I'm not promising anything here - my time on this planet is still stratified among a million different responsibilities, creative urges and necessary expenditures of my daily energy, but I wanted to poke my head in to mention something. This is a little off-tact for my blog, and perhaps a little too pointed for my usual bipartisan call to trivialism, but I'm going to go ahead anyway and recommend that every American should probably read Obama's "The Audacity of Hope."
So before you leave or gloss over entirely, a couple quick points and caveats:
1. Yes, the book title suggests that other names under consideration might have been "The Audacity of Rhetoric," "America: The Genericing," or "Look at me, I'm Barack Obama, I'm So Special, Naa Naa Naa."
2. Yes, if you hate the man now and are already convinced that he's wrong and radical, reading this book through that lens probably isn't going to rock your world (but it might, depending on the lens).
3. Yes, he already won the Presidency, so why am I still bleating on about him?
Well, he is your President now, so you might as well get to know him, right? A lacking familiarity with the man seems to be a common complaint among detractors. Others, subsumed by their adoration for his awesome stage presence would do just as well to read it - because contrary to the title, or the impression it gives of four-hundred pages of sweeping generalizations and feel-good epithets, like some sort of feature-length stump speech, the book is actually really good. If nothing else (and this is a fairly useless caveat to make given his other accomplishments of late), Barack Obama is a startlingly good writer. And more than a manual of political strategy or an egregious exercise in self-promotion, the poorly-named "Audacity of Hope" is a carefully wrought chronicle of the man's worldview, his perspective on everything from the constitution to the economy to what Americans value.
I personally think a more appropriate title would have been "Common Sense II: This Time It's Personal," because much like the works of Locke, the gravity of Obama's thought process is self-evident in his prose - unlike many politicians (and all pundits), Obama is not trying to energize his base or divine some all-encompassing theory; on the contrary, he seems genuinely concerned with finding language that will again allow Americans of different creeds to look each other in the eye, put down their talking points and look toward policies that will allow the country to move forward, guided by a careful consideration of the values that most Americans claim to hold, and yet never seem to agree on. His reflections on campaigning and acting as senator are honest and often self-effacing; he observes the climate of Washington and the immense pressure it imposes on politicians to become cynical, vote down party lines and only pay heed to those issues to which his or her constituents pay due lip service (and campaign contributions). While fully admitting that he is a Democrat and believes in typical Democratic principles, he observes the moral failings of both parties with an eye towards honest analysis and clear communication. At any rate, reading this book has lead me to to the conclusion that though he may be a stirring speaker, Barack Obama is also a brilliant thinker, even-keeled and incredibly circumspect. Some might see this as merely the impressive act of a calculating mind, a man keenly attuned to the machinations of politics and the words that will win him favor. But I think this book actually transcends the localized rhetoric of any one campaign or political cycle. Even if he wasn't a politician, this book would still be awesome.
Anyway, I'll leave it there, with an excerpt chosen to underscore the tone of his writing:
"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. We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.
"But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values 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. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.
"When this happens--when liberty is cited in the defense of a company's decision to dump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an upscale new mall is used to justify the destruction of somebody's home--we depend on the strength of countervailing values to temper our judgment and hold such excesses in check.
"Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for instance, that society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm to others. The First Amendment doesn't give ou the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater; your right to practice your religion doesn't encompass human sacrifice. 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 our medical spending may be due to rising rates of obesity.
"More often though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult. Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, we have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism. But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and the most prudent Congress would struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too little attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction of manufacturing jobs. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of economic security and competitiveness.
"Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don't even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don't like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people's sexual practices. Conversely, it's easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.
"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. This 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 freedoms as evangelicals do of their right to worship."
Maybe that's a bit more than an excerpt, but I wanted to do justice to what I think this book accomplishes: elaborating on sound-bytes to the advancement of a central political thesis. This passage may still come across as too broad-reaching, but I chose it because it's from the beginning of a chapter, where he's setting an overall context for discourse. Does this sound like the musings of a radical? I hope not.
