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Butte Let me start this review by stating that The Audacity of Hope is not a great book. I spend a great deal of time reading old books, and I am always looking, in modern books, for the quality and depth of thought I find in the old ones. It would be delightful to find the same universal knowledge in a man today that we find in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia – with intelligent observation on geology, climate, technology, agriculture, and social mores guiding a philosophy of politics and making a philosophical case for man’s place in the universe. Failing that, we might look for a certain prose vigor that reveals deep saturation in political principles, such as we find in Paine, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, or Roosevelt. Barack Obama shows neither of these things, and consequently his book is likely to have the short shelf life of most political books. I write occasional essays on books and authors, as well as on politics; when I saved this essay, I decided to put it in the “Essays on Politics” rather than the “Essays on Literature” section.

http://dkarim.com/Navir.php That said, The Audacity of Hope is a good book, and it is the only political memoir I know which merits that distinction. Once you get past its terrible title, which has almost nothing to do with its contents, the book is very easy to read. It is filled with common sense about modern life. It mixes politics skilfully with mundanities, and we are left with the impression that a senator’s life is like the life of any other well-paid white-collar professional. It is never profound, but it is deeply felt and is able to evoke emotion in the reader. Its style is literary in a way that appears to be the result of a real liberal education: conflict in Jerusalem is called “wars and rumors of wars,” he asks “righteousness like a mighty stream” to descend on our race relations, Ben Franklin wrote an “almanack,” with a ‘k.’ These allusions are so frequent and appropriate that they appear to be Obama’s. This book, taken with the previous one, make it clear that Obama is the best writer to vie for the presidency since at least Teddy Roosevelt.

Like most bestsellers, the book’s value depends mostly on its author. Any of the book’s sentences could have been written by almost any thoughtful, articulate person of the American upper class with an interest in politics. It probably would not have been published had its author been an otherwise unknown public defender or prosecutor or community organizer; and it really does not contain any thoughts which would have been out of place in such a book. Of course, it is in part about being in the U.S. Senate, and so there are some scenes which are outside of the normal pale of experience – getting personal advice from the president, or personal sketches of some of the senators. Part of the book’s appeal is that it contains such scenes – part of the reason we read books is to approximate the sensations of people who have different experiences from us.

In this, Obama is very successful. His descriptive prose is generally good, his detailing is superb, and he has the memory for phrasing of a novelist. The meetings with people that are included in the book always have an insightful edge. On the other hand, they are extremely subtle – the insight is already contained in the presentation, as with good fiction. The encounter with President Bush is an excellent example. It is preceded by a number of details which have an effect on the reader – the flat-screen television which now adorns the Lincoln Bedroom, the president’s aide squeezing a “big dollop of hand sanitizer” into his hands after shaking hands with all the new senators, the older black butler – the only other black in the room – taking away Obama’s plate. As the others were about the leave, Bush called Obama aside.

But before I could turn around to go, the President himself appeared in the doorway and waved me in. “Obama!” the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours – that’s one impressive lady.”

The dialogue seems so right, you imagine that Obama remembers it word-for-word. And shortly afterwards comes the president’s advice:

“Come over here for a second,” he said, leading me off to one side of the room. “You know,” he said quietly, “I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.”
“Not at all, Mr. President.”
He nodded. “You’ve got a bright future,” he said. “Very bright. But I’ve been in this town awhile and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily just be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.” (46-7)

Obama does not say much more about the encounter, but he puts so much into the portrait he does not need to. The reasons why Bush was elected, and the sadness of his tenure, are all there – his folksiness, his simplicity, his humanity, his lack of comprehension of his own role in creating opposition. Bush seems to see himself in Obama – a deeply significant and probably somewhat accurate assessment. It seems to have its root in the similarity of their families – competent, serious wives and two daughters – but it probably goes beyond that. Both men were sent by voters to Washington because of what they were rather than what they had done. Both seemed to imagine that they would be able to transcend the political-adversarial culture. Now the older man was, in some sense, confessing his failure to the young idealist.

