Barack Obama: Lost in the Foothills of Hope
By KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY

My wife, Sandra, warned me, "Don't be hating." Now San (as we call 
her), who has worked in retail sales, selling ladies shoes, throughout 
her working life, is not an overtly political person. She is one of 
those old-timey, "salt of the earth" types. But when she doesn't like a 
person, there is usually something wrong with that person. For 
instance, before it became evident that Al Sharpton's effort in South 
Carolina was going nowhere fast, she coined the now-popular phrase 
"scampaign" to refer to the reverend's run. I know it is ill-advised 
not to take heed of her warning. 

With San's admonition in mind, I tried to table her (and my) Oprah-
tainted, media-hyped preconception of Baraka Obama so that I could read 
The Audacity of Hope with an open mind and with the same hopeful spirit 
as the title seeks to portray.

But the book is like those two solid yellow lines on a two-lane 
mountain road. They're just there in the middle and never-ending, with 
a stop sign as the only relief.

He offers no boldness. Dr. King set out to change the social, 
economic, and political structures of this country. He described the 
change as a 'third way' beyond capitalism and socialism. King's "third 
way" is far different than Bill Clinton's "third way," promoted by 
Obama and all those around Hillary, who tout the Clintons as the second 
and third coming of Camelot.

The Clinton "third way" is Republican Party politics in slow motion. 
Under Bill Clinton, U.S. troops weren't trapped in Iraq, but just as 
many, if not more, Iraqis died as a result of his policies. His 
destruction of the welfare system, his embrace of capital punishment 
and other punitive and discriminatory crime policies, his bowing to 
Wall Street all made him palatable to Republicans.

The hope in Obama's title is for a mixture of Kennedyism, Reaganism, 
and Clintonism packaged as the new face of multicultural America. At 
its core, this is what The Audacity of Hope promotes, instead of any 
fundamental progressive change.

Nonetheless, it comes as no surprise that The Audacity of Hope is a 
New York Times bestseller. The book arrives amidst the hype of an 
upcoming and wide-open Presidential race, the collective angst over the 
country moving in the wrong direction, an economy that working people 
know isn't as good as they are being told it is, and a war that has 
washed away - at home and abroad - the country's preexisting false 
sense of moral superiority. As the line in Ethan and Joel Cohen's 2000 
movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, goes, "Everybody's looking for 
answers."

Yet, does Obama's book provide any real answers? It there anything in 
it that will help stimulate measurable change? Or, is it all just talk, 
posturing, and positioning for personal political goals? Is it an 
orchestrated, consciously plotted pretext to inoculate a politician 
from the perceived liabilities of race, lineage and inexperience?

The answers are no, no, yes, yes.

I can agree with Obama on the need for a new kind of politics. But he 
suggests that what's broken can be fixed versus being replaced 
altogether. He opines that if we would all just recognize our "shared 
understanding," "shared values," and "the notion of a common good" that 
life (or politics) in the United States would be better.

Take, for instance, his praise of Reagan, hedged as it is by criticism 
of Reagan's "John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by 
anecdote, and his gratuitous assault on the poor." Writes Obama: 

"I understood his appeal. It was the same appeal that the military 
bases back in Hawaii always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy 
streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper 
salutes. . . . Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to 
believe that we are not subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that 
we can shape our individual and collective destinies. So long as we 
rediscover the traditional values of hard work, patriotism, personal 
responsibility, optimism, and faith."

Obama gets a lot wrong from start to finish. While people may indeed 
have a shared reality - which means we witness the same things - we 
don't always feel, understand, process, or react to what we witness in 
the same way. The simplest example of not having a "shared 
understanding" is the difference in how blacks and whites view the 
police. 

