All language subtitles for The Final War

Barack Obama left office in 2017,

and almost immediately began work

on a memoir of his years
in the White House.

The writing of presidential memoirs
is an American tradition,

but few are as eagerly
anticipated as this.

We will go out and remake America,
and then we will change the world.

President Obama looks back
at his first term in office

in his new memoir,
A Promised Land.

Because of you,
tonight I can stand here and say

that I will be
the Democratic nominee

for the president of
the United States of America.

Obviously, I'd love
to have your vote.

If there is anyone out there

who still questions the power
of our democracy,

tonight is your answer.

Obama writes with measured candour
and often in granular detail

about the many challenges that
confronted him

during his time in office,

and he also writes
about the deepening

of America's
many historic divisions.

I've come to Washington
to talk to Barack Obama,

US president from 2009 to 2017,

and ask him to reflect
on his presidency

and how it changed America.

The Obama presidency
began with crisis,

much of the global banking system
and much of the American economy

teetering on the edge of collapse.

But those eight years in the White
House also witnessed the emergence

of what was to become a global
movement for racial justice.

Yes?Yep. Thanks, then.

Mr President.
It's wonderful to see you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Can I ask you about the timing
of A Promised Land?

You were writing it,
as the preface says,

you were putting the final
touches to it in August... Right.

..during the summer,

during the summer
of Black Lives Matter -

an enormous explosion of debate

and discussion and protest, and
what you called righteous anger

that's been compared
to the civil rights movement.

How did those events and that
atmosphere, how did that impact

on your views of where America
stands right now

in this long journey in its
relationship with race and racism?

Well, obviously, a running thread,

through not just this book
but also my presidency,

was the question of race.

That's been one of the central
faultlines in American history,

our original sin.

And I think as I was watching
the events unfold this summer,

both the... the...

..death of George Floyd,
the murder of George Floyd,

but also the response,

it was a mixture of despair
and optimism.

Enough is enough!

Despair that the chronic lingering
role of race and bias

in our criminal justice system

continues in such a blatant form.

Enormous optimism that you saw
an outpouring

of protest activism and interest

that far exceeded

anything we had seen previously,

and was peaceful, was thoughtful,
was well-organised

and was multiracial.

Traditionally, after Ferguson,
after Trayvon Martin, you know,

there was still, I think, resistance

on the part of large portions
of the white community in America

to push back against the notion

that this was more than just one
incident or a case of bad apples.

"The issue of black folks
and the police was more polarising

"than just about any other subject
in American life."

No justice! No peace!

"It seemed to tap into some
of the deepest undercurrents

"of our nation's psyche,
touching on the rawest of nerves."

"Who controlled legally sanctioned
violence, how it was wielded

"and against whom still mattered
in the recesses of our tribal minds,

"much more than we cared to admit."

What you saw this summer
was some communities

that had a very negligible
black population,

folks going out
there and saying black lives matter

and embracing the notion
that real change has to come.

And that, I think, is consistent
with the themes of this book, which,

you know, I call it A Promised Land
because in biblical terms, you know,

Moses doesn't get there.

You're wandering for 40 years.

It's full of trials and
tribulations and travails.

But the notion that if we are
persistent and hopeful,

we can make things better,
if not for ourselves,

then certainly for future
generations, I think,

is what propelled me into politics

and it's what I saw on display
this summer.

And you hold true to that belief

in what you call the possibility
of America,

and you're yet candid
about the contradictions of America,

this nation conceived in liberty
but by men who were themselves,

in many cases, the owners
of enslaved Africans.

How do you balance your belief
in the possibility of America

with your candid assessment
of the nation's flaws?

I think it's useful to hold two
ideas in your head at the same time,

which is that, um, America

is full of flaws
and contradictions, and yet...

..despite the cruelties,

despite the obvious violations

of our professed ideals - slavery,
Jim Crow,

the treatment of Native Americans,

the internment of Japanese
during World War II,

so forth - um, this remains
an experiment that matters

not just for Americans,
but for the world.

You don't have an example in history

of a great power

whose population is made up
of people who come from everywhere

and are functioning as a democracy

and are trying to figure out,
"Can we live together peacefully?

