Барак Обама: The Audacity of Hope

They told me about their fallen leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who had seen millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads rain down on his head — full-page newspaper ads and television spots informing his neighbors day after day that he supported baby-killing and men in wedding gowns, a few even suggesting that he’d treated his first wife badly, despite the fact that she had traveled to South Dakota to help him get reelected. They recalled Max Cleland, the former Georgia incumbent, a triple-amputee war veteran who had lost his seat in the previous cycle after being accused of insufficient patriotism, of aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden.

And then there was the small matter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the shocking efficiency with which a few well-placed ads and the chants of conservative media could transform a decorated Vietnam war hero into a weak-kneed appeaser.

No doubt there were Republicans who felt similarly abused. And perhaps the newspaper editorials that appeared that first week of session were right; perhaps it was time to put the election behind us, for both parties to store away their animosities and ammunition and, for a year or two at least, get down to governing the country. Maybe that would have been possible had the elections not been so close, or had the war in Iraq not been still raging, or had the advocacy groups, pundits, and all manner of media not stood to gain by stirring the pot. Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign — a White House that would see a 51–48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.

But whatever conditions might have been required for such a détente, they did not exist in 2005. There would be no concessions, no gestures of goodwill. Two days after the election, President Bush appeared before cameras and declared that he had political capital to spare and he intended to use it. That same day, conservative activist Grover Norquist, unconstrained by the decorum of public office, observed, in connection with the Democrats’ situation, that “any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.” Two days after my swearing in, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, out of Cleveland, stood up in the House of Representatives to challenge the certification of Ohio electors, citing the litany of voting irregularities that had taken place in the state on Election Day. Rank-and-file Republicans scowled (“Sore losers,” I could hear a few mutter), but Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader DeLay gazed stone-faced from the heights of the dais, placid in the knowledge that they had both the votes and the gavel. Senator Barbara Boxer of California agreed to sign the challenge, and when we returned to the Senate chamber, I found myself casting my first vote, along with seventy-three of the seventy-four others voting that day, to install George W. Bush for a second term as president of the United States.

I would get my first big batch of phone calls and negative mail after this vote. I called back some of my disgruntled Democratic supporters, assuring them that yes, I was familiar with the problems in Ohio, and yes, I thought an investigation was in order, but yes, I still believed George Bush had won the election, and no, as far as I could tell I didn’t think I had either sold out or been co-opted after a mere two days on the job. That same week, I happened to run into retiring Senator Zell Miller, the lean, sharp-eyed Georgia Democrat and NRA board member who had gone sour on the Democratic Party, endorsed George Bush, and delivered the blistering keynote address at the Republican National Convention — a no-holds-barred rant against the perfidy of John Kerry and his supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony — the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting — with what I imagined to be a sly smile — that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election.

In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment.

MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal.

Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry.

It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment.

No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem.

We know that global competition — not to mention any genuine commitment to the values of equal opportunity and upward mobility — requires us to revamp our educational system from top to bottom, replenish our teaching corps, buckle down on math and science instruction, and rescue inner-city kids from illiteracy. And yet our debate on education seems stuck between those who want to dismantle the public school system and those who would defend an indefensible status quo, between those who say money makes no difference in education and those who want more money without any demonstration that it will be put to good use.

We know that our health-care system is broken: wildly expensive, terribly inefficient, and poorly adapted to an economy no longer built on lifetime employment, a system that exposes hardworking Americans to chronic insecurity and possible destitution. But year after year, ideology and political gamesmanship result in inaction, except for 2003, when we got a prescription drug bill that somehow managed to combine the worst aspects of the public and private sectors — price gouging and bureaucratic confusion, gaps in coverage and an eye-popping bill for taxpayers.

We know that the battle against international terrorism is at once an armed struggle and a contest of ideas, that our long-term security depends on both a judicious projection of military power and increased cooperation with other nations, and that addressing the problems of global poverty and failed states is vital to our nation’s interests rather than just a matter of charity. But follow most of our foreign policy debates, and you might believe that we have only two choices — belligerence or isolationism.