The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Commentary ^ | December 2006 | Yuval Levin

[neverdem]

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

By Reviewed by Yuval Levin From issue: December 2006

Off and Running
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
by Barack Obama
Crown. 364 pp. $25.00


Barack Obama, the Democratic star of the moment in American politics, is the junior Senator from Illinois, and for the past two years has been the only black member of the U.S. Senate. Elected after seven years in the Illinois state legislature and a short career as a lawyer and community activist in Chicago, he first came to national prominence when John F. Kerry made him the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Since then he has been something of a celebrity, always in demand for speeches and interviews if not very active on the Senate floor. Washington pundits started buzzing early on about a future White House run, but not until this fall did Obama himself begin to drop hints that he might have his eyes on the Presidency. The hints came in the course of a book tour to launch The Audacity of Hope, and the resulting publicity quickly made the book a best-seller.

This is in essence a campaign document, with most of the faults and few of the virtues of the form. Each of its nine chapters (bearing titles like “Values,” “Race,” “Opportunity,” “Faith,” and “Family”) opens with a personal story, generally drawn from Obama’s two years in the Senate, proceeds to a set of social or political questions, and then mentions a policy proposal or two before circling back to the personal story with which it began. The chapter on values, for example, takes up questions of corporate ethics and compassion for the poor. The chapter on opportunity lays out concerns with education and American competitiveness. The discussion of family addresses the challenges of balancing work and parenthood. The chapter on race reflects upon the need simultaneously to celebrate the enormous progress we have made and tackle the great problems that remain. And so forth.

The book (which offers no sign of a co-author or ghost-writer) is crisply written, and the personal stories that shape each chapter are often telling and interesting. But when Obama moves from personal narrative to policy and politics, his chapters turn bland and flat, and his analysis often amounts to little more than an endless barrage of clichés.

Thus, after noting low math and reading scores in high schools, Obama with exquisite vagueness calls on policy makers to “identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that don’t produce results.” His brief discussion of tensions between religious and secular forces in American life ends with the anodyne observation that “it would be helpful . . . if in debates about matters touching on religion—as in all of democratic discourse—we could resist the temptation to impute bad motives to those who disagree with us.” Elsewhere, he takes this same trope to risible lengths by writing that our politics would work better “if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”

Now and then, Obama’s centrist platitudes lead him into unsupported or even outright false assertions. Of the $9 trillion national debt he claims, “the bulk of the debt is a direct result of the President’s tax cuts,” when in fact the tax cuts have involved less than a tenth of that amount. Elsewhere, invoking allegedly declining federal funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he launches into an argument about the Bush administration’s failure to support basic research essential to America’s global competitiveness. But the budget of the NIH has grown by more than $8 billion, or 40 percent, since Bush came into office, and this year the administration proposed to double federal funding for research in the physical sciences over the next decade.


By far the most prominent and the most clichéd theme of this book, however, is that American politics has been undone by partisan rancor. “You don’t need a poll,” Obama writes in one characteristic passage,

to know that the vast majority of Americans—Republican, Democrat, and independent—are weary of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth. . . . Religious or secular, black, white, or brown, we sense—correctly—that the nation’s most significant challenges are being ignored and that if we don’t change course soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves behind a weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited.

Obama clearly wants readers to experience his rebuke of partisan acrimony as a breath of fresh air, a break from the divisive spirit of our times. But since this complaint about our politics is standard fare for a campaign book, one gets the sense less of refreshing honesty than of a populist ploy designed to obscure the fact that the author has not stated any clear-cut views of his own. Politics is meant to be an arena of debate and clashing interests. Besides, is it really the case that “the nation’s most significant challenges are being ignored,” or that America is “weaker and more fractured” than it was a generation ago, let alone, as Obama later contends, than “at any time since before World War II”?

Like many on the contemporary Left, Obama subscribes to a kind of false nostalgia, what might be called backward-looking progressivism. Without a hint of irony, he contrasts today’s partisan rancor in Congress with a “time before the fall, a golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party was in power, civility reigned and government worked.” One wonders just when that golden age might have been—during the epic battles over McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, détente, Reaganomics, and other fronts too numerous to mention? Nor does Obama appear to notice that, in admonishing us to heed his warnings lest we find ourselves in “an America very different from the one most of us grew up in,” he sounds more like a stern traditionalist than a liberal Democrat.

But then, Obama does his best throughout this book not to sound like a liberal Democrat. In this, he does a disservice to his own record.

