The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama. Crown, 2006, 384 pages.

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The Vision of the Anointed

by James Walsh

Barack Obama is a recently elected U.S. senator from Illinois, a liberal Democrat who has risen on a fast track through establishment party ranks. On paper, his career is nearly perfect for "progressive" appeal. Born in 1961, he fits squarely in the tail end of the Baby Boom. He's a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he edited the law review. Between college and law school, he worked "as a community organizer out of the Harlem campus of the City College of New York."

(I often wonder how so many young left-wing statists end up "working" as "community organizers." Who signs their paychecks? In Obama's case, it seems to have been CCNY, a public institution. Do New York taxpayers know that some of their money goes to hire "community organizers?" Shouldn't communities be able to organize themselves? Isn't self-sustaining organization one of the things that makes a group of people a community?)

After law school, Obama worked for the big law firm Sidley & Austin before joining a "small civil-rights practice" and being elected to the Illinois state legislature. He has written two successful, heavily autobiographical books — including the recent bestseller "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream." In early February, Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

Behind his rapid rise lurks the matter of his race. Sen. Obama's father was a Kenyan academic; his mother was a free spirit from Kansas by way of Hawaii. To put it more plainly, his father was black and his mother was white. By most standards — including, most importantly, his own — Obama is a "black" man. But his experience is more cosmopolitan than the traditional American black politician's. Neither of his parents had any direct experience in African-American culture or the civil rights movement. In fact, his father didn't live in the United States for very long; soon after Obama was born, his parents divorced and his father moved back to Kenya. During his childhood, Obama spent some time in Indonesia after his mother married again, and then returned to Hawaii in his teenage years.

In his first book, Obama wrote of struggling with both his own sense of racial identity and his relationship to his largely absent father. Eventually, he was able to spend some time in Kenya and reestablish contact with his father (who remained, by Obama's account, a rather difficult fellow) and his father's extended family. He also came to terms with being a black man in America.

In his more recent book, those struggles are behind him. He focuses his attention on how his personal experiences inform his views on America. It is, much more than the first book, a campaign tool.

I've read "The Audacity of Hope"; I don't find Obama a compelling candidate for higher office. Behind his certain and self-admitted "talent for rhetoric," the senator is just one more self-satisfied statist hack who believes that he knows better than you do how you should live.

Others feel differently. Depending on which poll you read, Obama either leads or comes in a close second among likely voters in the early Democrat primary states for the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign season.

Some grizzled political pundits predict that Obama's appeal will not last through the 2008 election cycle. He has peaked too early, and he will drop in the polls as the actual primaries approach and the competition heats up.

Maybe, maybe not. The man has a strong media presence. On television and in print, he comes across as thoughtful and forceful. He sounds moderate — acknowledging the validity of some of his opponents' perspectives while voting against them; he sounds rational, emphasizing common-sense wisdom in his analysis of major issues. He is also the fashionable choice among well-positioned political dilettantes such as the European currency trader George Soros and the easily lampooned Hollywood actor Matt Damon.

Most importantly, he gave a keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that left most of the people in the hall wishing that he, not the feckless Sen. John Kerry, was the party's presidential nominee. And at that point Obama hadn't even been elected to the U.S. Senate; he was still just a state legislator.

Since "The Audacity of Hope" is clearly a campaign document, and since Obama has served in the Senate for only two years, it seems fair to judge the candidate by his book (perhaps more useful than judging a book by its cover). Like most books of its kind, "The Audacity of Hope" reads like a series of stump speeches sewn together with personal anecdotes, observations, and descriptions of the corridors of power. This politician's stump speeches are of a better quality than most; his anecdotes and descriptions are well crafted — the book at least reads quickly.

But getting to the essence of what the candidate actually believes takes some work. Obama is deeply invested in seeming moderate and rational. He recounts stories of people literally telling him that he's moderate and rational. In his own analysis of current events, Obama often pulls the postmodern parlor trick of showing first that he understands an opposing view . . . and then either countering or simply rejecting it.

Parlor tricks aren't a strong foundation for political philosophy. By focusing on the tricks, Obama sometimes triangulates into ridiculous situations. Consider his discussion of the Central American Free Trade Agreement:

There were some problems with the agreement, but overall, CAFTA was probably a net plus for the U.S. economy. ("The Audacity of Hope," 172)

I ended up voting against CAFTA, which passed the Senate by a vote of 55 to 45. (176)

He voted against the best interests of the U.S. economy in order to "send a strong signal" to Big Labor that he was on its side — but at least his vote didn't matter! It's kind of an anti-Profile in Courage.