But this exchange is important not because of its content – again, any two people might be the interlocutors here – but because we are interested in these particular historical men. The exchange itself is quite normal. This is one of the curious qualities of Obama’s book. Everything in it seems so very normal. He himself seems like a normal man, not like a Senator from the most powerful country on Earth, but just a normal person. He goes shopping. He drives his car alone with a map on the driver’s seat. He flies coach. He goes to soccer games and parent-teacher conferences. Sometimes he feels shut out by his wife. One time after a major bill had passed her only comment was an order to buy ant traps to kill the ants in their house.

Of course, here we run up against the problem of political bookwriting. It is considered important in democratic politics to seem normal, and so this could be merely the politically correct façade. I know well that when you ask people what their income level is, they all say “middle class,” though we know that there must be some rich people somewhere.

But it so happens that I believe Obama here. First of all, much of the narrative of his political life refers to his experiences before he became a political superstar. But even now I believe that he has to play modern, involved father while he also plays the role of active senator; I believe that his wife is jealous of his time and resentful of the sacrifices she has made in her own career, and that this makes him feel guilty. I believe that they do “normal things” because they were raised that way and, while wealthy, are not so rich that they can have others do all their living for them.

The curious thing about this is that the normalcy is always told with a slightly melancholy lilt, a little cadence of sorrow in his own smallness that is most curious in a politician. It is strange, but I would say that the dominant tone of the book is melancholy, despite the title. This melancholy can be found from the first few pages, and it does not dissipate.

Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws – the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip. In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It’s a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think – endemic, too, in the American character – and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics. Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who possess it is unclear. Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else. (2-3)

This passage is typical of the style of the book. Interspersed with the personal reflection related to broader human phenomena are three unresolved antitheses (genetic or environmental, encourages or attracts, expectations or mistakes), four qualifications (I suppose, almost certainly, I think, I suppose), and a host of words indicating uncertainty (some, may, unclear, someone, anything). The tone of the book is reflective and even aporetic, to a degree that goes beyond the typical breezy politico-book’s caveat at the beginning or end of every paragraph, “These are complex issues which won’t be solved overnight.” This seems to be instead of kind of Hamlet-like philosophical nature. It is easy to argue against this being a good thing in a president, but it certainly would be a change from previous presidents.

Together with that melancholy and reflectiveness we find a powerful impulse to autobiography. Although this is usually a sign of egocentrism, in Obama this impulse is very complicated. Many of his stories are rather uniquely self-deprecating: not the “I was born in a ditch” kind of false humility, but a real self-deflating movement back towards normalcy. After his election to the Senate, he gets an apartment (without his family) in Washington. He looks forward to enjoying the pleasures of bachelorhood while still having his family. The first morning he is there, as one of the hundred men governing the most powerful nation on Earth,

I realized I’d forgotten to buy a shower curtain, and had to scrunch up against the shower wall in order to avoid flooding the bathroom floor. The next night, watching the game and having a beer, I fell asleep at halftime, and woke up on the couch two hours later with a bad crick in my neck. Take out food didn’t taste so good anymore; the silence irked me. (72)

This appears to be something different from false humility. It’s not mere flattery for his wife either; in fact, the portrait of her in the chapter “Family” is not entirely sympathetic and its detaling is perhaps mildly embarrassing.

“You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.” I was stung by such accusations; I thought she was being unfair. After all, it wasn’t as if I went carousing with the boys every night. I made few demands of Michelle – I didn’t expect her to darn my socks or have dinner waiting for me when I got home. Whenever I could, I pitched in with the kids. All I asked for in return was a little tenderness. Instead, I found myself subjected to endless negotiations about every detail of managing the house, long lists of things that I needed to do or had forgotten to do, and a generally sour attitude. (340)

This is why people don’t like being part of the lives of writers. And perhaps why people prefer fiction to nonfiction, when it comes to recording emotions. The intimacy is uncomfortable. That said, the honesty is powerful and refreshing in a political book. Obama seems committed, whether you find this impulse admirable or not, to living a public life.