Obama has almost nothing to say, for instance, about his tenure in the Illinois legislature, where his voting record put him on the Left of every major question—from gun control, to taxes, to abortion. In expressing admiration for the “Gang of Fourteen”—the U.S. Senators who last year worked out a compromise to avoid an explosive showdown over judicial nominations—he glosses over the fact that he refused to join them, or for that matter that he was one of only 22 Senators to vote against the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts. Similarly, in laying out the case for free trade, he barely mentions that he voted against the Central America Free Trade Agreement approved by the Senate last year.

As a Senator, Obama has earned a 100-percent rating from Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal interest group that scores the votes of members of the U.S. Congress based on their allegiance to key left-wing causes and interests. Even Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts could manage only a 95 during the same period.


Of course, the effort to mask one’s liberal stripes has not been limited to Obama in this election year. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean may have drawn ridicule in 2004 for telling a reporter he wanted to be the candidate of “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” but since then, Dean’s party has deliberately sought to appear more conservative than it has become, including by recruiting more conservative candidates to run for office. In this year’s congressional elections, the Democrats fielded, among others, Ronald Reagan’s former Navy Secretary James Webb, who resigned his office in protest when he found Reagan’s military buildup inadequate, and Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., who at campaign rallies handed out cards with his picture on one side and the Ten Commandments on the other.

Observing these contortions, one may well wonder whether the Democrats are truly moving to the center or whether, as in Dean’s quip two years ago, they merely aim to pick up support from disillusioned conservative voters without allowing the views of those voters to exercise any real influence on the party’s platform. Contrasting Obama’s centrist conceit in The Audacity of Hope with his voting record in the Senate hardly helps to still one’s doubts on this score.

In all fairness, Obama has been in the Senate for only two years, and it is hard to judge so brief a record. But that is only further reason to wonder how he or anyone else could think it is time for him to run for President. His foreign-policy experience amounts to two years as the most junior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he has no executive experience of any kind.

Obama is aware that the excitement he has generated is due in part to his scant record. “I am new enough on the national political scene,” he writes, “that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He has certainly done his best here to refrain from filling that “blank screen” with anything of substance. It says much about the condition of contemporary liberalism that this seems to strike some people as reason enough to believe he is ready to govern.

About the Author

Yuval Levin, a new contributor, was formerly chief of staff of the President's Council on Bioethics and has served on the White House domestic-policy staff. He is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Agree? Disagree? Write a letter to the editor

Let us know what you think! Send an email to editor@commentarymagazine.com

Footnotes

© Copyright 2006 Commentary. All rights reserved

[frankjr]

Will Obama "Hussein" Barrack be saddened by the death of his namesake in Iraq?

I think he will.

[clamper1797]

I believe Obama_nation has two chances to be elected president in 2008

1. Slim
2. None

My money is on chance #2

[Always Right]

The Audacity of Hope

Funny Osama stole Billy's Hope theme to help beat Hillary.

[Cicero]

Wow. Nailed him to the wall.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun

Guns isn't about hunting, Obama.

if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom

A right totally fabricated from thin air by black robes.

If Obama was a white male, he'd still be in the IL Senate.

[isthisnickcool]

Obama "Hussein" Barrack is all burka and no jihad.....*

[sgtbono2002]

Women have every right to reproduce as far as I am concerned, its their so called right to end that reproduction at any time they feel like it that bugs me.

[Gideon Reader]

Should be called the "Paucity of Believability"

[Gideon Reader]

Should be called the "Paucity of Believability"

[Gideon Reader]

Should be called the "Paucity of Believability"

[Gideon Reader]

Should be called the "Paucity of Believability"

[JillValentine]

What has Obama done to earn the label of "star/rising star/hero" that the media place upon him? I've asked several liberals this question. I get two kinds of responses:

1. Blank looks
2. Angry looks accompanied by clenched fists

[My2Cents]

The Audacity of Barak Obama

[My2Cents]

"Reproductive freedom" is a euphemism for "sex without consequences and without responsibility."

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[GVNR]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”


Let's see.....how should I pick-this-apart??
Walll, lessee mah raffel felld offen duh truck winderr an aint no booklearnin wooda stopped it

Definition: "reproduction freedom" - - The SO-CALLED RIGHT of women to have their unborn child murdered by medication or by having it "delivered" foot-first, excepting its head, and having the baby's brains sucked-out.

Re Obama's attempted smear of Evangelical Christians: Not only do Evangelicals have to right to worship as they see fit, so do all the other citizens of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! - - (Although, perhaps Osama Hussein Obama wouldn't be able to understand the concept)

I have heard Obama referred to as "an empty suit"....I think that's exactly what he is.