What is lacking here is devotion to principles, which Obama constantly 
sacrifices on the altar of "shared values." And of course the issue is 
not of shared values. It's how we rank our values. Many people value 
religion, but which religion has more value? In this country we all 
know the answer to that question. As proof that the United States 
government values Christians over Muslims, consider that the United 
States is at war with an Islamic country. Consider that Muslims in this 
country are subject to increased government scrutiny and racial, 
ethnic, and religious profiling. No one in their right mind could 
believe that the United States place a Muslim on an equal footing with 
a Christian or Jew. The daily body count dispels that notion. 

At the top of Obama's shared values matrix is his Christian faith, his 
heterosexual family, the American flag, and the Democratic Party. 
"Shared values" and "the notion of a common good" pretty much amounts 
to the same thing in Obamaspeak. It all sounds pleasant, but it's 
surely not new. It's somewhat reminiscent of Jesse Jackson's "common 
ground" theme that he built his '88 campaign around. Clinton picked up 
the phrase, and it is now a standard part of the political lexicon.

But the use and meaning of Jackson's phrase has changed over the years 
since Clinton co-opted it. Jackson's "common ground" meant bringing 
together a coalition of workers, women, men, blacks, progressive 
whites, gays and lesbians, environmentalists, anti-apartheid activists, 
those opposed to Ronald Reagan's illegal war in Central America, 
farmers, Latinos, Arab-Americans and other traditionally 
underrepresented or unrepresented groups. With Jackson's phrase, all 
could demand a seat at the Democratic Party table.

By contrast, Clinton wanted the Democratic Party to renew its "common 
ground" with those who left the party with Strom Thurmond and the 
Dixiecrats and those who jumped ship when Ronald Reagan rose to power: 
white men. Clinton's "common ground" was with the Democratic Leadership 
Council. Clinton "common ground" pushed aside those whom Jackson 
brought to the party. And The Audacity of Hope places Obama squarely in 
the DLC camp, even if he never applies for a membership card.

As a political tome, The Audacity of Hope is kind of a new and 
improved, better-written version of Clinton's long-winded speech at the 
'88 Democratic Convention in book form. Obama touches all the hot 
button words like the "nuclear option," "strict constructionists," and 
the like but never really says anything deep or brave or new other than 
to remind us that the hot buttons are really hot.

Give Obama credit for copping to the fact that his "treatment of the 
issues is often partial and incomplete." Overall, the treatise reads 
like a very, very long speech of sound bites and clichés arranged by 
topic and issue and connected by conjunctions, pleasantries, and 
apologies. Pleasantries like wishing for a return to the days when 
Republicans and Democrats "met at night for dinner, hashing out a 
compromise over steaks and cigars." Or, leading with apologias to 
describe painful parts of United States history or softening a 
rightfully deserved blow as when he describes racist southern Senator 
Richard B. Russell as "erudite." Or accusing his mom of having a 
"incorrigible, sweet-natured romanticism" about the '60s and the civil 
rights era as he waxes romantically about Hubert Humphrey's Democratic 
Party. It's like he did not have a clue about the 1964 struggles of 
Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

The shame of Obama's lack of depth is that Hamer's conflict over 
representation pretty much set the table for how the Democratic Party 
deals with blacks today. But of course he was only three years old and 
living in Hawaii when Lyndon Johnson went on national television to 
give a speech so that Hamer's image and the MFDP challenge would be off 
the airwaves. Hamer's fight was a precursor to the candidacy of Shirley 
Chisholm, the first black to seriously run for President in 1972 (if 
you exclude Dick Gregory's 1968 bid). Chisholm continued Hamer's fight 
for a greater black and female voice in politics and government.

Throughout, Obama proffers an unnaturally romantic view of the 
Democratic Party for a person of his age. His appreciation of party 
seems as times deeper than his understanding of the civil rights 
movement, which comes across as antiseptic. And he goes out of his way 
to comfort whites with a critique of black Americans that could tumble 
out of the mouth of William Bennett. "Many of the social or cultural 
factors that negatively affect black people, for example, simply mirror 
in exaggerated form problems that afflict America as whole: too much 
television (the average black household has the television on more than 
eleven hours per day), too much consumption of poisons (blacks smoke 
more and eat more fast food), and a lack of emphasis on educational 
attainment," he writes. "Then there's the collapse of the two-parent 
black household, a phenomenon that . . . reflects a casualness towards 
sex and child rearing among black men."

