Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

So I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way; I don’t mind feeling obligated toward home health-care workers who clean bedpans every day for little more than the minimum wage, or toward teachers in some of the toughest schools in the country, many of whom have to dip into their own pockets at the beginning of every school year to buy crayons and books for their students. I 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. Already there have been some strains — I’ve proposed experimenting with merit pay for teachers, for example, and have called for raising fuel-efficiency standards despite opposition from my friends at the United Auto Workers. I like to tell myself that I will continue to weigh the issues on the merits — just as I hope my Republican counterpart will weigh the no-new-tax pledge or opposition to stem cell research that he made before the election in light of what’s best for the country as a whole, regardless of what his supporters demand. I hope that I can always go to my union friends and explain why my position makes sense, how it’s consistent with both my values and their long-term interests.

But I suspect that the union leaders won’t always see it that way. There may be times when they will see it as betrayal. They may alert their members that I have sold them out. I may get angry mail and angry phone calls. They may not endorse me the next time around.

And perhaps, if that happens to you enough times, and you almost lose a race because a critical constituency is mad at you, or you find yourself fending off a primary challenger who’s calling you a traitor, you start to lose your stomach for confrontation. You ask yourself, just what does good conscience dictate exactly: that you avoid capture by “special interests” or that you avoid dumping on your friends? The answer is not obvious. So you start voting as you would answer a questionnaire. You don’t ponder your positions too deeply. You check the yes box up and down the line.

POLITICIANS HELD CAPTIVE by their big-money contributors or succumbing to interest-group pressure — this is a staple of modern political reporting, the story line that weaves its way into just about every analysis of what’s wrong with our democracy. But for the politician who is worried about keeping his seat, there is a third force that pushes and pulls at him, that shapes the nature of political debate and defines the scope of what he feels he can and can’t do, the positions he can and can’t take. Forty or fifty years ago, that force would have been the party apparatus: the big-city bosses, the political fixers, the power brokers in Washington who could make or break a career with a phone call. Today, that force is the media.

A disclaimer here: For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacy for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary of unusually — and at times undeservedly — positive press coverage. No doubt some of this had to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate primary, as well as my novelty as a black candidate with an exotic background. 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.

Moreover, even when I’ve been at the receiving end of negative stories, the political reporters I’ve dealt with have generally been straight shooters. They’ve taped our conversations, tried to provide the context for my statements, and called me to get a response whenever I’ve been criticized.

So personally, at least, I have no cause for complaint. That doesn’t mean, though, that I can afford to ignore the press. Precisely because I’ve watched the press cast me in a light that can be hard to live up to, I am mindful of how rapidly that process can work in reverse.

Simple math tells the tale. In the thirty-nine town hall meetings I held during my first year in office, turnout at each meeting averaged four to five hundred people, which means that I was able to meet with maybe fifteen to twenty thousand people. Should I sustain this pace for the remainder of my term, I will have had direct, personal contact with maybe ninety-five to one hundred thousand of my constituents by the time Election Day rolls around.

In contrast, a three-minute story on the lowest-rated local news broadcast in the Chicago media market may reach two hundred thousand people. In other words, I — like every politician at the federal level — am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach my constituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statements analyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.

The media’s influence on our politics comes in many forms. What gets the most attention these days is the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, Fox News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-show circuit, and most recently the bloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As others have noted, this style of opinion journalism isn’t really new; in some ways, it marks a return to the dominant tradition of American journalism, an approach to the news that was nurtured by publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick before a more antiseptic notion of objective journalism emerged after World War II.

Still, it’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and the Internet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust. And whether we politicians like to admit it or not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit. Oddly enough, the cruder broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if Rush Limbaugh’s listeners enjoy hearing him call me “Osama Obama,” my attitude is, let them have their fun. It’s the more sophisticated practitioners who can sting you, in part because they have more credibility with the general public, in part because of the skill with which they can pounce on your words and make you seem like a jerk.

In April 2005, for example, I appeared on the program to dedicate the new Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield. It was a five-minute speech in which I suggested that Abraham Lincoln’s humanity, his imperfections, were the qualities that made him so compelling. “In [Lincoln’s] rise from poverty,” I said in one part of my remarks, “his self-study and ultimate mastery of language and of law, in his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat — in all of this, we see a fundamental element of the American character, a belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

A few months later, Time magazine asked if I would be interested in writing an essay for a special issue on Lincoln. I didn’t have time to write something new, so I asked the magazine’s editors if my speech would be acceptable. They said it was, but asked if I could personalize it a bit more — say something about Lincoln’s impact on my life. In between meetings I dashed off a few changes. One of those changes was to the passage quoted above, which now read, “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat — in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”