Occasionally, the senator's passions peek through the curtains of his rhetoric. But even his passions seem to conflict. In the second chapter, titled "Values," Obama serves up some meat-and-potatoes antibusiness populism for his left-wing base:

But the explosion of CEO pay has had little to do with improved performance. In fact, some of the country's most highly compensated CEOs over the past decade have presided over huge drops in earnings, losses in shareholder value, massive layoffs, and the underfunding of their workers' pension funds. What accounts for the change in CEO pay is not any market imperative. It's cultural. At a time when average workers are experiencing little or no income growth, many of America's CEOs have lost any sense of shame about grabbing whatever their pliant, handpicked corporate boards will allow. (62)

Clearly, shameless CEOs — he never names any — and their cronies are fat cats that Obama can't stand.

Then, on the facing page, he spins justification for the fat cats he likes (and whose money and political endorsements he accepts):

All the money in the world won't boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instill in their children the values of hard work and delayed gratification. But when we as a society pretend that poor children will fulfill their potential in dilapidated, unsafe schools with outdated equipment and teachers who aren't trained in the subjects they teach, we are perpetrating a lie on those children, and on ourselves. (63)

"Teachers who aren't trained in the subjects they teach" is right out of the teachers' union rhetorical phrasebook. It is a bureaucratic, obstructionist perspective about teaching that's designed to control the flow of dues-paying union members.

The difference between the shameless CEOs and the obstructionist teachers' unions is that the teachers' unions always manipulate public monies. (Some of the shameless CEOs do that, too — but most of their abuses are directed at private-sector investors or employees who willingly get involved with them.)

One of the reasons that Obama has risen so quickly on the national political scene is that his rise within the Illinois Democratic Party was unlikely. When he started running for the U.S. Senate, he faced two seemingly strong opponents for his party's nomination. One was the son of a long-time state party leader who had strong name recognition; the other was a self-made millionaire willing to spend a lot of his own money to reach office (and who had the backing of some powerful Democrats in Washington, D.C.).

Obama started with a few good contacts in the state capitol and the loyal support of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and a couple of far-left service employees unions. He'd been an effective agent for these unions in the Illinois legislature. That background says more about Obama's politics than his more recent, stumbling triangulation on Big Issues.

He was a long shot — but fortune broke his way. First, the incumbent senator (a Republican) decided not to seek reelection. Second, the self-made millionaire Obama faced in the Democratic primary had skeletons in his closet: "[H]is campaign imploded when allegations surfaced that he'd had some ugly run-ins with his ex-wife" (113). Third, in the general election, his original opponent withdrew after some awkward portions of his divorce file were made public.

It was often said of Bill Clinton that the man was blessed with weak opponents. Barack Obama seems to share that blessing. (Or maybe he has an opposition research staff that's really good at digging up divorce depositions.) In 2004, however, the Democratic Party powers saw Obama differently. He looked like an authentic, grass-roots winner from the Midwest. This would make him a good complement to the charisma-challenged presidential candidate.

Personal "authenticity" has become a core value of mainstream politics. And the search for personal authenticity has infected the American culture's daily discourse. Read the letters to the editor page of any major newspaper or magazine, or the comments posted to any news-related website; many begin with the words "As a , I believe . . . " Remember Oprah Winfrey's problems with the literary fraud James Frey, whose "authentic" tale of drug addiction and recovery turned out to be not so.

Obama may be the ultimate product of this emphasis on personal authenticity. To race-obsessed statists, he has the ultimate authenticity: dark skin. To Bush-hating partisans on the political Left, he has the authenticity of not having voted for the Iraq war (as Hillary Clinton did). In this vein, Obama even writes about authenticity in his book: "Perhaps this explains why we long for that most elusive quality in our leaders — the quality of authenticity, of being who you say you are, of possessing a truthfulness that goes beyond words" (66).

And, predictably, he falls into the familiar trope about his own authenticity later: "As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii . . . " (231). There are some questions about Obama's authenticity, though. His background and his résumé game some measures dear to his supporters: his skin is dark, but he's not a product of the culture that most Americans consider "black"; he didn't vote for the Iraq war because he wasn't in national office when the votes were cast. There's a bit of Chance the Gardener from "Being There" about Obama. He seems to be made up mostly of other people's projections.

