The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
Product Description
“A government that truly represents these Americans–that truly serves these Americans–will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be pre-packaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we’ll need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.”
–from The Audacity of Hope
In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called “the audacity of hope.”
Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics–a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces–from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media–that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.
At the heart of this book is Senator Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy–where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.
A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes–“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”
From the Hardcover edition.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #46 in Books
- Published on: 2007-11-06
- Released on: 2007-11-06
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father, was a compelling and moving memoir focusing on personal issues of race, identity, and community. With his second book The Audacity of Hope, Obama engages themes raised in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, shares personal views on faith and values and offers a vision of the future that involves repairing a “political process that is broken” and restoring a government that has fallen out of touch with the people. We had the opportunity to ask Senator Obama a few questions about writing, reading, and politics–see his responses below. –Daphne Durham
20 Second Interview: A Few Words with Barack Obama
Q: How did writing a book that you knew would be read so closely by so many compare to writing your first book, when few people knew who you were?
A: In many ways, Dreams from My Father was harder to write. At that point, I wasn’t even sure that I could write a book. And writing the first book really was a process of self-discovery, since it touched on my family and my childhood in a much more intimate way. On the other hand, writing The Audacity of Hope paralleled the work that I do every day–trying to give shape to all the issues that we face as a country, and providing my own personal stamp on them.
Q: What is your writing process like? You have such a busy schedule, how did you find time to write?
A: I’m a night owl, so I usually wrote at night after my Senate day was over, and after my family was asleep–from 9:30 p.m. or so until 1 a.m. I would work off an outline–certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell–and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad. Then I’d edit while typing in what I’d written.
Q: If readers are to come away from The Audacity of Hope with one action item (a New Year’s Resolution for 2007, perhaps?), what should it be?
A: Get involved in an issue that you’re passionate about. It almost doesn’t matter what it is–improving the school system, developing strategies to wean ourselves off foreign oil, expanding health care for kids. We give too much of our power away, to the professional politicians, to the lobbyists, to cynicism. And our democracy suffers as a result.
Q: You’re known for being able to work with people across ideological lines. Is that possible in today’s polarized Washington?
A: It is possible. There are a lot of well-meaning people in both political parties. Unfortunately, the political culture tends to emphasize conflict, the media emphasizes conflict, and the structure of our campaigns rewards the negative. I write about these obstacles in chapter 4 of my book, “Politics.” When you focus on solving problems instead of scoring political points, and emphasize common sense over ideology, you’d be surprised what can be accomplished. It also helps if you’re willing to give other people credit–something politicians have a hard time doing sometimes.
Q: How do you make people passionate about moderate and complex ideas?
A: I think the country recognizes that the challenges we face aren’t amenable to sound-bite solutions. People are looking for serious solutions to complex problems. I don’t think we need more moderation per se–I think we should be bolder in promoting universal health care, or dealing with global warming. We just need to understand that actually solving these problems won’t be easy, and that whatever solutions we come up with will require consensus among groups with divergent interests. That means everybody has to listen, and everybody has to give a little. That’s not easy to do.
Q: What has surprised you most about the way Washington works?
A: How little serious debate and deliberation takes place on the floor of the House or the Senate.
Q: You talk about how we have a personal responsibility to educate our children. What small thing can the average parent (or person) do to help improve the educational system in America? What small thing can make a big impact?
A: Nothing has a bigger impact than reading to children early in life. Obviously we all have a personal obligation to turn off the TV and read to our own children; but beyond that, participating in a literacy program, working with parents who themselves may have difficulty reading, helping their children with their literacy skills, can make a huge difference in a child’s life.
Q: Do you ever find time to read? What kinds of books do you try to make time for? What is on your nightstand now?
A: Unfortunately, I had very little time to read while I was writing. I’m trying to make up for lost time now. My tastes are pretty eclectic. I just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a wonderful book. The language just shimmers. I’ve started Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is a great study of Lincoln as a political strategist. I read just about anything by Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, or Philip Roth. And I’ve got a soft spot for John le Carre.
Q: What inspires you? How do you stay motivated?
A: I’m inspired by the people I meet in my travels–hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I’m inspired by the love people have for their children. And I’m inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.
Customer Reviews
Good Book
I liked his candor about his hope. You can do anything you want and we have to keep hope alive!
All talk and no action
I tried and I tried and I tried to read this book. Now that he is the presumptive Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. President, I thought it was time I read something about him. This book didn’t tell me anything.He is the champion of writing super long run-on sentences. You get done reading one and you have no idea what he just said. Some sentences take up an entire paragraph! He tries to dumb down the use of big words but it is just the sentence structure that made the book totally unreadable for me. He brings up some interesting questions about our culture in general, about the two party political system, about religion, etc. but he makes no attempt at providing any answers. Now obviously this book was written before he got into any Presidential campaign, but if he was asking these questions back then, why did’nt he provide any solutions in his primary platform? One has to wonder if this guy is all talk and no action??? FOr our country’s sake, I hope not.
A cynic’s view
In “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” Senator Barack Obama offers a message of hope to the cynics that would claim that our country is hopelessly divided and politics has devolved into a power game of little interest to ordinary Americans. Senator Obama believes there are, in fact, ordinary Americans out there that do care about our country, are engaged in politics, and can manage to find common ground with neighbors and friends whose politics or values they may disagree with. I admit, I do not share Senator Obama’s optimism. I am one of those cynics who believes Americans are divided, politics is a game, and it is best to simply avoid people whose politics I don’t agree with. While I may not paint my face blue or red on Election Night, I do keep track of the score, and I don’t care if my side engages in cheap shots or late hits to win; I just hope they do win, even if I remain skeptical that they can actually make a difference. In his book, Senator Obama tries to convince readers like me that there is, in fact, a “new kind of politics” that we can engage in to build upon the “shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.”
