Most of your book choices are about how to make change in the country in one way or the other. However, The Bridge is a biography. Why did you choose a biography of President Obama as a book about progressivism in America?

President Obama’s stark victory in 2008 was one of the signal events, I think, in American history. While we’re very close to it right now – so we’re kind of worried about what’s happening in this subcommittee and that new cycle and this language in that bill – this is a watershed moment. America is a particularly interesting country in that it has a very ugly founding reality that’s very unequal but has a founding dream that is beautiful and is about equality. We hold it to be self-evident that all are created equal and so we’ve had this long 200-plus-year journey trying to drag that unequal founding reality closer to that beautiful founding dream of equality, and this is a huge marker along that journey. That’s why the whole world was touched by our achievement here with the president’s election and I wanted to know more of the back-story.

This particular book I highly recommend – it’s a magisterial work on the president and goes deep into the histories of other African American figures like Marcus Garvey, and fairly major people in the president’s life who are seen as minor characters in the mainstream media. This book goes deeply into their backgrounds, where they’re from and how they grew up, so it paints a much fuller picture of the president’s journey through America as he discovered it and as he changed it.

I think one of the things that people have taken from the book is the many facets of the president, and how those facets and his life experiences shaped his ability to communicate to many different people. Is there anything about that element that you think is meaningful about progressivism and liberalism, and the ability of America to be a place where there are so many diversities – of race, origin, geography, economic conditions – and where a person with such diverse experiences can be president?

I think we’re going into the age of the hybrid – hybrid cars, hybrid world views and philosophies, even biologies and heritages. That’s really part of the American myth, the idea of the melting pot or the big salad or whatever you want to call it. But I do think that progressives have something to learn, and the country has to learn that there’s a lot of wisdom at the margins.

We think we have a diverse society, but most of the time we just have a bunch of bubbles that touch. People are kind of riding the seams in between all those bubbles, but you can sometimes see more from the edge than you can see from the centre. I think that’s some of the power of art from the edge. Fifty years ago, [the African American writers] Maya Angelou or James Baldwin were a part of America that had previously been silenced or silent, and then suddenly burst forth with its own view of life and its own perspective on the country. I think President Obama did that in some ways in politics in those key moments – those key gut-check decision moments where he had to address the right issue or he had to make a decision about whether to go in the campaign trail with the gas tax stampede. There’s a certain wisdom that comes through in how he handled that, because when you spend that much time travelling the margins of so many different things, you eventually have some insight into what holds it all together. I think President Obama is at his best when he goes through that which holds us all together, and I think that’s the real key to his particular kind of political genius.

Do you think that says something about America? Do you think the story of President Obama and those things that he’s able to hold together says something larger about the kind of things that hold us all together in a very diverse country?

Yes. The fact of his achievement, and the fact of the backlash against his achievement, both say something powerful about America. They say true things about America. That rainbow, the hopeful flood that poured out in every city across America when he was elected in 2008, that’s America. And then the counter-flood that poured out at the town hall meetings in August 2009, that’s America too. And I do feel, despite the temporary setbacks, that one America is rising and another America is inevitably on the decline.

I think what the president struggles with is the same thing we all struggle with – how do we truly include the legitimate concerns of all Americans without giving up on our best thinking about what we should do with the country. There’s this challenge of bipartisanship that we’ve been struggling with. All of us know that no one party, or no one ethnic group, or no one gender expression has all the answers, and that we need each other. That said, governing is about choosing, and there can be fear that arises for people when choices have to be made and changes have to go forward.

My basic sense about where we are now is that by the time you get to 2016 you’ll be in the post-Obama era, or right at the end of it, and one third of all the voters will be millennials. That’s anyone born between 1980 and 2000. Now, the little nose of that generation poking into politics in 2008 shook up the whole system. When that little nose pulled back a little in 2010, the system went right back to the nonsense. If you imagine 2012, it moves in a little more, and by the time you get to 2016 I think the future is in those people. Right now we have this last gasp of a particular kind of politics, but I think that the politics that the president has pioneered and embodies is in some ways ahead of its time.