Bill Clinton allowed his personal charisma to lead people to infer political beliefs that he didn't hold, or didn't hold faithfully. His political brilliance was in accepting with charm the projections people put on him. Barack Obama seems to have studied Bill Clinton's model — so it's somehow fitting that he's competing against Clinton's wife for the Democratic presidential nomination.

There are some differences, though. Obama seems to have a more orderly personal life than Bill Clinton. That might mean that Obama holds some beliefs deeply enough to imply a consistent philosophy, but it's hard to tell from his chameleonic public persona.

Of course, "The Audacity of Hope" is 376 pages of his words. A reader should be able to come away with some idea of what the man himself stands for. For instance:

But the essential idea behind the Declaration — that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can't be taken by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our own lives what we will — is one that every American understands. (53)

Sounds good on the first reading. But it's exactly because that bundle of rights can be taken away from people that it must be protected vigorously. His bold statement about protecting essential liberties is reduced by the qualifier "without just cause." The important question, then, becomes what constitutes "just cause." Statists are masters of exploiting such questions while lawyers quibble over the details.

Implicit in its [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth . . . (93)

Really? That sounds like an imprecise — or extremely mechanistic — statement. To start, all truth is absolute; the notion that a thing can be "partly" true is just a common colloquialism. Ordered liberty is a means to achieve truth, not a rejection of truth. Perhaps Obama means that the state has no claim to truth, but the rest of his beliefs don't square with that. He generally seems to believe that the state does have a claim — perhaps the surest claim — to "absolute truth."

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. (146)

Nor did American culture have much sympathy for workers left impoverished by capitalism's periodic gales of "creative destruction" — the recipe for individual success was greater toil, not pampering from the state. What safety net did exist came from the uneven and meager resources of private charity. (154)

He's begging the question: if the economy truly is "winner-take-all," and the hand of charity "uneven and meager," then of course only the state can provide. But note again that "talent for rhetoric," as Obama exploits a common rhetorical device of stump speakers — delivering his adjectives in pairs. A few pages later, he writes of "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism."

Other rhetoric isn't so able: "Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real, is serious, and is accelerated by the continued release of carbon dioxide" (168). So do your part and stop breathing.

Obama may be impressed with his own rhetorical skills, but "just about every" is weak form — rhetoricians call it a modified categorical. It's a contradiction in terms, fuzzy filler.

[R]egulation, if applied with flexibility and sensitivity to market forces, can actually spur private sector innovation and investment in the energy sector. (169)

Another bold statement reduced by modifiers. Regulation is inherently insensitive to market forces — in fact, it is designed to control or modify market impulses. Regulation applied with sensitivity to market forces would do nothing.

Obama's most tortured pages are the ones that deal with issues of risk and security (personal, not national) in public policy. Like most statists, he has a weak understanding of risk theory:

But this compact also rested on an understanding that a system of sharing risks and rewards can actually improve the workings of the market. . . . That's what Social Security, the centerpiece of New Deal legislation, has provided — a form of social insurance that protects us from risk. . . . The bigger the pool of insured, the more risk is spread, the more coverage provided, and the lower the cost. Sometimes, though, we can't buy insurance for certain risks on the marketplace — usually because companies find it unprofitable. Sometimes the insurance we get through our job isn't enough, and we can't afford to buy more on our own. Sometimes an unexpected tragedy strikes and it turns out we didn't have enough insurance. For all these reasons, we ask the government to step in and create an insurance pool for us — a pool that includes all of the American people. (177–78)

This passage makes Obama seem either ignorant or willfully misleading about risk allocation and insurance.

First, insurance doesn't protect anyone from risk. It's simply a tool for distributing losses so that no single loss concentrates on a single person or small group. The same risks exist — they always do — it's just the fallout from those risks that's managed.

Second, no insuring entity — including the state — can "step in" and create a risk pool after a loss (in his words, a "tragedy") has occurred. The purpose of risk pools is to gather resources before a loss occurs, so that they can be allocated when one does.

Third, like so many career politicians, Obama seems to be confusing the roles of insurer and guarantor. An insurer is simply a manager of other people's assets, gathering them and allocating them in an actuarially sound manner, in exchange for a fee. A guarantor is someone or something that promises to pay expenses or debt.

Why is it that statists have such a hard time understanding risk? Do they believe in collective solutions because they don't understand risk and rewards; or believe in collective solutions first, and then ignore risk management because its tenets are inconvenient truths?