"Can we bind ourselves to a common
creed even if we don't look alike,

"don't have the same last names,

"don't necessarily worship
in the same way?"

And what is the source of optimism
is, you see a trajectory

in which American democracy becomes
more and more inclusive,

starting with the abolitionists
and the suffragettes

and the union movement.

And later in our history,
the LGBTQ movement

systematically saying,

"You know what?
When we describe we, the people,

"it's not just a handful of folks.
It's not just property owners.

"It's not just white males.
It's all of us.

"We have a seat at the table."

And there is a powerful

and beautiful story to tell
in that progression.

But as I point out, and as I think
our recent history indicates,

that history doesn't move
in a straight line.

It zigzags and can go backwards.

You know, if you were
a African-American

right after the Civil War,
during reconstruction,

you might feel pretty optimistic.

15 years later, you'd feel
very pessimistic

because there was a massive
retrenchment.

And that, I think, is the thing

that always makes me
cautiously optimistic

as opposed to Pollyannish
about America,

and, for that matter,
about the world.

"Of all the rooms and halls
and landmarks that make up

"the White House and its grounds,
it was the West Colonnade

"that I loved best. For eight years,
that walkway would frame my day.

"A minute-long, open-air commute
from home to office and back again.

"The place where I'd gather
my thoughts,

"taking through the meetings
that lay ahead,

"girding myself for this decision
or that slow-rolling crisis."

The book, including its title,
is loaded with symbolism,

symbolism from the Bible, from
the words of Martin Luther King,

from Abraham Lincoln. You can feel
the weight of American history

in lots of the language
that you use,

and that symbolism was always there
as part of your journey.

You began your journey
to the White House in 2007,

announcing your candidacy,
as you remind us in the book,

at the Old State Capitol building
in Springfield, Illinois,

where Abraham Lincoln gave his
famous,

legendary "A House Divided" speech.

In 2020, is America once again
a house divided?

We are very divided right now,

certainly more than we were when
I first ran for office in 2007

and won the presidency in 2008.

Even more divided than when
I ran for re-election in 2012,

and more divided than we were
four years ago

when Donald Trump first
won the presidency.

And some of that is attributable

to our current president,

who actively...

..er, fanned division

because he felt it was good
for his politics,

but it preceded him and it
will outlast him.

And I discuss in the
book some of the trends

that have created that kind of
division.

Some of it has to do with broad
socioeconomic factors,

growing inequality,

the growing division between
rural and urban America,

people feeling as if they're losing
a grip

on the ladder of economic
advancement and so react,

and can be persuaded

that it's this group's fault
or that group's fault -

it's immigrants' fault,

it's folks who are taking
advantage of the system.

So some of that was there.

It has been greatly magnified
by the course of media.

Here in the United States, you start
with older media forms like Fox News

and talk radio hosts like
Rush Limbaugh,

whose business model is premised
on fanning a certain kind of anger,

resentment, a certain story
about people who are not like us,

are taking advantage of us
and we have to fight back.

That has been turbo-charged
by social media.

And, you know, I think the debate
that's been taking place here about,

you know, the kinds of crazy
conspiracy theories

and what some have called
truth decay, right?

Where facts don't matter, er...

You know, everything is fair game,
everything goes.

That has contributed enormously
to these divisions,

and it's going to take
more than one election

to reverse those trends.

It's going to require work

at a local level, as well
as national level.

It's going to require not just
political work, but cultural work

to get people to listen to each
other, think more critically

in evaluating information.

I think at some point, it's going
to require a combination

of regulation and standards
within industries

to get us back to the point

where we at least recognise
a common set of facts

before we start arguing about what
we should do about those facts.

You've said in the past that
Americans, at the moment,

can't recognise each other.

Look, if you are somebody
who exclusively watches...

..you know, er, right-wing media,

um, I am unrecognisable
as a figure

because what's portrayed
of me is just a caricature.

It doesn't compute with
what I believe, what I say, etc,

but there are millions of people
who subscribe to the notion

that Joe Biden is a socialist,

you know, who subscribe to the
notion

that Hillary Clinton
was part of a evil cabal

that was involved in paedophile
rings.

What's been interesting, obviously,
and sad during this election

is that, um, that kind of
lack of fidelity to the truth

has consequences
when it's being promoted

by the most powerful
elected official in the country.

