Books by the U.S. Senator from Illinois
The Audacity of Hope
Dreams From My FatherIn The Audacity of Hope, Senator Barack Obama lays out his vision for how America can move beyond partisan rancor and confront concrete problems. He devotes a hefty chunk of this 362-page book, published in 2006, to meditations on policy and politics. The Senator also writes frankly about the long road that led to what many have called his meteoric rise: from his jet-setting boyhood to his days as a lawyer and finally to the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he gave the speech that made him a star (and gave this book its title). Throughout, Obama emphasizes how the grueling demands of a legislator's schedule have affected his family life, and how in turn his personal journey has influenced his politics. —Laura Fitzpatrick
The Audacity of Hope
by Barack Obama
|
|
|---|---|
| Childhood | Born in Hawaii, Obama moved to the "sleepy backwater" of Jakarta at age six after his mother married her second husband, an Indonesian student she had met at the University of Hawaii. He remembers "days of chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo...street vendors bringing delectable sweets to our door." He adds, "I felt [the] mark that a father's absence can leave on a child," but credits his mother with instilling in him "the values [of] tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged." (p. 29, 273-4, 346) |
| The Obama-Osama Stigma | Soon after suffering a rout in his first bid for Washington, a 2000 Congressional race, he recalls that in the wake of 9/11, a media consultant friend advised that with a name so similar to "Osama," Barack would never win an election. "I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues," Obama writes, "he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him." (p. 3-4) But Obama was unwilling to give up the dream entirely. He ran for the United States Senate in 2004 in hopes that voters "were tired of distortion, name-calling, and sound-bite solutions to complicated problems." Obama believed that if he could just reach enough people with truth-telling, he could win. (p. 18) |
| The Speech That Launched It All | The keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention made Obama a star. He remembers writing it in his hotel room with basketball on the TV blaring in the background. Hours before the speech, Obama recalls, his wife and his staff agonized over which tie he should wear. Just before he went on, his wife Michelle "hugged me tight, looked into my eyes, and said, 'Just don't screw it up, buddy!'" A few months later, after besting six opponents in the primary, Obama prevailed over Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald to win the Senate. (p. 356-9) |
| On the Issues: Immigration | "American citizenship is a privilege and not a right...[but] danger will come if we...withhold from [immigrants] the rights and opportunities that we take for granted." (p. 266-8) |
| Foreign Affairs | The best way to improve our international reputation is "by perfecting our own democracy and leading by example...when we seek to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun...[we are] retarding the possibility that genuine, home-grown democracy will ever emerge." (p. 317-21) |
| Capital Punishment | "While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child-so heinous...that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment." (p. 58) |
| Healthcare | "Our health-care system is broken," he writes, advocating that the government enlist a nonpartisan group to come up with a viable plan. But "if we commit ourselves to making sure everybody has decent health care, there are ways to accomplish it without breaking the federal treasury or resorting to rationalizing." (p. 23, 186) |
| Education | "[W]hat we've seen from government for close to two decades has been tinkering around the edges and a tolerance for mediocrity." Obama advocates challenging math- and science-heavy curricula, longer school hours, performance-based assessments and teacher training. (p. 159-61) |
| Social Security | The Bush Administration's privatization plan "simply magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today's winner-take-all economy." The government must make "a commitment to preserve Social Security's essential character and shore up its solvency." (p. 180-2) |
| Climate Change | "Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real, is serious, and is accelerated by the continued release of carbon dioxide. If the prospect of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, changing weather patterns...doesn't constitute a serious threat, I don't know what does." (p. 168) |
| Energy | "It's hard to overstate the degree to which our addiction to oil undermines our future," Obama writes, advocating that a proportion of revenues from the wealthiest oil companies should be allocated to alternative fuel research. (p.167-70) |
| His Marriage... | "If I ever had to run against her for public office, she would beat me without much difficulty," Obama writes of his wife, Michelle Obama, whom he also calls smart, funny and beautiful. The two met while working at Sidley & Austin, a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. These days, the candidate explains, his wife keeps him grounded. Once, he remembers, he called Michelle to share his elation over the potential success of a weapons restrictions bill, but she cut him off: "We have ants," she said. (p. 5, 327) |
