Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

More than anything, it is that sense — that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together — that we can’t afford to lose. As the pace of change accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship becomes harder to maintain. Jefferson was not entirely wrong to fear Hamilton’s vision for the country, for we have always been in a constant balancing act between self-interest and community, markets and democracy, the concentration of wealth and power and the opening up of opportunity. We’ve lost that balance in Washington, I think. With all of us scrambling to raise money for campaigns, with unions weakened and the press distracted and lobbyists for the powerful pressing their full advantage, there are few countervailing voices to remind us of who we are and where we’ve come from, and to affirm our bonds with one another.

That was the subtext of a debate in early 2006, when a bribery scandal triggered new efforts to curb the influence of lobbyists in Washington. One of the proposals would have ended the practice of letting senators fly on private jets at the cheaper first-class commercial rate. The provision had little chance of passage. Still, my staff suggested that as the designated Democratic spokesperson on ethics reform, I should initiate a self-imposed ban on the practice.

It was the right thing to do, but I won’t lie; the first time I was scheduled for a four-city swing in two days flying commercial, I felt some pangs of regret. The traffic to O’Hare was terrible. When I got there, the flight to Memphis had been delayed. A kid spilled orange juice on my shoe.

Then, while waiting in line, a man came up to me, maybe in his mid-thirties, dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, and told me that he hoped Congress would do something about stem cell research this year. I have early-stage Parkinson’s disease, he said, and a son who’s three years old. I probably won’t ever get to play catch with him. I know it may be too late for me, but there’s no reason somebody else has to go through what I’m going through.

These are the stories you miss, I thought to myself, when you fly on a private jet.

T WO DAYS AFTER I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School.

“Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win,” the doctor wrote. “I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you.”

The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be comprehensive and “totalizing.” His faith led him to strongly oppose abortion and gay marriage, but he said his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and the quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of President Bush’s foreign policy.

The reason the doctor was considering voting for my opponent was not my position on abortion as such. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, suggesting that I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” He went on to write:

I sense that you have a strong sense of justice and of the precarious position of justice in any polity, and I know that you have championed the plight of the voiceless. I also sense that you are a fair-minded person with a high regard for reason…. Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded…. You know that weenter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others…. I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.

I checked my website and found the offending words. They were not my own; my staff had posted them to summarize my prochoice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade. Within the bubble of Democratic Party politics, this was standard boilerplate, designed to fire up the base. The notion of engaging the other side on the issue was pointless, the argument went; any ambiguity on the issue implied weakness, and faced with the single-minded, give-no-quarter approach of antiabortion forces, we simply could not afford weakness.

Rereading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. Yes, I thought, there were those in the antiabortion movement for whom I had no sympathy, those who jostled or blocked women who were entering clinics, shoving photographs of mangled fetuses in the women’s faces and screaming at the top of their lungs; those who bullied and intimidated and occasionally resorted to violence.

But those antiabortion protesters weren’t the ones who occasionally appeared at my campaign rallies. The ones I encountered usually showed up in the smaller, downstate communities that we visited, their expressions weary but determined as they stood in silent vigil outside whatever building in which the rally was taking place, their handmade signs or banners held before them like shields. They didn’t yell or try to disrupt our events, although they still made my staff jumpy. The first time a group of protesters showed up, my advance team went on red alert; five minutes before my arrival at the meeting hall, they called the car I was in and suggested that I slip in through the rear entrance to avoid a confrontation.

“I don’t want to go through the back,” I told the staffer driving me. “Tell them we’re coming through the front.”

We turned into the library parking lot and saw seven or eight protesters gathered along a fence: several older women and what looked to be a family — a man and woman with two young children. I got out of the car, walked up to the group, and introduced myself. The man shook my hand hesitantly and told me his name. He looked to be about my age, in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a St. Louis Cardinals cap. His wife shook my hand as well, but the older women kept their distance. The children, maybe nine or ten years old, stared at me with undisguised curiosity.

“You folks want to come inside?” I asked.

“No, thank you,” the man said. He handed me a pamphlet. “Mr. Obama, I want you to know that I agree with a lot of what you have to say.”

“I appreciate that.”

“And I know you’re a Christian, with a family of your own.”

“That’s true.”

“So how can you support murdering babies?”

I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained my belief that few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually; that any pregnant woman felt the full force of the moral issues involved and wrestled with her conscience when making that heart-wrenching decision; that I feared a ban on abortion would force women to seek unsafe abortions, as they had once done in this country and as they continued to do in countries that prosecute abortion doctors and the women who seek their services. I suggested that perhaps we could agree on ways to reduce the number of women who felt the need to have abortions in the first place.

The man listened politely and then pointed to statistics on the pamphlet listing the number of unborn children that, according to him, were sacrificed every year. After a few minutes, I said I had to go inside to greet my supporters and asked again if the group wanted to come in. Again the man declined. As I turned to go, his wife called out to me.