Barack Obama, the Hopeful Realist

[Emit]

My wife will tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. …

… And yet publicly it’s difficult to find much soul-searching or introspection on either side of the divide, or even the slightest admission of responsibility for the gridlock. What we hear instead … are the deflections of criticism and assignments of blame. Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or perverse liberalism, Tom Delay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers, religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times. How well these stories are told, the subtlety of the arguments and the quality of the evidence, will vary by author, and I won’t deny my preference for the story the Democrats tell, nor my belief that the arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact. In distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal. Like all food conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truth to satisfy those predisposed to believe them, without admitting any contradictions that might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to persuade the other side but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes – and lure just enough new adherents to beat the other side into submission. ….

… for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, the fiery rhetoric was more than a matter of campaign strategy. They were true believers who meant what they said … In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left’s leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists or orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, any Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or against us. You had to choose sides.

It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideological deadlock, recognizing not only that what had come to be meant by the labels of “conservative” and “liberal” played to Republican advantage, but that the categories were inadequate to address the problems we faced…

…There are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way – in their own lives, at least – to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves. … I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism with realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don’t always understand the arguments between the right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting.

They are out there, waiting for Republican and Democrats to catch up with them.

Excerpted from The Audacity of Hope Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama, Chapter One: Republicans and Democrats, pp 21 ~ 42

Being much further to the left of Obama, this was actually one of the most infuriating parts of his book for me, and the part that gave me great pause in my decision to not only vote for him but to back him fully and volunteer many long hours once he became the nominee. Anybody else read his book prior to '08?

[MotherPetrie]

1. Never read it, and after reading the claptrap above, am very glad I never did.

It drips with condescension and false equivalences.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. "Modertation in temper is always a virtue; Moderation in principle is always a vice." Thomas Paine

And, rationalizations like the one in the book are are always bullshit.

[dawg]

3. His first book was much, much better.

But I enjoyed The Audacity of Hope as well. I did not read it until after 2008. I supported Clinton in the primaries, and the book would not have changed my mind had I read it earlier.

FWIW, I think the President is a good writer.

[Thinkingabout]

4. Too much ODS here, it would not matter what the man did, said or thought some

Continue to allow their ODS to override any thing good.

[Emit]

5. Ods?

What's that?

[Thinkingabout]

6. Obama Dislike Syndrome

[alcibiades_mystery]

7. A lot of people made "Obama" into a cipher for their own desires

They thereby expected a token facilitator of their own policy priorities - a kind of blank conduit for their own ideas.

When it turned out Obama was his own man, who had his own ideas, his own policies, his own strategies, well, their fury cannot be contained. They had expected a symbol, and got, instead, a man. But dammit, they want their symbol and their conduit. The sputtering rage is amusing.

Not surprisingly, the African American literary tradition is rife with this issue, and with black characters understanding the complexities of white desires much more clearly than white folks do. And yes, of course, Obama played on that to get elected - Obama is, in many ways, the ultimate trickster character. Like all trickster characters, you see in hindsight that he never even lied: he told us everything up front, and let certain quarters believe what they desperately wanted to believe. He's also, incidentally, the most clear-headed President we've had in my lifetime when it comes to what is needed.

[Emit]

9. Yes, and it was he, himself, in the prologue of Audacity that wrote

"Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble. I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them..." p. 11

[MFrohike]

8. Wow, that's some terrible thinking

It's some utopian vision of politics as a glorified debating society without any real conflict. If that's what he want, maybe he should have been a high school debate coach.