A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius
And so, coming here, I read Dreams for My Father, which I had read before, and going back read The Audacity of Hope. And the striking thing to me was that all of the themes I was trying to identify in those seven lectures were present in those two books. And I hadn't read a word about the depth of those books in anything I had seen about the election. It was all about how Dreams for My Father was a meditation on identity, it was about race, and how The Audacity of Hope was simply a campaign book, in the way that all presidential candidates have to write campaign books.
So what struck me as I reflected on these books is how much better than that they were – how much richer, how much deeper, how much broader they were. And so I began thinking about Obama in relation to traditions in American political history.
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pg. 66:
At its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As a general rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those – whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors – who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize opportunity – all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin first popularized in Poor Richard's Almanack and that have continued to inspire our allegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.
These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will – a confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth.
See also. Or this whole page. Or this. Passim!
Barbara Tuchman called this sort of thing"self-hypnosis." It's like a sort of Rorschach test: I'm going to show you 400 pages of mind-numbing platitudes, and you tell me what you see. (Geez, doc, I dunno -- is it the greatest political mind since Jefferson?)
I just don't understand the intensity of the investment.