| Legislating Marriage | "I consider decisions about sex, marriage, divorce, and childbearing to be highly personal," Obama writes. "I don't believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into the relationships we think are best for them." Obama notes that in supporting same-sex civil unions but not gay marriage, "in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history." (p. 223, 334-6) |
| Career and Family | Obama admits to calling home from D.C. multiple times in a night just to hear five-year-old Sasha's voice, and recalls the time Malia, now 8, introduced him to an elementary school friend, then admonished him, "Listen, Daddy...you don't shake hands with kids." Yet he admits that parenthood is a stressful balancing act. Calling his roles as husband and father the parts of his life which inspire the most doubt, Obama says he sometimes wonders if a Senator's life is worth the tradeoff of time not spent with his daughters. (p. 340-6) |
| Legislating the Family | "[I]n the African American community," Obama writes, "it's fair to say that the nuclear family is on the verge of collapse." Rattling off statistics about the high rate of divorce and the plummeting marriage rate, he notes that the problem is affecting all races, and that balancing family life with professional life is harder than ever. He calls for government-subsidized, high-quality day-care services for all workers. (p. 342) |
| His Faith | Though not religious herself, Obama's mother did bring her son to church, Buddhist temple, ancient Hawaiian burial sites and Shinto shrines. In Indonesia, Obama went first to a Catholic school and then to a Muslim school. Eventually, he says, "I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would...always remain apart." While working as a community organizer in Chicago, he came to appreciate the way the African American church embraced the whole person, not insisting on a bright line between the sinners and the saved. His decision to be baptized, he writes, "came about as a choice and not an epiphany." (p. 203-8) |
| Faith and Politics | "The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is...between those who attend church regularly and those who don't," Obama notes. If politicians shy away from engaging with religion, he argues, "other will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends." Obama also condemns the way religion is used in campaigns: "[N]othing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith — such as the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps (off rhythm) to the gospel choir." (p. 214-6) |
| On Race | "[F]amily get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting," Obama writes. With a black father and a white mother, a half Indonesian sister and a brother-in law and niece of Chinese descent, he has "some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac." (p. 231) On a broader level, he writes that "To think clearly about race...requires us to see the world on a split screen — to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair." (p. 233-46) |
| President Bush | "I had found the President to be a likable man, shrewd and disciplined but with the same straightforward manner that had helped him win two elections," Obama writes. But watching Bush discuss his political agenda, Obama recalled, "it felt as if somebody in a back room had flipped a switch...his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty." He criticizes the administration's tax cuts and policies on energy and health care, but carefully sidesteps an ad hominem attack. "I don't consider George Bush a bad man, and...I assume he and members of his Administration are trying to do what they think is best for the country." (p. 45-7) |
| The Iraq War | At the beginning, "Instead of an honest accounting of this military campaign's pros and cons, the Administration initiated a public relations offensive," Obama writes. He spoke against the war from the outset because "What I sensed...was that the threat Saddam posed was not imminent, the Administration's rationales for war were flimsy and ideologically driven." (p. 293-5) |
| On Both Parties' Failings | "Instead of the 'compassionate conservatism' that George Bush promised in his 2000 campaign, what has characterized the ideological core of today's GOP is absolutism, not conservatism." And as for Obama's own party, "we Democrats are just, well, confused...the party of reaction." (p. 37-9) |
| On the Lack of Bi-Partisanship | "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, Obama argues, partisanship flattens debate: because so much is predetermined, representatives often deliver speeches only to "C-SPAN's unblinking eye" and a near-empty Senate chamber. "In the world's greatest deliberative body, no one is listening." (p. 15-22) |
| His Celebrity | Celebrity is gratifying, Obama admits, but insists he knows that fame is fleeting. "I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them." (p. 11, 134, 355-61) |
