The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama

“You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?”

I understood the skepticism, but that there was—and always had been—another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.

I had preserved my independence, my good name, and my marriage, all of which, statistically speaking, had been placed at risk the moment I set foot in the state capital.

particular malady as well as anything else. In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered

the lunch was scheduled for late September 2001. “You realize, don’t you, that the political dynamics have changed,” he said as he picked at his salad. “What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what he meant. We both looked down at the newspaper beside him. There, on the front page, was Osama bin Laden.

the animal warmth of shaking hands and plunging into a crowd

came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.

Whether we’re from red states or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of honesty, rigor, and common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what appears to be a continuous menu of false or cramped choices. Religious or secular, black, white, or brown, we sense—correctly—that the nation’s most significant challenges are being ignored, and that if we don’t change course soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves behind a weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited.

That’s the topic of this book: how we might begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life. This isn’t to say that I know exactly how to do it. I don’t.

I am a prisoner of my own biography: I can’t help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives.

think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised.

I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.

I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.

Some of these desks date back to 1819, and atop each desk is a tidy receptacle for inkwells and quills.

In the world’s greatest deliberative body, no one is listening.

We disagreed on the scope of our disagreements, the nature of our disagreements, and the reasons for our disagreements. Everything was contestable, whether it was the cause of climate change or the fact of climate change, the size of the deficit or the culprits to blame for the deficit.

I had watched campaign culture metastasize throughout the body politic, as an entire industry of insult—both perpetual and somehow profitable—emerged to dominate cable television, talk radio, and the New York Times best-seller list.

I understood politics as a full-contact sport, and minded neither the sharp elbows nor the occasional blind-side hit.

I had clung to the notion that politics could be different, and that the voters wanted something different; that they were tired of distortion, name-calling, and sound-bite solutions to complicated problems; that if I could reach those voters directly, frame the issues as I felt them, explain the choices in as truthful a fashion as I knew how, then the people’s instincts for fair play and common sense would bring them around. If enough of us took that risk, I thought, not only the country’s politics but the country’s policies would change for the better.

I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses.

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.

compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or against us. You had to choose sides.

Unless political leaders are open to new ideas and not just new packaging, we won’t change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy policy or tame the deficit.

the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of those buildings as he is of the bankers who won’t give him a loan to expand his business.

suddenly it felt as if somebody in a back room had flipped a switch. The President’s eyes became fixed; his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty.

an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand. “Want some?” the President asked. “Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.” Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

their main streets barely hanging on with every other store closed, the occasional roadside vendors selling fresh peaches or corn, or in the case of one couple I saw, “Good Deals on Guns and Swords.”

Not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike.

Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discover that most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows.

“I never realized just how American I was,” she said. She hadn’t realized just how free she was—or how much she cherished that freedom.

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.

I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years too hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state.

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

My encounters with such competence seem more sporadic lately; I seem to spend more time looking for somebody in the store to help me or waiting for the deliveryman to show.

(I am convinced—although I have no statistical evidence to back it up—that antitax, antigovernment, antiunion sentiments grow anytime people find themselves standing in line at a government office with only one window open and three or four workers chatting among themselves in full view.)

I offered the further observation that a popular show targeted at teens, in which young people with no visible means of support spend several months getting drunk and jumping naked into hot tubs with strangers, was not “the real world.”

the severing of sexuality from intimacy.

I OFTEN WONDER what makes it so difficult for politicians to talk about values in ways that don’t appear calculated or phony. Partly, I think, it’s because those of us in public life have become so scripted, and the gestures that candidates use to signify their values have become so standardized (a stop at a black church, the hunting trip, the visit to a NASCAR track, the reading in the kindergarten classroom) that it becomes harder and harder for the public to distinguish between honest sentiment and political stagecraft. Then there’s the fact that the practice of modern politics itself seems to be value-free.

Like a prisoner of war, Justin kept repeating his name, his rank, and the telephone number of his candidate’s campaign headquarters.

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. It’s not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.

As he spoke, his voice grew more forceful; his forefinger stabbed the air; the dark room seemed to close in on him, until he seemed almost a specter, the spirit of Senates past, his almost fifty years in these chambers reaching back to touch the previous fifty years, and the fifty years before that, and the fifty years before that; back to the time when Jefferson, Adams, and Madison roamed through the halls of the Capitol, and the city itself was still wilderness and farmland and swamp. Back to a time when neither I nor those who looked like me could have sat within these walls.

separates the Senate from the House and serves as a firewall against the dangers of majority overreach.

With words, with rules, with procedures and precedents—with law—Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black subjugation in ways that mere violence never could.

Should we let teachers lead our children in prayer and leave open the possibility that the minority faiths of some children are diminished? Or do we forbid such prayer and force parents of faith to hand over their children to a secular world eight hours a day?

I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution—that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world. How could it be otherwise?

The original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, would certainly allow sex discrimination and might even allow racial segregation—an understanding of equality to which few of us would want to return.

The Founders and ratifiers themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted, not just about minor provisions but about first principles, not just between peripheral figures but within the Revolution’s very core.

one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had.

What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future.

The Constitution’s exquisite machinery would secure the rights of citizens, those deemed members of America’s political community. But it provided no protection to those outside the constitutional circle—the Native American whose treaties proved worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the black man Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave.