Барак Обама: The Audacity of Hope

It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had once used in a sermon.

The audacity of hope.

That was the best of the American spirit, I thought — having the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control — and therefore responsibility — over our own fate.

It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.

I turned off the basketball game and started to write.

A FEW WEEKS later, I arrived in Boston, caught three hours’ sleep, and traveled from my hotel to the Fleet Center for my first appearance on Meet the Press. Toward the end of the segment, Tim Russert put up on the screen an excerpt from a 1996 interview with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that I had forgotten about entirely, in which the reporter had asked me — as someone just getting into politics as a candidate for the Illinois state senate — what I thought about the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

The convention’s for sale, right…. You’ve got these $10,000-a-plate dinners, Golden Circle Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that, they rightly feel they’ve been locked out of the process. They can’t attend a $10,000 breakfast. They know that those who can are going to get the kind of access they can’t imagine.

After the quote was removed from the screen, Russert turned to me. “A hundred and fifty donors gave $40 million to this convention,” he said. “It’s worse than Chicago, using your standards. Are you offended by that, and what message does that send the average voter?”

I replied that politics and money were a problem for both parties, but that John Kerry’s voting record, and my own, indicated that we voted for what was best for the country. I said that a convention wouldn’t change that, although I did suggest that the more Democrats could encourage participation from people who felt locked out of the process, the more we stayed true to our origins as the party of the average Joe, the stronger we would be as a party.

Privately, I thought my original 1996 quote was better.

There was a time when political conventions captured the urgency and drama of politics — when nominations were determined by floor managers and head counts and side deals and arm-twisting, when passions or miscalculation might result in a second or third or fourth round of balloting. But that time passed long ago. With the advent of binding primaries, the much-needed end to the dominance of party bosses and backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms, today’s convention is bereft of surprises. Rather, it serves as a weeklong infomercial for the party and its nominee — as well as a means of rewarding the party faithful and major contributors with four days of food, drink, entertainment, and shoptalk.

I spent most of the first three days at the convention fulfilling my role in this pageant. I spoke to rooms full of major Democratic donors and had breakfast with delegates from across the fifty states. I practiced my speech in front of a video monitor, did a walk-through of how it would be staged, received instruction on where to stand, where to wave, and how to best use the microphones. My communications director, Robert Gibbs, and I trotted up and down the stairs of the Fleet Center, giving interviews that were sometimes only two minutes apart, to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, at each stop emphasizing the talking points that the Kerry-Edwards team had provided, each word of which had been undoubtedly tested in a battalion of polls and a panoply of focus groups.

Given the breakneck pace of my days, I didn’t have much time to worry about how my speech would go over. It wasn’t until Tuesday night, after my staff and Michelle had debated for half an hour over what tie I should wear (we finally settled on the tie that Robert Gibbs was wearing), after we had ridden over to the Fleet Center and heard strangers shout “Good luck!” and “Give ’em hell, Obama!” after we had visited with a very gracious and funny Teresa Heinz Kerry in her hotel room, until finally it was just Michelle and me sitting backstage and watching the broadcast, that I started to feel just a tad bit nervous. I mentioned to Michelle that my stomach was feeling a little grumbly. She hugged me tight, looked into my eyes, and said, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy!”

We both laughed. Just then, one of the production managers came into the hold room and told me it was time to take my position offstage. Standing behind the black curtain, listening to Dick Durbin introduce me, I thought about my mother and father and grandfather and what it might have been like for them to be in the audience. I thought about my grandmother in Hawaii, watching the convention on TV because her back was too deteriorated for her to travel. I thought about all the volunteers and supporters back in Illinois who had worked so hard on my behalf.

Lord, let me tell their stories right, I said to myself. Then I walked onto the stage.

I WOULD BE lying if I said that the positive reaction to my speech at the Boston convention — the letters I received, the crowds who showed up to rallies once we got back to Illinois — wasn’t personally gratifying. After all, I got into politics to have some influence on the public debate, because I thought I had something to say about the direction we need to go as a country.

Still, the torrent of publicity that followed the speech reinforces my sense of how fleeting fame is, contingent as it is on a thousand different matters of chance, of events breaking this way rather than that. I know that I am not so much smarter than the man I was six years ago, when I was temporarily stranded at LAX. My views on health care or education or foreign policy are not so much more refined than they were when I labored in obscurity as a community organizer. If I am wiser, it is mainly because I have traveled a little further down the path I have chosen for myself, the path of politics, and have gotten a glimpse of where it may lead, for good and for ill.

I remember a conversation I had almost twenty years ago with a friend of mine, an older man who had been active in the civil rights efforts in Chicago in the sixties and was teaching urban studies at Northwestern University. I had just decided, after three years of organizing, to attend law school; because he was one of the few academics I knew, I had asked him if he would be willing to give me a recommendation.

He said he would be happy to write me the recommendation, but first wanted to know what I intended to do with a law degree. I mentioned my interest in a civil rights practice, and that at some point I might try my hand at running for office. He nodded his head and asked whether I had considered what might be involved in taking such a path, what I would be willing to do to make the Law Review, or make partner, or get elected to that first office and then move up the ranks. As a rule, both law and politics required compromise, he said; not just on issues, but on more fundamental things — your values and ideals. He wasn’t saying that to dissuade me, he said. It was just a fact. It was because of his unwillingness to compromise that, although he had been approached many times in his youth to enter politics, he had always declined.