And the pandemic is a classic
example of reality biting back

if you ignore it for too long.

Obviously, the same would apply
in a more slow-rolling

but ultimately perhaps even more
damaging way with climate change.

"In my own mind, those dark cyclones
of oil came to symbolise the string

"of constant crises we were
going through.

"More than that, they felt alive
somehow. A malevolent presence.

"Actively taunting me.

"Even Sasha came into my bathroom

"one morning while I was shaving to
ask,

"Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

And it began, in some ways,
your presidency was the experiment

for these ideas with birtherism,
again involving Donald Trump.

It was your person,
to an extent,

that was the first target for this
wandering from the truth.

You know, I won't say that I was
the first target, but I think

that what you started seeing
with Sarah Palin,

who John McCain selected as his
running mate

and sort of liked to swim
in these waters,

and then with the Tea Party,
its emergence, birtherism,

which Donald Trump promoted,

what you started seeing
was a systematic effort

to not just demonise me,
paint me as the other,

but I think more profoundly,
the realisation that,

um...

..the old rules about paying a price
for being caught lying

or making stuff up
no longer applied, that you could,

because of the multiplicity of media
outlets out there,

you could just put out
whatever you wanted.

Instead of honest debate, we've seen
scare tactics.

"As I debunked the phoney claim

"that the bill would insure
undocumented immigrants,

"a relatively obscure five-term
Republican congressman

"from South Carolina named Joe
Wilson leaned forward in his seat,

"pointed in my direction and
shouted, his face flushed with fury,

"'You lie!'"

The reforms I'm proposing
would not apply

to those who are here illegally.
You lie!

"For the briefest second, a stunned
silence fell over the chamber.

"As far as anyone could remember,
nothing like that had ever happened

"before at a Joint Session address,
at least not in modern times."

And I will not accept
the status quo as a solution.

Not this time. Not now.

That breakdown in some
of our conventions

around public discourse began to
change

and, you know, we notice it...

People, I think, noticed it more
with things like birtherism.

But it actually applied in
less obvious ways,

for example, during the debate
around health care, you know,

when the Republican Party starts
saying

that the health care bill we had
proposed,

which was actually modelled

on a bipartisan approach,

championed by Mitt Romney

when he was the governor
of Massachusetts, a Republican,

along with Ted Kennedy, a Democrat,

that still involved private
insurance,

you started getting
these crazy stories about,

"Well, this is going to legalise
euthanasia."

"They're going to kill your
grandma," and so on and so forth.

Stuff that was clearly not true.

But, you know, if you've repeated
it often enough,

it began to get traction

within certain segments
of the American people.

And these ideas
used to be on the fringes,

and then they moved very much
to the centre... Yes.

..of both Republican policy
and politicking. Yes.

That makes bipartisanship,
which is one of the lubricants

that makes this system work,
in theory, very difficult.

Is bipartisanship possible today?

It is very challenging.

A lot of the old bipartisanship
was premised on, um,

you had southern Democrats
who were quite conservative.

You had liberal Republicans
from north-eastern states.

You know, those Dixiecrats,
Southern Democrats,

abandoned the Democratic Party

right after Lyndon Johnson
signed the Civil Rights Act

and African-Americans become
more empowered politically.

Conversely, a lot of Republicans
who are pro-civil rights

or pro-environment, they get
driven out of their party,

and it makes it much more difficult

to find the outliers,
the iconoclasts,

those who are willing
to break party ranks.

I'm signing this reform bill
into law on behalf of my mother,

who argued with insurance companies

even as she battled cancer
in her final days.

I'm signing it for 11-year-old
Marcelas Owens.

Marcelas lost his mom to an illness
and she didn't have insurance

and couldn't afford the care
that she needed.

We are done.

It's going to be very rare
where either party in America

has that big a majority to get
things done,

and what I worry about is,

on everything from a pandemic
to a major economic crisis

to climate change, it is...

it's hard for this big, creaky
system to move quickly enough

to respond to the very real needs
of the American people.

And I think that there are going
to be some structural reforms

that have to happen in...

Because part of the cynicism
people feel about government is,

if government's gridlocked,
that's good for people

who want to protect the status quo.

