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On a trip to the Pyramids in the same year, his body man Reggie Love points out an image of a man’s face carved in the stone: ‘Not the profile typical of hieroglyphics but a straight-on head shot. ‘Looking out the rain-streaked window, I wondered how long the road I was travelling would last, with its gas stations and convenience stores, before it too was swallowed by the waves.’ Sometimes, though, it is simply the Ozymandian futility of it all that consumes him.
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Driving back from a visit to Mississippi in 2010 to inspect the damage done by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he glimpses what might be coming. Some of this comes from his anxieties about climate change, which can appear beyond anyone’s power to control, including his own. He has a tendency to lapse into existential reveries about the impermanence of everything. The idea that his gifts could have taken him in many directions gives Obama a distinct sense of unease, the feeling that nothing is ever as fixed as it seems. ‘Cool comedian and quiet commander,’ as Adam Gopnik described him then. As well as being one of the smartest people ever to enter the White House, Obama was also one of the funniest, a natural stand-up, who even managed his turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, on the night he green-lighted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. What else might he have been? A law professor, of course, but also a CEO, a diplomat, maybe even an entertainer. When Jonathan Freedland interviewed him recently for the Guardian, he started by asking: ‘Are you a writer who became a politician, rather than a politician who’s done some writing?’ ‘Great question,’ Obama replied. It made me wonder how much the differences between us could be explained by our respective characters and dispositions, and how much was merely the result of our different circumstances.’ Dabbled in politics? Obama is preoccupied by the thought not merely that he could have been a different sort of politician, but that he might not really be a politician at all. Both of us had studied and taught law, gone on to marry and start families a few years later, dabbled in politics and been helped along by older, cagier politicians. ‘Medvedev and I had more than a few things in common.
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On the drive back, while Michelle slept, the American president reflected on the vagaries of fate. The evening the Obamas spent with the Medvedevs felt ‘ordinary’: ‘We could have been attending a dinner party in any well-to-do American suburb.’ They talked about Silicon Valley, their taste in music (Medvedev has a soft spot for Deep Purple), and their kids’ education. The lives of the privileged in the 21st century do not differ from each other all that much. Instead he found himself on an enormous, modern estate protected by a bank of tall trees. From his reading of Russian novels, he had been expecting ‘a larger but still-rustic version of the traditional country home’. Was he, for instance, the same person as Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president? When Obama met with Medvedev in 2009 at a dacha outside Moscow, he was surprised by how familiar it all seemed. W ho was Barack Obama? The man himself seems troubled by this question and his notably introspective memoir offers up some surprising answers.