February Is Black History Month: Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope"

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama
Hardcover, 384 pages
Publisher: Random House

Price: $25
Published: 2006

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in February 2007.

From the time of its release in October 2006, The Audacity of Hope by U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has ranked high — if not number one — on the best-seller lists of the country's most prominent newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today.

Reasons for this swift success abound. Obama has been placed squarely in the American consciousness since his rousing keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston and his subsequent election to the Senate. His status as the newcomer-to-watch was heightened exponentially on April 18, 2005, when Time magazine cited Obama as one of "The World's Most Influential People." Again, Time aimed a very bright spotlight on the judiciously minded 45-year-old with its Oct. 23, 2006, cover story written by Joe Klein (Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid, 2006; Primary Colors, 1996) and titled: "Why Barack Obama Could Be Our Next President." And last month, Obama quelled rumors and fulfilled expectations by filing papers with the Federal Election Commission to form a presidential exploratory committee. (When Obama announces officially his intention to seek the office of President of the United States in 2008 this month, listen for the discernable buzz that now surrounds him to transform into a fervent roar.)

This fame and glory and superstar-in-the-making are all well and good, but let's not forget this simple fact: The Audacity of Hope is a very fine book.

Well-conceived and cohesive, The Audacity of Hope is a book of ideas, ideas that are reasoned, pragmatic, decisive, and evaluative. It is structured into nine themed chapters. And, in each of them —"Republicans and Democrats," "Values, Our Constitution," "Politics," "Opportunity," "Faith," "Race," "The World Beyond Our Borders," "Family" — Obama suggests in "broad strokes" the course we should follow in order to change our nation's hostile political partisanship and enhance our lives as citizens. He offers his own judgment, based on his "experience as a senator and lawyer, husband and father, Christian and skeptic, of the ways we can ground our politics in the notion of a common good."

Reforming our defective health-care system is our "most pressing task," and Obama presents thoughts on how to amend its inefficiency. He puts forward strategies to free people from poverty, which include expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, "tackling the nexus of unemployment and crime in the inner city," reducing teen pregnancy rates, and controlling the ever-increasing cost of higher education. He believes in leveling the "playing field between organized labor and employers" to "help workers gain higher wages and better benefits." He encourages fundamental changes in our current U.S. foreign policy, which — as the Senator expresses — lacks guiding principles, coherence, and multilateralism.

One of Obama's chief concerns is the nation's dependency on fuel from the Middle East and the lack of any real initiative to develop alternative fuel sources, renewable energy, and increased fuel-efficiency standards. As it stands, U.S. automakers maintain that they are hamstrung in their efforts to design hybrid vehicles because of fierce competition and the enormous retiree health-care expenses they pay out. During his first year in the Senate, Obama proposed legislation that he named "Health Care for Hybrids." It's a plan that brokers a deal with automakers: In exchange for federal financial assistance in meeting the health-care costs of their retired workers, automakers would reinvest these savings into developing more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Family is also an important point of discussion. As the husband of Michelle, the Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and the father of two girls — Malia, age 8 and Sasha, age 5 — Obama understands what it's like to be a "juggler family," the term his policy director created to describe the struggles working parents experience trying to raise their children, maintain their careers, manage their households, and preserve their relationships. Obama admits readily that he and Michelle are financially able to offset some of these pressures (although Michelle lives in Chicago with the children, and is the primary parent four days out the week.) For working parents who aren't as fortunate, he recommends changing the Family and Medical Leave Act to provide paid parental leave and making high-quality day care more affordable by expanding the federal and state tax credits and offering sliding-scale subsidies to families in need.

Obama writes candidly throughout his book and conveys an attitude of humility. He declares: "[M]y treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete." A common sense approach to problem-solving is Obama's rallying cry — and he is well aware that such sensibility is atypical and breeds suspicion in today's political environment.

"I recognize the risks in talking this way . . . . In an era of globalization and dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture wars, we don't even seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss our ideals, much less the tools to arrive at some rough consensus about how, as a nation, we might work together to bring those ideals about . . . . In such a climate, any assertion of shared ideals and common values might seem hopelessly naïve, if not downright dangerous — an attempt to gloss over serious differences in policy and performance or, worse, a means of muffling the complaints of those who feel ill served by our current institutional arrangements. My argument, however, is that we have no choice."

Yet, given the presence of an all-too-cynical electorate, the "sheer predictability of our current political debate," the demonization of those with opposing views, and government policies driven by ideological absolutism, the questions must be asked: Is there any room in our present-day political system for an elected official to exhibit a kind of political pragmatism that stems from, and owes its very mention to, the cogitative prudence of President Abraham Lincoln? Will political pundits and we, as voters, interpret "values-speak" as pie-in-the-sky liberalism, or can we trust that it will unlock today's "either/or thinking," which stagnates productive and imaginative governance? Can Obama, or anyone in public office, "avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments?"

The answers can be found somewhere in the enduring American spirit, that tendency to believe in a "relentless optimism in the face of hardship," to be audacious enough to hope.

Demonstrated in the pages of The Audacity of Hope — the title derives from a sermon preached by Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. — is discernment and unfeigned goodwill. Some passages drip syrupy-sweet, but they are saved from being mawkish by Obama's keen writing. The Audacity of Hope is heartening. And even if we remain disenchanted with our politicians, Obama's book renews the belief that our system of government can find its way back to "promoting opportunity and prosperity for all Americans."