Dreams from My Father
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama, who was elected as U.S. President in 2008. The memoir explores the events of Obama's early years in Honolulu and Chicago up until his entry into law school in 1988. Obama published the memoir in July 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for Illinois Senate. He had been elected as the first African-American president of the "Harvard Law Review" in 1990. According to "The New York Times", Obama modeled "Dreams from My Father" on Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man".
David Brooks (commentator)
Brooks has frequently expressed admiration for President Barack Obama. In an August 2009, profile of Brooks, "The New Republic" describes his first encounter with Obama, in the spring of 2005: "Usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don't know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew "both" better than me. ... I remember distinctly an image of – we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I'm thinking, a) he's going to be president and b) he'll be a very good president." Brooks appreciates that Obama thinks "like a writer", explaining, "He's a very writerly personality, a little aloof, exasperated. He's calm. He's not addicted to people." Two days after Obama's second autobiography, "The Audacity of Hope", hit bookstores, Brooks published a column in "The New York Times", titled "Run, Barack, Run", urging the Chicago politician to run for president. However, in December 2011, during a C-SPAN interview, Brooks expressed a more tempered opinion of Obama's presidency, giving Obama only a "B-", and saying that Obama's chances of re-election would be less than 50–50 if elections were held at that time. He stated, "I don't think he's integrated himself with people in Washington as much as he should have." However, in a February 2016 "New York Times" op-ed, Brooks admitted that he missed Obama during the 2016 primary season, admiring the president's "integrity" and "humanity" among other characteristics.