[My2Cents]

the vast majority of Americans—Republican, Democrat, and independent—are weary of the dead zone that politics has become

No, Americans are weary of opportunistic, power-hungry, self-aggrandizing, shallow empty-suit politicians who give the appearance of substance by manipulating symbolic languange but who have no real vision, and whatever convictions they have are more aligned with 19th-Century collectivist ideology.

The fact that Obama is something of a "phenom/flavor-of-the-month" is an indication of how dangerously vapid most Americans have become.

[Ben Ficklin]

www.myspace.com/barackobama

[GVNR]

H O L Y C O W ! ! !

I don't know what happened !

I kept clicking "post" and nothing was happening (or so I thought)
Sorry for the "screw-up"!

[JimSEA]

Obama has objectively about the same political qualifications as does Edwards but without the trial lawyer stigma. I guess that makes Obama marginally preferable for what it is worth, if anything.

[My2Cents]

A freshman senator with only 2 years gone in his term would never be seriously considered presidential material....unless he was black. That's his principal "qualification."

[My2Cents]

...but actually you raise a good point. I mean, faced with the options of "Hitler Lady Ripens" (acronym for "President Hillary"), Edwards, or Obama, who would do the least damage to the nation...it's a difficult choice.

[Marie2]

"Most women" oppose "most abortion," according to the polls I've seen, anyway.

[D-Chivas]

Barack Hussein Obama is the kind of schlock that Oprah-fanatics eat up

[SisBoombah]

"Hitler Lady Ripens" (acronym for "President Hillary")

Super, but an anagram, perhaps?

[JillValentine]

Obama, whose real full name is Barack Saddam Hussein Obama bin Laden*, can put on a nice dog-and-pony show, but he will never be able to conduct an orchestra.

Then again, maybe we should be nice to him, just for tonight, since his middle name got executed.

*Humor

[samm1148]

"Reproductive freedom" is a euphemism for "sex without consequences and without responsibility."

You nailed it. Even in the sixties I remember if a girl got pregnant the boy did the right thing and they raised the child. It made for a rough life sometimes as old dreams were stubbed out. But most chose not to go down that path because there were observable bad consequences.

[JillValentine]

The most useful thing that Barack Hussein Obama's name has ever done is prove that there IS a link between Hussein and Osama (I mean Obama).

[2harddrive]

Vote against Osama Obama! We just got rid of one Hussein!

[Gelato]

“if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”

Repulsive.

[Unicorn]

Don't you mean Barack Hussein Obama?

[Unicorn]

Don't you mean Barack Hussein Obama?

[Señor Zorro]

I believe Obama_nation has two chances to be elected president in 2008 1. Slim 2. None

I think Obama has a better chance than Hillary. Both are red as Marx, but Obama has less known about him (a plus, given that neither want to be known as Marxists and any shady dealings aren't public knowledge) and has two things that Hillary doesn't: (comparative) looks and charm (a rabid porcupine would be more charming than Hillary, but that's besides the point).

[Lancey Howard]

Rule #1:When you write a book it is important to AVOID making yourself a "documented liar":

Now and then, Obama’s centrist platitudes lead him into unsupported or even outright false assertions. Of the $9 trillion national debt he claims, “the bulk of the debt is a direct result of the President’s tax cuts,” when in fact the tax cuts have involved less than a tenth of that amount. Elsewhere, invoking allegedly declining federal funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), he launches into an argument about the Bush administration’s failure to support basic research essential to America’s global competitiveness. But the budget of the NIH has grown by more than $8 billion, or 40 percent, since Bush came into office, and this year the administration proposed to double federal funding for research in the physical sciences over the next decade.

[JimSEA]

You said it better than I did, but, yes that is what I am getting at. How can we come up with so many truly horrible candidates??

[balls]

This Obama bin Barack guy appeared from nowhere. It seems like the media pulled him out of a hat. Let's get real. Nobody with a muslim name stands any chance in a race to the Whitehouse!

[samadams2000]

The Audacity of raising taxes.

[samadams2000]

The Audacity of raising taxes.

[newheart]

So I follow your link to Obama's vanity myspace page. I notice that under religion he lists "Christian - other". Can someone clarify exactly what THAT means. As Dylan put it, "You've either got faith or you've got unbelief. And there ain't no middle ground." Other?

[Don Joe]

The Audacity of Hype

[Don Joe]

*Humor

Oh.

(I thought you were just quoting Ted Kennedy.)

[Don Joe]

---

I believe Obama_nation has two chances to be elected president in 2008

1. Slim
2. None

My money is on chance #2

---

I hear ya.

I felt exactly the same way when some dope with a bad used car salesman haircut from Arkansas, of all places, said that he was running for president.

That's only one reason I'll be shocked as hell of B. Hussein Obama doesn't end up in the Presidential Palace.