You know, I experienced this
during my presidency.

Things I wanted to get done
that I couldn't get done

because of these problematic
features in the government

and how it functions would
dishearten and discourage my base,

which then leads them not to vote,

which then leads me to then
lose more seats

during a midterm election,

which then makes it even
harder to get things done.

And you start getting
into that vicious loop.

Can I ask you about part
of what's happening in America

that you draw a lot of hope from?

You write at the beginning
of the book

about the attitudes of the young,
of your daughters' generation,

and especially when it comes
to issues of race and equality,

that those attitudes are profoundly
different

to their parents'
and their grandparents' generation.

Is America, is perhaps the world,
at a great inflection moment

between generations with very
different views of the world?

They are. And it's not just
around race.

It's around gender.
It's around sexual orientation.

My daughters and their peers

cannot conceive of treating somebody
differently

because they're gay

or bisexual or transgender.

And I'm not saying that they are
representative of all young people,

but it doesn't matter
whether I'm in Johannesburg

or Buenos Aires or Ho Chi Minh City.

You talk to these young people,
they share that common attitude.

They are more sophisticated.

The collision of cultures is
something they are comfortable with.

And the folks who resist
are us old folks,

who want to fasten ourselves
to our old attitudes.

So the spirit that is prompting
nationalism

and nativism and xenophobia
in some cases,

it's not that suddenly people
are mean

or automatically looking
to harm others.

I think they feel uncertain,
unmoored.

There are those who've said
that the sight of a black president,

the sight of an African-American
first family,

while certainly
an historic achievement for America,

may also have been the event
that revealed the depths

of America's historic problem
with race.

What they say, in short,
is that your presidency,

not for what you did
but for who you are in the end,

made these situations,
the race relations issue worse.

How do you respond to that line
of argument?

Yeah. That doesn't make much sense.

Um...
the idea that it made it worse.

I do think that it exposed

some faultlines in our culture

that we have to work through,
but, er,

the fact that you saw
all those protests this summer

indicate the degree to which

we have the capacity
to work them through.

You know, I was never of the view

that somehow, my election signified
a post-racial America.

What I was of the view,
and I still am,

is that the majority of Americans

have very different attitudes

than their parents
and their grandparents did,

and that's indisputable.

By the way, 2008 wasn't an accident.

I then got re-elected in 2012

and left office in 2016
in a pretty good position

if there weren't term limits

and had not Michelle put the
kibosh on things, you know,

even without the Constitution.

I certainly had the
majority of the American people

still approving of the job
I was doing.

So that indicates a change
in attitudes.

It also allowed, for eight years,
children growing up - black, white,

Hispanic, Asian, Native American -
to learn to take for granted

that a black person could occupy
the highest office in the land.

And they internalised that.

And now another generation will be
able to take for granted the idea

that a woman of Indian and Jamaican
heritage can be Vice President.

That's exactly right. Right?
And that's how progress gets made.

But along the way, there's
going to be pushback.

There's going to be resistance.

And I don't think it's unfair to
say that Donald Trump's election

was in some ways in part
fuelled by anxieties

around these changes
that are taking place.

He was very explicit about that,
right? "Make America great again."

And so there was...
there was this interim period

when things aren't great.
Um, and...

You know, I can't, er, change

or apologise for those reactions
and that backlash.

That's the nature of progress.

But what I can say for certain

is that as a consequence of the work
we did,

the indisputable fact
that the country was better off

eight years later than it was when I
took office, it moved the needle.

Young people felt as if,

"You know what? Government is
not separate from me."

And that will have ripple effects

that go beyond the particular
challenges

that we're facing right now

and makes me, again,
cautiously optimistic

as long as we're all vigilant.

And that's part of what A Promised
Land is about,

wanting young people
to cultivate that cautious optimism

that the world can change, but you
have to be a part of that change.

Mr President, thank you
very much for your time.

I look forward to volume two.
I really enjoyed it.

Thank you very much.

With the interview at an end,
what he left behind

was his unshakeable sense
of optimism,

that belief in the promise of
America,

even in the aftermath of an election
and a transition like no other.

And... action!

Good? That's beautiful.

You know what, I can take direction.
Great. There's no doubt about it.