PositiveWall Street JournalThe reader’s response to A Promised Land is likely to comport with the reader’s attitude toward its author. Barack Obama is a smart politician with a practiced ear and a lawyer’s capacity for argument; as our first black president, he holds a particular place in history. As a matter of substance, however, A Promised Land tells us little that a newspaper reader wouldn’t already know ... This is all expressed in a kind of consensus prose, rotating the trademark Obama detachment with occasional flashes of anger or self-deprecating humor. It can get monotonous at times. The chapters unfold in a formulaic, curiously uniform, fashion ... Political debts are repaid in affectionate phrases and hindsight is prescient ... Most revealing of all, there are unguarded moments of smoldering discontent that he shares with another president: Mr. Obama is routinely aggrieved by his press coverage; and on the subject of friction within the executive branch, he explains \'how the foreign policy bureaucracy could slow-walk, misinterpret, bury, badly execute, or otherwise resist new directions from a president [who would] often end up butting heads with the Pentagon, State Department, and CIA.\' The glorious burden of the presidency can sound very familiar.
