Thread by @shadihamid

If you missed it, I wrote a review of Obama's memoir for @WCrowdsLive. Why did I read it, you ask? I had a duty and duty called. The passages on the Arab Spring are especially interesting but not in the way you might expect. 1/x wisdomofcrowds.live/oh-the-audacit…

The first thing I noticed was the self-regard masked as self-awareness, a clever trick that apparently went down well with most mainstream reviewers who, when they did offer gentle criticism, did so with sufficient reverence. 2/x

To Obama's credit (or discredit), he basically sounds like me sometimes. For example, he seems to understand that autocracy, by definition, isn't permanent. Yet despite this knowledge, he spends the next several years acting against his own counsel. 3/x

Now that I think about it, Obama would probably make a good think tank analyst. But Obama wasn't a think tank analyst. He was the president of the world's only superpower. 4/x

The way Obama talks about Samantha Power is a bit cringe-inducing. 5/x

wisdomofcrowds.live/oh-the-audacit…

Obama was famously thin-skinned when it came to criticism. It's not hard to understand why. If you see yourself as the the embodiment of what America might become, then you are likely to perceive attacks on yourself as attacks against the country. 6/x

Are some of my criticisms unfair? Probably, yes. At least Obama was a hypocrite. Trump was our first anti-hypocrite president. If I have to choose, I'll choose a hypocrite any day. After all "hypocrisy is the homage that virtue pays to vice." 7/x

wisdomofcrowds.live/why-america-ne…

Part of the problem, as I discuss in the essay, is that I was a believer. It is the believers who find themselves betrayed. 8/x

For fun, I looked back at my first ever @washingtonpost oped from 2008, when I was gushing over Obama from a café in Amman. It's depressing to read it now, after everything that happened. 9/x

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content…

Anyway, in all seriousness, it was difficult for me to read the parts of Obama's memoir on Egypt. But in some ways, those are very clarifying sections. They encapsulate the seemingly permanent dilemmas of US foreign policy. /fin

Read the full essay here: wisdomofcrowds.live/oh-the-audacit…