Sen. Gary Hart reviews "The Audacity of Hope"

[BeyondGeography]

Man of the moment

Books
GARY HART

THE AUDACITY OF HOPE

By Barack Obama

<...Obama disarmingly admits to ambition, "chronic restlessness" and envy of more successful younger politicians. Before rolling the dice on a risky senate race, he had begun to harbour doubts about his choice of career, and suggests that he went through at least some of "the stages prescribed by the experts: denial, anger, despair". In a particularly Tolstoyan moment, he confesses to "acceptance" of "my mortality". He listened to countless people's stories and came to a Roosevelt-like epiphany: "Government should help." He laments the loss of a shared civic language and the widening gap between the myth of American life and its reality, and he devotes this book to the discovery of "a new kind of politics" and "civic life", to "the notion of a common good". He specifically refuses to offer "a manifesto for action, complete with ten-point plans".>

<...Despite being new to the scene (although he did serve three terms in the Illinois state senate), Obama casts himself in the role of a political veteran. But his upbringing gives him special insights into the transition of US politics in the 1960s and 1970s from debates over economic principles to a focus on culture and morality, and into the divisiveness, polarisation and incivility that accompanied this transition. He describes the Democratic Party as one that merely reacts to events, and he documents the strangulation of conviction by "triangulation". His answer? Trans-partisan consensus around a "project of national renewal".>

<...Truly great leaders possess a strategic sense, an inherent understanding of how the framework of their thinking and the tides of the times fit together and how their nation's powers should be applied to achieve its large purposes. The Audacity of Hope is missing that strategic sense. Perhaps the senator should address this in his next book. By doing so, he would most certainly propel himself into the country's small pantheon of leaders in a way that personal narrative and sudden fame cannot.

In a very short time, Obama has made himself into a figure of US national interest, curiosity and some undefined hope. This book fully encourages those sentiments. His greatest test will be that of sensing the times, of matching his timing with the tides of the nation.

He is at his best when he writes things like this: "I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience." >

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