His stumbling explanation of health care suffers from the same flawed perspective:

The market alone can't solve our health-care woes — in part because the market has proven incapable of creating large enough insurance pools to keep costs to individuals affordable, in part because health care is not like other products or services (when your child gets sick, you don't go shopping for the best bargain). (184)

Let's take his first part first. Markets don't create insurance pools — insurers do. And larger pools don't necessarily make insurance more affordable. If the incidence rate for certain losses in a large pool is higher than the rate in a small pool, the large pool's insurance costs will be higher than small pool's. The keys here are the loss histories and actuarial projections for each pool.

Size can make some administrative costs easier to carry (which is why statists always argue for bigger pools; they're administrators at heart) but it has nothing to do with incidence rates and loss histories.

Now, the second part. "You" may not shop for the best bargain when you choose health care providers. But you should.

Obama doesn't believe in privatization of Social Security pension benefits. Not much of a surprise there — just a lot more cant about the "winner-take-all" society.

In other words, the Ownership Society doesn't even try to spread the risks and rewards of the new economy among all Americans. Instead, it simply magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today's winner-take-all economy. If you are healthy or wealthy or just plain lucky, then you will become more so. If you are poor or sick or catch a bad break, you will have nobody to look to for help. (180)

But his personal anecdotes prove there's another solution. Near the end of the book, he tells of courting his wife. Early in their relationship, he'd gone to her home and met her parents and siblings. He was impressed by the family's old-fashioned structure and closeness. Even though they weren't rich, the parents had sent all of their children to college and beyond. Only later did he learn that his girlfriend's father had been suffering from multiple sclerosis for some years. The man lived with the disease gracefully and, with the support of his family, led a full life.

The strongest proof of the limits of Obama's perspective comes in his discussion of productivity gains in business ventures.

Business groups may argue that a more unionized workforce will rob the U.S. economy of flexibility and its competitive edge. But it's precisely because of a more competitive global environment that we can expect unionized workers to want to cooperate with employers — as long as they are getting their fair share of higher productivity. (182)

Obama must never have started a business . . . and the reader begins to understand why he didn't make partner at Sidley & Austin. Higher productivity goes to the bottom line in any business venture. And owners — who have invested capital into the venture — are entitled to bottom-line profits. Unless unionized workers have invested capital in the venture, they are merely one expense item higher up on the P&L. Their "fair share" of increased profits is their pro rata portion of the shareholders' equity. If Obama believes that employees deserve equity ownership in a venture in addition to their wages, he doesn't understand the economic roles of employer and employee.

Obama effectively conveys common-sense wisdom on issues like foreign debt, campaign finance laws, and national security. He agonizes convincingly about moral questions like abortion and gay marriage. From his discussion of these topics in the abstract, he sounds like a moderate pragmatist.

But, often, when he moves from theoretical discussions to specific examples drawn from his time in the Illinois legislature or the U.S. Senate, he abandons his common-sense wisdom to take contradictory actions for partisan or downright stupid reasons. He squares this with another rhetorical trick: acknowledging the inconsistency. He admits the contradiction and moves on without further explanation.

But "The Audacity of Hope" wasn't written for libertarians or hard-eyed businessmen. It was written for the author's base of supporters in the left wing of the Democratic Party and swing voters who pay more attention to charisma and emotion than political philosophy. If Obama can combine these groups, he will go a long way toward the White House: scant experience, question-begging, contradictions between word and deed, and all.

One last observation. Early in the book, Obama describes his first meeting with George W. Bush. After some standard pleasantries, Bush points out that both he and Obama have had to debate Alan Keyes — whom the president calls "a piece of work." Obama eagerly agrees.

Bush has many unappealing traits. One of the worst is his locker-room mentality about insulting or minimizing people he considers strange; it smacks of the football star (which W. himself was not) mocking the awkward geek.

In his anecdote, Obama joins in the towel-snapping — and takes several other personal swipes at Keyes throughout the book.

Alan Keyes is by no means a libertarian. From his public speeches, it's fair to conclude his view of America verges on the theocratic. He's a statist of a heavily religious bent. But he speaks his mind clearly and even forcefully; and his beliefs are no more ridiculous than Barack Obama's smug, liberal-establishment cant.

Obama's cool-kid dismissal of the geeky Alan Keyes hints at insecurity in the face of honest expression.

A "talent for rhetoric" can be a hollow thing.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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