[lit-ideas] Correction -- Audacity
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2006 01:04:57 EST
As much as I like Audacity of Hop, Audacity of Hope seems a little more
professional. Btw, a long-time lurker sent me the review.
Julie Krueger
typos abound
========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Audacity Date:
12/25/2006 11:00:01 P.M. Central Standard Time From: _JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxxx
(mailto:JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx) To: _lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on:
A review of Audacity of Hop by Gary Hart of Hart vs. Mondale fame. I've
ordered the book on-line -- I've been wanting to read it for quite some time.
Has anyone here read it? Reactions to it?
Julie Krueger
December 24, 2006
American Idol
By GARY HART
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
By Barack Obama.
375 pp. Crown Publishers. $25.
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_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/senate/index.html?inline=nyt-org)
, 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.” He suspects that some of his
views —
his open-mindedness on social issues, for example, combined with economic
traditionalism — will cause him trouble. His relative newness on the
political
scene, he admits, will also cause him to be seen as a “blank screen” on
which a variety of people will project their own views, but he then quickly
acknowledges that he must “avoid the pitfalls of fame.”
Given his recent media exposure, Obama would be well advised to follow his
own counsel in this regard. “Precisely because I’ve watched the press cast
me
in a light that can be hard to live up to,” he writes, “I am mindful of
how
rapidly that process can work in reverse.” The media age has been known, as
he wisely recognizes, to devour what it doth create.
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,
using phrases like “the longer I served in Washington” (less than two
years)
and “the more time I spent on the Senate floor.” But his particular
upbringing gives him special insights into the transition of American politics
in the
1960s and ’70s from debates over economic principles to a focus on culture
and morality, and into the divisiveness, polarization 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 substitute? Trans-partisan consensus around a “project
of
national renewal.”
The success of a book like this may be judged by determining for whom it is
written. Obama perceives his audience as intelligent, involved (though only
slightly wonkish) citizens interested in knowing more about who he is and what
and how he thinks. Much of his book is dedicated to the who and the how,
though the chapters “Our Constitution,” “Opportunity” and “The World
Beyond Our
Borders” are meant to demonstrate the what — intellectual depth, policy
innovation and international exposure. As sprightly as his political
observations are (e.g., the longer you are in the Senate, the more you come to
resemble
your wealthy contributors), the substantive discussions often seem didactic,
revealing, especially in his discussion of the Constitution, the law
professor he once was.
Obama thinks _Democrats_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/democratic_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org)
have been “wrong
to run away from a debate about values,” though exactly who has been guilty
of running away is not made clear, and his correct definition of values — “
the standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important in
their lives, and in the life of the country” — is hardly what the
evangelical polemicists who have hijacked the traditional _Republican Party_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/ind
ex.html?inline=nyt-org) have in mind. 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.”
Prescriptively, he advocates public investments in education, science and
technology, and energy as the key to expanded opportunity. This has been
standard fare for so-called neoliberals since the late 1970s. But he also
writes
that “what’s missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.” He
promotes cutting-edge ideas — for instance, abolishing all tax breaks for
the oil
industry and requiring contributions from the big companies that would help
finance alternative energy research — and shows great interest in
governmental
experimentation instead of traditional bureaucratic programs. His inherent
internationalism causes him to ponder why, five years after 9/11 and 15 years
after the end of the cold war, the United States “still lacks a coherent
national security policy,” rightly finding the Bush doctrine of pre-emption
and
defeat of evil in the world wanting.
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, Barack Obama has made himself into a figure of 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.”
Gary Hart, a former United States senator, is the author, most recently, of “
The Courage of Our Convictions: A Manifesto for Democrats.”
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