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Former President Barack Obama reads from the highly anticipated first volume of his new presidential memoirs. Elected in 2008, he became the 44th president of the United States and the first African American to sit in the Oval Office and A Promised Land offers a unique and deeply personal account of his campaign to get elected and some of the landmarks of his first term. With extraordinary frankness he explores his own ambition and drive to achieve real change and how he had to confront the limitations of presidential power.

Covering his early ambition and the steps first to the Senate and then to the highest office in the land, Obama’s book explores both his personal reflections and his political highs and lows. From the grind of campaigning to the Inauguration, through the financial crisis and fight for the Affordable Care Act, to the moral dilemmas of foreign policy and his place on the world stage he also reveals private moments of self-doubt. This book charts the unrelenting demands on the President of the USA, and threaded through it all he gives tantalising glimpses of family life with Michelle, Malia and Sasha at one of the world’s most famous addresses.

In today’s episode Obama reflects on the ‘sheer chutzpah’ of launching a Senate race and the fun of the early days of campaigning in Illinois. “Being shot from a canon’ was how his strategist David Axelrod referred to it as Obama draws ahead in the popularity stakes. Then Hurricane Katrina blows them off course and Michelle Obama has her reservations about the financial toll of campaign expenses and the demands on her husband’s time.

Abridged by Katrin Williams.
Produced by Julian Wilkinson; the editor is Di Speirs.