The book begins, in the chapter entitled “Republicans and Democrats,” with an overview of the current American political situation. While this overview is not profound, it seems accurate and certainly is levelheaded. In fact, this levelheadedness is pleasantly unusual in itself.

When democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest that we all take a deep breath. (21-22)

I will note that this is not quite the same tone Obama has at his rallies (“Our nation is at war. Our planet is in peril.”). But despite his refusal to preach political apocalypse, he does acknowledge that he feels a kind of national malaise in the air: “Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry” (22).

His diagnosis of this malaise forms the philosophical foundation of the book:

It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one way or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics – the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. (22)

He then goes on to list the usual problems – education, health care, international order, and religion’s interaction with politics. He says that the national debate on all of them has been brought to a standstill within the political process. Republican and Democratic positions on all of them are clear and not open to negotiation.

He notes that this was not always the case; there is apparently general consensus in Washington that the generation which fought together in World War II did not act this way. Obama then lauches into a mini-history of American politics since World War II, which is certainly worth reading and probably correct in its broad outlines. Few things indicate character quite so well as a retelling of a well-known story, and Obama shows his personality quite clearly. He acknowledges himself as a “product” of the 1960s, and that his mother, who was born only a few years earlier than Hillary Clinton, was an unabashed liberal whose marriage to a black man would have been significantly more difficult (and in many places outright illegal) in an earlier era. But this liberal upbringing and liberal era brought him into personal trouble, his period of drug use:

Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college I’d begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. (30)

This brings him to the Reagan era, whose “appeal” he admires:

It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes…. by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. (31-32)

Obama’s relationship with Reagan, whom he resembles in many ways, is quite intriguing. He has already drawn rebukes from Hillary Clinton for his admiration of the fortieth president. While Bill Clinton surfaces only a few times outside of Obama’s historical survey, Reagan returns multiple times in the narrative, and it is clear that what Obama admires so much about Reagan is his political vision, what I will call “landslide politics”: he was the last person to win a dominant majority for the presidency, and to dedicatedly govern according to an American, as opposed to partisan, policy.

This brief discussion of liberalism and self-indulgence versus the straight-backed patriotism and hard work of Reagan is a paradigm of Obama’s outlook. He sees all things, including his own person, as thesis and antithesis; and his goal is to personally and politically realize or forge synthesis. Everything is plural. He never gives one explanation for a phenomenon. He never cites just one example. Wherever there is light, he fills in the shadow. He follows his brief history with a chapter called “Values.” The thesis here is individualism, the antithesis community:

If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe against a past of tribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and castes, it would be a mistake to assume this is all we are. Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values… (55)

He goes on to make it clear (especially in the following chapter, “Our Constitution,” that he thinks that holding this creative tension between thesis and antithesis is the basic form of America as a nation:

In every society (and in every individual) these twin strands – the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity – are in tension, and it has been one of the blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation’s birth allowed us to negotiate these tensions better than most. (55)

Obama gives this tension and this contradiction an almost ontological significance:

It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the Jihad. (93)

It’s hard not to be sympathetic with this main thesis of the book, especially when it is so thoroughly and consistently advocated; it is deep in our nation’s history (“e pluribus unum”) and it appears to be deeply and profoundly felt by Obama. He finds tensions everywhere in the country: power versus service; economic opportunity versus government intervention; religious versus secular; white versus black; isolationism versus empire; parent versus worker. These tensions are, fundamentally, the topics of the remaining chapters: Politics, Opportunity, Faith, Race, The World Beyond Our Borders, and Family. The endless antitheses in his writing become tiresome, but they are, indeed, revealing:

