 before returning to the Oval Office. He would receive his President’s Daily Brief (or as Michelle called it, “The Death, Destruction and Horrible Things Book”) at the breakfast table.
《应许之地》并不完全是关于他的总统任期。全书（相对）轻快的前200页，从奥巴马的早年生活谈到他在芝加哥的日子，当时他的政治生涯正在起步，给他和米歇尔的婚姻带来了压力，米歇尔抑制了自己的一些抱负，以便夫妻中能有一人可以陪伴女儿。当然，成为总统根本不能让工作与生活更加平衡，尽管这确实意味着他可以不用往返于芝加哥和伊利诺伊州斯普林菲尔德之间，或是芝加哥和华盛顿之间。他通常可以在6:30之前回家吃晚饭，然后返回椭圆形办公室。他会在早餐桌上收到总统的《每日简报》（President’s Daily Brief，或者用米歇尔的话说，是一份《死亡、毁灭与恐怖之书》[The Death, Destruction and Horrible Things Book]）。
He happened to be at home in April 2010 when he first got word that an explosion had torn through the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig off the Louisiana coast, belching fire and smoke and gushing oil — the worst oil spill in the country’s history. An underwater video feed showed “the oil pulsing in thick columns from the surrounding wreckage,” Obama writes, “like emanations from hell.”
2010年4月，第一次听到路易斯安纳海岸的钻井平台“深水地平线号”(Deepwater Horizon)发生爆炸的消息时，他碰巧在家。爆炸造成了大火与浓烟，石油喷涌而出——这是美国历史上最严重的石油泄漏事件。一段水下视频显示，“石油从周围的残骸中喷出粗大的油柱，”奥巴马写道，“就像从地狱里冒出来的。”
The novelty and enormity of the disaster shook him. (The technology for ultradeep underwater drilling made the Exxon Valdez look like a Tinkertoy by comparison.) Until then, Obama had maintained a “fundamental confidence” that he “could always come up with a solution through sound process and smart choices.” But those “plumes of oil rushing out of a cracked earth and into the sea’s ghostly depths” seemed of another order, unassimilable to his generally imperturbable worldview. Even after the hole was plugged and the cleanup was proceeding apace, something awful had been unleashed, with the true extent of the poisoning not yet known.
这场灾难的奇异和庞大规模使他震惊。（超深水钻井技术让埃克森油轮瓦尔迪兹号的泄露事故相形之下微不足道。）在那之前，奥巴马一直保持着“基本信心”，认为自己“总能通过健全的程序和明智的选择找到解决办法”。但是，“一股股石油从裂开的地面喷涌而出，涌向大海的幽深之处”，这一幕似乎是另一种秩序，与他一贯沉着冷静的世界观格格不入。即使洞被堵住了，清理工作也在迅速进行，一些可怕的东西已经被释放出来，它对环境究竟有多大毒害尚不清楚。
A hundred pages later, Obama remembers how Republicans seemed to get increasingly petulant at the prospect of working with his administration. “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” he writes, “a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.” Trump had been peddling a birtherist conspiracy theory that some conservatives seemed eager to accept.
100页过后，奥巴马回忆，对于同他的政府合作的前景，共和党人似乎显得越来越暴躁。“仿佛我在白宫的存在引发了一种根深蒂固的恐慌，”他写道，“一种自然秩序被打乱的感觉。”而特朗普一直在兜售一些保守派人士似乎急于接受的出生地阴谋论。
Obama doesn’t force the metaphor, but the events described in “A Promised Land” suggest that something very old and toxic in American politics had been unleashed too. It was as if the Republican Party, having sidled up to the jagged shores of white grievance, was starting to founder on them. As he writes of the Deepwater disaster: “Where the rest of the oil ended up, what gruesome toll it took on wildlife, how much oil would eventually settle back onto the ocean floor, and what long-term effect that might have on the entire Gulf ecosystem — it would be years before we’d have the full picture.”
奥巴马并没有明确打出这个比方，但《应许之地》中描述的事件表明，美国政治中一些古老而且有毒的东西也被释放出来。共和党似乎已经悄悄登上充满白人怨恨的崎岖海岸，开始在这里走向失败。正如他在谈到“深水号”的灾难时所写的那样：“其余的石油到哪里去了，它们会对野生动物造成多么可怕的危害，多少石油最终会沉淀到海底，它有可能对整个海湾生态系统造成什么样的长期影响——我们要过些年才能对这一切有个完整的概念。”
