NYT Book Review: Gary Hart reviews Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope"

[DeepModem Mom]

American Idol
By GARY HART
Published: December 24, 2006

In a more perfect world, a graduate program complete with a doctoral thesis might be required of all those seeking the presidency. In certain ways, “The Audacity of Hope” qualifies as Senator Barack Obama’s thesis submission. While exhibiting his leadership attributes, life experiences and personal qualities, largely in anecdotal form, this book also displays reasonably wide and thoughtful, if occasionally predictable, responses to domestic controversies and underscores that in his brief time as the junior senator from Illinois, he has been exposed to conflicts in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.

The self-portrait is appealing. It presents a man of relative youth yet maturity, a wise observer of the human condition, a figure who possesses perseverance and writing skills that have flashes of grandeur. Obama also demonstrates a wry sense of humor. His life has given him many reasons to be wry.

The senator is a global man for the age of globalization, and his story is now familiar. A Kansas mother, a Kenyan father, an Indonesian stepfather, and years growing up in the disparate places of Hawaii and Indonesia marked him for distinction the moment he walked through the doors of the United States Senate, and provided him with a unique prism through which to view the glory and the folly of American politics.

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 harbor doubts about his choice of career, and suggests here that he went through at least some of “the stages prescribed by the experts”: “denial, anger ... despair.” And, 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 ... 10-point plans.”

Confessing guilt at being “insufficiently balanced” in his political views — “I am a Democrat, after all” — Obama insists that “government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all”; he also believes in “the free market, competition and entrepreneurship.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/books/review/Hart.t.html

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. wow. I may have to change my opinion of Obama as

'not experienced enough'.

Thank you. You (and Hart whom I admire a lot) have given me something to think about. :)

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Thank YOU, Viva! nt

[alfredo]

3. Gary hart continues to impress me. He's a flwed man, but still

he is a better man than most.

Very good review.

[theoldman]

5. I do not have much respect for a man who cheats on his wife.

I have nothing but contempt for a man who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. No one is perfect but there is a big difference between Hart and Bush.

[alfredo]

6. The cheating on his wife is a deal breaker, but next to bush or

Tom DeLay he is a giant.

[uberblonde]

4. I found this part fascinating...

Hart:

He is particularly evocative on the issue of ideological inconsistency, blaming liberals for demanding civil liberties but not deregulation and conservatives for wanting deregulation of markets but encouraging wiretapping. “Values,” Obama writes, “are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.”

These are not inconsistent. The Founding Fathers clearly did not intend to grant corporations the rights individual received under the constitution. That was later approved by a probably-fixed Supreme Court decision (read Thom Hartmann's "Unequal Protection"] - if you read the original documents, liberty was intended only for individuals, not corporations.

[alfredo]

7. How would it change our society if congress voted to

declare that corporations do not have the rights of a person?