The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama

And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate. An up-or-out strategy was how I described it to my wife, one last shot to test out my ideas before I settled into a calmer, more stable, and better-paying existence. And she—perhaps more out of pity than conviction—agreed to this one last race, though she also suggested that given the orderly life she preferred for our family, I shouldn’t necessarily count on her vote.

I suspect that some readers may find my presentation of these issues to be insufficiently balanced. To this accusation, I stand guilty as charged. I am a Democrat, after all;

I am angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody’s religious beliefs—including my own—on nonbelievers.

Recently, one of the reporters covering Capitol Hill stopped me on the way to my office and mentioned that she had enjoyed reading my first book. “I wonder,” she said, “if you can be that interesting in the next one you write.” By which she meant, I wonder if you can be honest now that you are a U.S. senator.

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.

And in fact it is one of the few things that conservative and liberal commentators agree on, this idea of a time before the fall, a golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party was in power, civility reigned and government worked.

Sometimes I suspect that even the Republican leaders who immediately followed Reagan weren’t entirely comfortable with the direction politics had taken. In the mouths of men like George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, the polarizing rhetoric and the politics of resentment always seemed forced, a way of peeling off voters from the Democratic base and not necessarily a recipe for governing.

War might be hell and still the right thing to do. Economies could collapse despite the best-laid plans. People could work hard all their lives and still lose everything.

Others pursue a more “centrist” approach, figuring that so long as they split the difference with the conservative leadership, they must be acting reasonably—and failing to notice that with each passing year they are giving up more and more ground.

I recognize the dangers of subtlety and nuance in the face of the conservative movement’s passionate intensity.

What’s needed is a broad majority of Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents of goodwill—who are reengaged in the project of national renewal, and who see their own self-interest as inextricably linked to the interests of others.

Maybe there’s no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

The openness of the White House said something about our confidence as a democracy, I thought. It embodied the notion that our leaders were not so different from us; that they remained subject to laws and our collective consent.

The legitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the degree to which these values are rewarded, which is why the values of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination complement rather than impinge on our liberty.

collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost.

More than once in our history we’ve seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others.

Likewise, we all agree that there must be limits to the state’s power to control our behavior, even if it’s for our own good. Not many Americans would feel comfortable with the government monitoring what we eat, no matter how many deaths and how much of our medical spending may be due to rising rates of obesity.

In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

Americans understand the damage such an ethic of greed has on our collective lives; in a recent survey, they ranked corruption in government and business, and greed and materialism, as two of the three most important moral challenges facing the nation (“raising kids with the right values” ranked first).

Dr. King replied, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”

And yet I find myself returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle—“How would that make you feel?”—as a guidepost for my politics.

I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.

That’s what empathy does—it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.

By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.

To me, the threat to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations was just one more example of Republicans changing the rules in the middle of the game.

It was Jefferson, not some liberal judge in the sixties, who called for a wall between church and state—and if we have declined to heed Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it’s only because the Constitution itself proved a sufficient defense against tyranny.

The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them.

Indeed, it is that process, according to Madison, that brought about the Constitution itself, through a convention in which “no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth, and was open to the force of argument.”

I love America too much, am too invested in what this country has become, too committed to its institutions, its beauty, and even its ugliness, to focus entirely on the circumstances of its birth. But neither can I brush aside the magnitude of the injustice done, or erase the ghosts of generations past, or ignore the open wound, the aching spirit, that ails this country still.

I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.

Hard as it may be to believe, most politicians are pretty likable folks.

It’s hard to deny that political civility has declined in the past decade, and that the parties differ sharply on major policy issues. But at least some of the decline in civility arises from the fact that, from the press’s perspective, civility is boring.

“Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, but I’m entitled to my own opinion.” To which Moynihan frostily replied, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation. Depending on your viewing preferences, global climate change is or is not dangerously accelerating; the budget deficit is going down or going up. Nor is the phenomenon restricted to reporting on complicated issues.

Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make—the immigrant who comes to this country with nothing and strikes it big, the young man who heads West in search of his fortune.

In other words, we can afford to do what needs to be done. What’s missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.

Americans are willing to compete with the world. We work harder than the people of any other wealthy nation. We are willing to tolerate more economic instability and are willing to take more personal risks to get ahead.

am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.

As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.

To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters—that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted.

I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger.

But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I am mindful of this truth as well: Better isn’t good enough.

They sensed what I’d come to know from a lifetime of experience: that whatever preconceived notions white Americans may continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able—if given the time—to look beyond race in making their judgments of people.

None of us—black, white, Latino, or Asian—is immune to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especially stereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence, or the black work ethic.

It’s the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round—the feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error.

Their arguments tapped into a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor that has a long and varied history in America, an argument that has often been racially or ethnically tinged and that has gained greater currency during those periods—like the seventies and eighties—when economic times are tough.

But ultimately the danger to our way of life is not that we will be overrun by those who do not look like us or do not yet speak our language. The danger will come if we fail to recognize the humanity of Cristina and her family—if we withhold from them the rights and opportunities that we take for granted, and tolerate the hypocrisy of a servant class in our midst;

America’s early leaders cautioned against idealistic attempts to export our way of life; according to John Quincy Adams, America should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” nor “become the dictatress of the world.”