The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama

How can I, an American with the blood of Africa coursing through my veins, choose sides in such a dispute? I can’t. 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.

it was a matter of maintaining within himself the balance between two contradictory ideas—that we must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at times we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.

The blood of slaves reminds us that our pragmatism can sometimes be moral cowardice. Lincoln, and those buried at Gettysburg, remind us that we should pursue our own absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price to pay.

“We all have regrets, Senator,” I said finally. “We just ask that in the end, God’s grace shines upon us.”

These days, almost every congressional district is drawn by the ruling party with computer-driven precision to ensure that a clear majority of Democrats or Republicans reside within its borders. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.

MOST OF THE other sins of politics are derivative of this larger sin—the need to win, but also the need not to lose.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids.

I found myself hedging on such questions, writing in the margins, explaining the difficult policy choices involved. My staff would shake their heads. Get one answer wrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all go to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into the pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end. Say one thing during the campaign and do another thing once in office, and you’re a typical, two-faced politician.

got into politics to fight for these folks, and I’m glad a union is around to remind me of their struggles. But I also understand that there will be times when these obligations collide with other obligations—the obligation to inner-city children who are unable to read, say, or the obligation to children not yet born whom we are saddling with debt.

Maybe it also had something to do with my style of communicating, which can be rambling, hesitant, and overly verbose (both my staff and Michelle often remind me of this), but which perhaps finds sympathy in the literary class.

Ouch! It’s hard to tell, of course, whether Ms. Noonan seriously thought I was comparing myself to Lincoln, or whether she just took pleasure in filleting me so elegantly.

In an environment in which a single ill-considered remark can generate more bad publicity than years of ill-considered policies, it should have come as no surprise to me that on Capitol Hill jokes got screened, irony became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon, and passion was considered downright dangerous.

To make the deadline, to maintain market share and feed the cable news beast, reporters start to move in packs, working off the same news releases, the same set pieces, the same stock figures. Meanwhile, for busy and therefore casual news consumers, a well-worn narrative is not entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought or time; it’s quick and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody.

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.

There are times when one feels a piece of legislation to be so obviously right that it merits little internal debate (John McCain’s amendment prohibiting torture by the U.S. government comes to mind). At other times, a bill appears on the floor that’s so blatantly one-sided or poorly designed that one wonders how the sponsor can maintain a straight face during debate.

What every senator understands is that while it’s easy to make a vote on a complicated piece of legislation look evil and depraved in a thirty-second television commercial, it’s very hard to explain the wisdom of that same vote in less than twenty minutes.

We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I explained my concern that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war in the country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At the end of our conversation he shook my hand. “I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve thought about it. Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all the time.”

was reminded of something Justice Louis Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen.

and to make sure that the folks don’t think you’ve forgotten them.

Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road.

and had already started the Book Project, the goal of which was to scan every book ever published into a web-accessible format, creating a virtual library that would store the entirety of human knowledge.

“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the engineer said. “Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way”—he caused the screen to alter—“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.” The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men—nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light.

At least half of the group looked Asian; a large percentage of the whites had Eastern European names. As far as I could tell, not one was black or Latino. Later, walking back to my car, I mentioned this to David and he nodded. “We know it’s a problem,” he said, and mentioned efforts Google was making to provide scholarships to expand the pool of minority and female math and science students. In the meantime, Google needed to stay competitive, which meant hiring the top graduates of the top math, engineering, and computer science programs in the country—MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. You could count on two hands, David told me, the number of black and Latino kids in those programs.

for those with unique skills and talents and for the knowledge workers—the engineers, lawyers, consultants, and marketers—who facilitate their work, the potential rewards of a global marketplace have never been greater. But for those like the workers at Maytag, whose skills can be automated or digitized or shifted to countries with cheaper wages, the effects can be dire—a future in the ever-growing pool of low-wage service work, with few benefits, the risk of financial ruin in the event of an illness, and the inability to save for either retirement or a child’s college education. The question is what we should do about all this.

Or, as Ronald Reagan succinctly put it: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

as Ronald Reagan succinctly put it: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

But over the long term, doing nothing probably means an America very different from the one most of us grew up in. It will mean a nation even more stratified economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want on the marketplace—private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets—while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s educations.

What’s preventing us from shaping that future isn’t the absence of good ideas. It’s the absence of a national commitment to take the tough steps necessary to make America more competitive—and the absence of a new consensus around the appropriate role of government in the marketplace.

It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services—electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances—that are still unattainable for most of the world.

America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate, but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the efficient allocation of resources.

Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, ...

He passed the landmark Homestead Act of 1862, which turned over vast amounts of public land across the western United States to settlers from the East and immigrants from around the world, so that they, too, could claim a stake in the nation’s growing economy. And then, rather than leave these homesteaders to fend for themselves, he created a system of land grant colleges to instruct farmers on the latest agricultural techniques, and to provide them the liberal education that would allow them to dream beyond the confines of life on the farm.

Teddy Roosevelt recognized that monopoly power could restrict competition, and made “trust busting” a centerpiece of his administration.

Federal and state governments established the first consumer laws—the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act—to protect Americans from harmful products.

workers left impoverished by capitalism’s periodic gales of “creative destruction”

As he would explain in 1944, “People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

(FDR)

the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth. Just as too many corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering value, too many government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their shareholders (the American taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of government services) were getting their money’s worth.

we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately. In other words, we should be guided by what works.

in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where a child in Los Angeles has to compete not just with a child in Boston but also with millions of children in Bangalore and Beijing, too many of America’s

If we’re serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we’re going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional course work; pairing up new recruits with master teachers to break their isolation; and giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms. It also means paying teachers what they’re worth.

(most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad).

And we can make sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.

one young teacher mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome”—the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.” “When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not ‘these kids.’ They’re our kids.” How America’s economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how well we take such wisdom to heart.

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

The United States has 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world’s oil. We can’t drill our way out of the problem.

Aggressively investing in alternative fuel sources can also lead to the creation of thousands of new jobs. Ten or twenty years down the road, that old Maytag plant in Galesburg could reopen its doors as a cellulosic ethanol refinery. Down the street, scientists might be busy in a research lab working on a new hydrogen cell. And across the way, a new auto company could be busy churning out hybrid cars. The new jobs created could be filled by American workers trained with new skills and a world-class education, from elementary school to college. But we can’t afford to hesitate much longer.

What was needed, they said, was not just free trade but fair trade: stronger labor protections in countries that trade with the United States, including rights to unionize and bans on child labor; improved environmental standards in these same countries; an end to unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff barriers on U.S. exports; stronger protections for U.S. intellectual property; and—in the case of China in particular—an end to an artificially devalued currency that put U.S. companies at a perpetual disadvantage.

free trade may well grow the worldwide economic pie—but there’s no law that says workers in the United States will continue to get a bigger and bigger slice. Given these realities, it’s easy to understand why some might want to put a stop to globalization—to freeze the status quo and insulate ourselves from economic disruption.