Attendance varies at these meetings [town-hall meetings he held as senator]: we’ve had as few as fifty people turn out, as many as two thousand. But however many people show up, I am grateful to see them. They are a cross-section of the counties we visit: Republican and Democrat, old and young, fat and skinny, truck drivers, college professors, stay-at-home moms, veterans, schoolteachers, insurance agents, CPAs, secretaries, doctors, and social workers. They are generally polite and attentive, even when they disagree with me (or one another). They ask me about prescription drugs, the deficit, human rights in Myanmar,
ethanol, bird flu, school funding, and the space program. Often they will surprise me: a young flaxen-haired woman in the middle of farm country will deliver a passionate plea for intervention in Darfur, or an elderly black gentleman in an inner-city neighborhood will quiz me on soil conservation. (102)

Obama sees Illinois as an emblem of the contradictions of America, and indeed this may be one of the reasons why he ultimately chose to live there. He is clearly an urban creature, but the three people that raised him were all from Kansas. Illinois helps him to go more deeply into the country and himself:

Outside of Washington, though, America feels less deeply divided. Illinois, for example, is no longer considered a bellwether state. For more than a decade now, it’s become more and more Democratic, partly because of increased urbanization, partly because the social conservatism of today’s GOP doesn’t wear well in the Land of Lincoln. But Illinois remains a microcosm of the country, a rough stew of North and South, East and West, urban and rural, black, white, and everything in between. Chicago may possess all the big-city sophistication of L.A. or New York, but geographically and culturally, the southern end of Illinois is closer to Little Rock or Louisville, and large swaths of the state are considered, in modern political parlance, a deep shade of red. (48-9)

The obvious conclusion is that Obama is intrigued by these supposed tensions and contradictions because he embodies them. He is progressive and conservative, secular and religious, oppressed and powerful, normal and extraordinary, American and African, black and white. From his other book, Dreams From My Father, we learn of his experimentation with identity politics, which almost always meant the partial solutions of absolutism. He seems to have resolved the contradictions by accepting them: trying to be neither too much of one or the other, but both at the same time. And he seems to have learned that most other people are doing the same thing. Yes, they are conservative Christians, but also have gay family members; yes, they hunt and live in a trailer, but they were born in Queens; yes, they are white racists, but their son married a Mexican woman. Everyone is composite.

This worldview not only applies well to a country as huge and disparate as America, but makes for good writing. It is probably the philosophical engine behind the extremely rich texture of the book. It’s hard to believe how many things get a mention in the book, and how rich and varied the phrasing is: Dijon mustard, cone hats, “paunch-bellied gladiators,” Hamilton’s industrial visions for America, “marijuana puffing,” twist-ties on bread, the Third Way, Sportscenter, strict constructionism, the Alien and Sedition Acts, Martin Luther, private Jets, “the jagged Rockies,” Google, the Meat Inspection Act, a Maytag plant in Galesburg, Norse mythology, self-flagellation, “WHAT ABOUT THE WHITE GUYS?”, Cyprus, a history of Indonesia, Henry Cabot Lodge, “goody bags,” Alan Keyes, and all those other details that have already appeared in this essay: flaxen hair, hand sanitizer, the Lincoln bedroom, a naked Barack Obama pressed into a corner of the shower. Very little of this detailing is undigested cataloguing: it is absorbed into a coherent whole. This whole is not necessarily profound. But it does seem like a portrait not only of one man but of a nation.

America famously lacks a great embodying novel, partially because it has lacked titanic literary figures, and partially because it is so vast and complicated. Similarly we have had very few truly national men, emblems of the entire nation. But whenever we get one, they frequently rise to the presidency. Washington was one: he was equally at home around a campfire at Valley Forge and in the best society, though his America was much, much smaller than ours. Lincoln was both brilliant and lowly; Teddy Roosevelt was both sophisticated and strenuous. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and “the man from Hope;” George W. Bush was a trailer-trash former-alcoholic evangelical and the son of a president. We need images of our own broadness as a country in order to assimilate the vast contradictions of who we are. Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope is a kind of resume for precisely that kind of symbolic relationship with his nation.