The book has no soul. That perhaps explains why some (with motives 
good and bad) in the black community complain that he "is not black 
enough," or "he has no respect or appreciation for the past," or "he is 
the amalgamation of everything white folk want a black man to be," or 
"he's a white boy being scripted by smart-ass white boys."

The book is surprisingly short on substance. Given all the policy 
disasters of the Bush Administration, what troubles Obama about the 
Bush era is not so much the policies Republicans championed but "the 
process" or lack of process "by which the White House and its 
Congressional allies disposed of opposing views." In the end, all he 
offers is the promise of a 'hope' that he will manage the process 
better than the other guy or gal.

So then, why write the book?

Obama's face is everywhere. And, there is no shortage of opinion about 
him, which makes it difficult to read his book and sort things out 
without atmospheric bias. But The Audacity of Hope plays on the 
creation of a Kennedy-like mystique. I've spoken to a couple of writer 
friends who attended an Obama event and in both conversations the 
comparison to John Kennedy was bandied about. On cue, Obama plays the 
Kennedy-card throughout his book, tossing in passages from Profiles in 
Courage. 

Although we now know that John F. Kennedy did not write Profiles in 
Courage, the book is one you have on your shelf that you might look 
through on occasion and actually enjoy rereading. Profiles in Courage 
is a historical marker in a way Audacity of Hope will never be. Not 
that I am a fan in the slightest regard of the early John and Robert 
Kennedy. There was much to dislike about them even before the days when 
they authorized then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to bug Dr. King, 
after which the top cop and closet cross dresser (no disrespect to 
cross dressers) in turn authorized his agents to try to prod King into 
killing himself. 

Not everyone writes a book before running for the Presidency. But some 
do, and those books reveal things about the person and the time. 
Jackson's Straight from the Heart, of which many people contributed to, 
still holds up as a record of where progressive stood at a particular 
point and where many progressives stand today. Ross Perot's United We 
Stand at least tried to confront some familiar problems such as the 
federal debt. And he actually wrote of reforming the system of campaign 
finance, increasing electoral participation, and eliminating the 
Electoral College. 

The title of a book usually tells the story. Sometimes it may take 
reading the entire book, down to the last page before you realize how 
telling or appropriate a title is. The Audacity of Hope. You can't 
chant it in a crowd like, well, "Keep Hope Alive!" Or "Keep the Faith, 
Baby!" or "Power to the People!" And while the book is technically well-
written with aspirations to inspire, Obama falls far short of the 
mountaintop. In the end, the feels trapped in a valley of buzzwords, 
catch-phrases, and insider jargon with words like "halcyon" thrown in 
for good measure.

So, if you are searching Obama's book for hints or even the language 
of the kind of change that means something in a structural and systemic 
way, it's not there. 

But I'm afraid people are going to discount Obama not for what he 
says, but for who he is. I was at the bank talking politics, among 
other things, with Maria, the head teller. As I spoke in my usual 
unrestrained and audible way, so as to let anyone hear me without 
having to eavesdrop, Obama's name came up. An older white gentleman 
standing next to me said, "Ya know his middle name is Hussein? This 
country will never elect a man named Hussein President!" To which I 
could only respond, "Well, the country elected a man that is insane!" 

Kevin Alexander Gray is lead organizer of the Harriet Tubman Freedom 
House Project in Columbia, South Carolina, which focuses on community-
based political and cultural education. He is also a contributing 
editor to Black News in South Carolina. Gray served as 1988 South 
Carolina coordinator for the Presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and 
as 1992 southern political director for Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's 
Presidential bid. He can be reached at: [log in to unmask]

This review originally appeared in the print edition of The 
Progressive.

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