Hope, despair, life at the centre of a divided nation

BARACK Obama laid out his concerns about picking Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008. The senator from Delaware loved to hear himself talk, he didn’t have a filter, and “he wasn’t always self-aware”, Obama writes in his new memoir.

While “we couldn’t have been more different”, Obama writes, he “found the contrast between us compelling”, along with what he called Biden’s good heart, foreign policy expertise and appeal to the working class.

With the choice finalised, Obama and Biden awaited Republican nominee John McCain’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick. Biden learnt of the decision in a meeting with Obama from a text message on an adviser’s BlackBerry. “Who the hell is Sarah Palin?” Biden said.

The story of the competing vice-presidential choices is one of many anecdotes in Obama’s new book The Promised Land, in which he defends his legacy and explains what motivated him and at times left him distraught.

As Palin created a surge of interest in the Republican ticket, Obama worried that he had been outfoxed by McCain, and that Palin would pull away enough undecided voters to swing the race to the GOP. But he soon figured the choice would backfire because “on just about every subject relevant to governing the country she had absolutely no idea what the hell she was talking about”.

The book is the first of an expected two volumes on Obama’s presidency. Obama writes of the job’s loneliness and the importance of a trusted circle of confidants who saw him through it.

As Obama elaborates on the roadblocks he faced in pushing his agenda, he acknowledges that his inspirational campaign talk of hope and “yes, we can” was accompanied by bouts of doubt, despair and regret. Time and again, he writes, he wondered whether he was the man for the moment, whether he was driven too much by ego and not his lofty ideals, and whether he was sacrificing too much of his family life for the political mire.

Obama came into office vowing to work with Republicans, but he tells with fury and frustration how the opposition party was just that – almost always in opposition.

In an atmosphere poisoned by false charges that he