While Senator Obama discusses a “new kind of politics,” the most interesting part of his book discusses politics, as it exists today, from his perch in the Senate, specifically the pervasive roles of money and the media. As a candidate for Senator, one of Obama’s major tasks was fund-raising, making cold-calls to the few Americans who can afford to write a $2,000 check to a politician. As a result, his primary interactions were limited to the top one percent of Americans, placing him “outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population,” or the people he actually entered public life to serve. In addition, Senator Obama laments his inability to directly reach his constituents. If he were to hold 39 town hall meetings a year (as he did his first year in the Senate), Senator Obama would be able to reach maybe 100,000 constituents in a six-year Senate term, whereas a three-minute story on the lowest rated news program in Chicago would reach 200,000 people, making him “entirely dependent on the media” to reach his constituents. Yet, as Senator Obama explains, instead of using its power to present politicians to the people they are supposed to serve, the media instead seems to use its power to disengage Americans from politics altogether. He presents the example of a story with the White House making debt projections. Because the media doesn’t have the time or interest to do its own research, it will typically present the opinion of a Republican analyst that the Republican projections are accurate, the countering opinion of a Democratic analyst that the projections are inaccurate, and no independent analyst to tell the true story or provide a conclusion. Instead of being about the debt projections, the story becomes about the same old tired plot of Republicans and Democrats fighting again, boring readers and prompting them to “turn to the sports page, where the story line is less predictable and the box score tells you who won.”
As Senator Obama presents it, the idea of a “new kind of politics” discourages this story line, instead focusing on narrowing differences and engaging in true dialogue and conversation with one another in order to find common ground. In an example of what is wrong with politics now, Senator Obama provides an interesting story of a breakfast meeting with President Bush, where he had noted Bush’s easy manner – that is, until Bush began his political speech, when “it felt as if somebody in a back room had flipped a speech,” and Bush’s “easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty,” as he spelled out his political agenda in an agitated, rapid tone discouraging any interruption or opposing viewpoint. In demonstrating his contrast to President Bush, Senator Obama structures his political discussions as conversations, where he always presents both sides of each issue – whether the topic be energy, race, or welfare – and inevitably concludes that each side has relevant points. In fact, Senator Obama seems to take pains to present a “Republican” point of view, virtually ignoring issues Democrats may consider important, such as education and health care, which get a total of seven pages between them, and focusing on traditionally Republican areas, such as family, values, and faith. This, Senator Obama states, is the “guidepost for his politics”: his mother’s simple principle, “How would that make you feel?” While he believes this guidepost serves him well, allowing him to gain insight into the other side’s perspective, it is a philosophy he syas everyone would benefit from, to note the suffering of others and put ourselves in their position.
Ultimately, this is the core behind Senator Obama’s philosophy – that, if we fail to help others, we diminish ourselves. In meeting with his constituents, Obama has found power in the American spirit, of people who have suffered and yet continue to work hard to fulfill their dreams. In his experiences growing up in Indonesia and traveling to his father’s native land of Kenya, Senator Obama has seen first-hand the effect of countries where individuals do not control their own fate, but must instead rely on the self-restraint of the military or on corrupt bureaucrats. As a result, he has developed a deep appreciation for the freedom we are afforded as Americans and the hope that, through hard work, we can accomplish our dreams. It is this audacity to hope, he says, that binds us together as one people, as Americans. This shared sense of community is what drives his idea of a “new kind of politics,” based on the premise that we have more similarities than differences, and that we can build on “those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.”
However, Obama concedes that, just because he believes there can be a new kind of politics, doesn’t mean he knows how to do accomplish it, because he admits, he doesn’t. He acknowledges that his book is more of a discussion than a manifesto and that his treatment of the issues is “often partial and incomplete.” In fact, his discussion of the actual issues often seems simplistic, contradictory, and sometimes uninformed. Admittedly, I had more hope for Senator Obama as a political candidate before I read this book than I do now, just because he didn’t focus on the issues I would have liked to hear about, didn’t provide substantive arguments, or didn’t present ideas I totally agreed with. Even more than his ideas on specific issues, though, I would have liked to hear how he plans to re-engage the American people: for example, does he have ideas about how to rid government of special interests and get more Americans involved in the process through a public funding system or a national holiday on Election Day? If politics is meant to be a discussion between two empathetic parties, how does he plan to engage ordinary Americans in that discussion? In the end, though, while Obama doesn’t go as far as he could in spelling out how he will re-engage Americans in our democracy, he lays the foundation for readers to make some of these conclusions for themselves, particularly in his narrative on race. In describing the problem of poverty among African-Americans, which has become a “permanent fixture in American popular culture,” one which we as Americans take for granted, and “not for which we are culpable,” Senator Obama inadvertently points to the impact a minority president could have. If the audacity of hope means that we are all bound together as Americans, then the implication of electing a minority President is clear: we are finally allowing new voices into the political discussion. If, in fact, we as a country do elect Senator Obama as president, then maybe, just maybe, I will join him and have the audacity to hope for the future of this country again.
arpijikii
IN THE BOOKS 
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