The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama

even among the most scrupulous reporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of different sides of a debate without any perspective on which side might actually be right.

Is there an independent analyst somewhere who might walk us through the numbers? Who knows? Rarely does the reporter have time for such details; the story is not really about the merits of the tax cut or the dangers of the deficit but rather about the dispute between the parties.

from the press’s perspective, civility is boring. Your quote doesn’t run if you say, “I see the other guy’s point of view” or “The issue’s really complicated.” Go on the attack, though, and you can barely fight off the cameras. Often, reporters will go out of their way to stir up the pot, asking questions in such a way as to provoke an inflammatory response.

We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.

The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise.

Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media won’t have the patience to sort out all the facts and so the public may not know the difference between truth and falsehood.

whether he believes in his positions matters less than whether he looks like he believes; that straight talk counts less than whether it sounds straight on TV.

Often, as I read through the bills coming to the floor my first few months in the Senate, I was confronted with the fact that the principled thing was less clear than I had originally thought; that either an aye vote or a nay vote would leave me with some trace of remorse.

Should I vote against a change in the Clean Air Act that will weaken regulations in some areas but strengthen regulation in others,

you can also rest assured that no matter how many bad provisions there are in the bill, there will be something—funding for body armor for our troops, say, or some modest increase in veterans’ benefits—that makes the bill painful to oppose.

Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take,

This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained—by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate—to negotiate in good faith.

the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants, go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.” For the minority party in such circumstances, “bipartisanship” comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled,

Not surprisingly, there are activists who insist that Democratic senators stand fast against any Republican initiative these days—even those initiatives that have some merit—as a matter of principle. It’s fair to say that none of these individuals has ever run for high public office as a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state, nor has any been a target of several million dollars’ worth of negative TV ads.

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.

There was the criminal law bill that purported to crack down on drug dealing in schools but had been so poorly drafted that I concluded it was both ineffective and unconstitutional—“Obama voted to weaken penalties on gangbangers who deal drugs in schools,” is how the poll described it.

it mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn’t mention that such measures were already the law)—but also extended “personhood” to previable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning Roe v. Wade; in the poll, I was said to have “voted to deny lifesaving treatment to babies born alive.”

For that is how most of my colleagues, Republican and Democrat, enter the Senate, their mistakes trumpeted, their words distorted, and their motives questioned. They are baptized in that fire; it haunts them each and every time they cast a vote,

Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more participation from the electorate—and the more the electorate is paying attention, the more integrity is rewarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio time could drastically reduce the constant scrounging for money and the influence of special interests.

Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what they already have.

I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience. And my constituents.

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

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. In fact, according to David, just finding American-born engineers, whatever their race, was getting harder—which was why every company in Silicon Valley had come to rely heavily on foreign students.

Like towns all across central and western Illinois, Galesburg had been pounded by the shift of manufacturing overseas.

amending the tax code to eliminate tax breaks for companies who shifted operations offshore; revamping and better funding federal retraining programs.

YOU’LL GET LITTLE argument these days, from either the left or the right, with the notion that we’re going through a fundamental economic transformation.

Pools of capital scour the earth in search of the best returns, with trillions of dollars moving across borders with only a few keystrokes.

There’s no doubt that globalization has brought significant benefits to American consumers. It’s lowered prices on goods once considered luxuries,

It’s helped keep inflation in check, boosted returns for the millions of Americans now invested in the stock market, provided new markets for U.S. goods and services, and allowed countries like China and India to dramatically reduce poverty, which over the long term makes for a more stable world.

To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the global marketplace, U.S.-based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced, and offshored.

The result has been the emergence of what some call a “winner-take-all” economy, in which a rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all boats. Over the past decade, we’ve seen strong economic growth but anemic job growth; big leaps in productivity but flatlining wages; hefty corporate profits, but a shrinking share of those profits going to workers.

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

reforms in education and training that will help workers to compete for the high-value, high-wage jobs of the future.

For the most part, though, the Republican economic agenda under President Bush has been devoted to tax cuts, reduced regulation, the privatization of government services—and more tax cuts.

the Republican-controlled Congress has pushed through successive rounds of tax cuts, but has refused to make tough choices to control spending—special interest appropriations, also known as earmarks, are up 64 percent since Bush took office.

U.S.-based companies continue to hold an edge in such knowledge-based sectors as software design and pharmaceutical research, and our network of universities and colleges remains the envy of the world.

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,

an America in which we underinvest in the basic scientific research and workforce training that will determine our long-term economic prospects and neglect potential environmental crises. It will mean an America that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as economic frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other.

Quite prescient in terms of predicting the rage that led to the rise of Trump.

the absence of a new consensus around the appropriate role of government in the marketplace.

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

As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score.

The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history. 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.

it’s not much of a leap to assume that any government intrusion into the magical workings of the market—whether through taxation, regulation, lawsuits, tariffs, labor protections, or spending on entitlements—necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits economic growth.

In our standard economics textbooks and in our modern political debates, laissez-faire is the default rule; anyone who would challenge it swims against the prevailing tide.

in each and every period of great economic upheaval and transition we’ve depended on government action to open up opportunity, encourage competition, and make the market work better.

In broad outline, government action has taken three forms. First, government has been called upon throughout our history to build the infrastructure, train the workforce, and otherwise lay the foundations necessary for economic growth.

Hamilton argued, America needed a strong and active national government, and as America’s first Treasury secretary he set about putting his ideas to work.

He promoted policies—from strong patent laws to high tariffs—to encourage American manufacturing, and proposed investment in roads and bridges needed to move products to market.

Hamilton encountered fierce resistance from Thomas Jefferson, who feared that a strong national government tied to wealthy commercial interests would undermine his vision of an egalitarian democracy tied to the land. But Hamilton understood that only through the liberation of capital from local landed interests could America tap into its most powerful resource—namely the energy and enterprise of the American people.

This tradition, of government investment in America’s physical infrastructure and in its people, was thoroughly embraced by Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party. For Lincoln, the essence of America was opportunity, the ability of “free labor” to advance in life. Lincoln considered capitalism the best means of creating such opportunity, but he also saw how the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society was disrupting lives and destroying communities.