A Valley of Buzzwords: Obama's
Soulless Book
by Kevin Alexander Gray
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
by Barack Obama
Crown. 384 pages. $25.
This article also appears in the current print edition of The Progressive.
My wife, Sandra, warned me, "Don't be hating." Now San (as we call her),
who has worked in retail sales, selling ladies shoes, throughout her working
life, is not an overtly political person. She is one of those old-timey, "salt
of the earth" types. But when she doesn't like a person, there is usually
something wrong with that person. For instance, before it became evident that
Al Sharpton's effort in South Carolina was going nowhere fast, she coined the
now-popular phrase "scampaign" to refer to the reverend's run. I know it is
ill-advised not to take heed of her warning.
With San's admonition in mind, I tried to table her (and my) Oprah-tainted,
media-hyped preconception of Baraka Obama so that I could read The Audacity
of Hope with an open mind and with the same hopeful spirit as the title
seeks to portray.
But the book is like those two solid yellow lines on a two-lane mountain road.
They're just there in the middle and never-ending, with a stop sign as the only
relief.
"The book is a mixture of Kennedyism, Reaganism, and
Clintonism packaged as the new face of multicultural America."
He offers no boldness. Dr. King set out to change the social, economic, and
political structures of this country. He described the change as a "third way"
beyond capitalism and socialism. King's "third way" is far different than Bill
Clinton's "third way," promoted by Obama and all those around Hillary, who tout
the Clintons as the second and third coming of Camelot.
The Clinton "third way" is Republican Party politics in slow motion. Under Bill
Clinton, U.S. troops weren't trapped in Iraq, but just as many, if not more,
Iraqis died as a result of his policies. His destruction of the welfare system,
his embrace of capital punishment and other punitive and discriminatory crime
policies, his bowing to Wall Street all made him palatable to Republicans.
The hope in Obama's title is for a mixture of Kennedyism, Reaganism, and
Clintonism packaged as the new face of multicultural America. At its core, this
is what The Audacity of Hope promotes, instead of any fundamental
progressive change.
Nonetheless, it comes as no surprise that The Audacity of Hope is a New
York Times bestseller. The book arrives amidst the hype of an upcoming and
wide-open Presidential race, the collective angst over the country moving in
the wrong direction, an economy that working people know isn't as good as they
are being told it is, and a war that has washed away - at home and abroad - the
country's preexisting false sense of moral superiority. As the line in Ethan
and Joel Cohen's 2000 movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, goes,
"Everybody's looking for answers."
Yet, does Obama's book provide any real answers? It there anything in it that
will help stimulate measurable change? Or, is it all just talk, posturing, and
positioning for personal political goals? Is it an orchestrated, consciously
plotted pretext to inoculate a politician from the perceived liabilities of
race, lineage and inexperience?
The answers are no, no, yes, yes.
I can agree with Obama on the need for a new kind of politics. But he suggests
that what's broken can be fixed versus being replaced altogether. He opines
that if we would all just recognize our "shared understanding," "shared
values," and "the notion of a common good" that life (or politics) in the
United States would be better.
Take, for instance, his praise of Reagan, hedged as it is by criticism of
Reagan's "John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his
gratuitous assault on the poor." Writes Obama: "I understood his appeal.
It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii always held for
me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp
uniforms and crisper salutes.... Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our
need to believe that we are not subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that
we can shape our individual and collective destinies. So long as we rediscover
the traditional values of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility,
optimism, and faith."
"Obama constantly sacrifices principle on the altar of ‘shared
values.'"
Obama gets a lot wrong from start to finish. While people may indeed have a
shared reality - which means we witness the same things - we don't always feel,
understand, process, or react to what we witness in the same way. The simplest
example of not having a "shared understanding" is the difference in how blacks
and whites view the police.
What is lacking here is devotion to principles, which Obama constantly
sacrifices on the altar of "shared values." And of course the issue is
not of shared values. It's how we rank our values. Many people value religion,
but which religion has more value? In this country we all know the answer to that
question. As proof that the United States government values Christians over
Muslims, consider that the United States is at war with an Islamic country.
Consider that Muslims in this country are subject to increased government
scrutiny and racial, ethnic, and religious profiling. No one in their right
mind could believe that the United States places a Muslim on an equal footing
with a Christian or Jew. The daily body count dispels that notion.
At the top of Obama's shared values matrix is his Christian faith, his
heterosexual family, the American flag, and the Democratic Party. "Shared
values" and "the notion of a common good" pretty much amounts to the same thing
in Obamaspeak. It all sounds pleasant, but it's surely not new. It's somewhat
reminiscent of Jesse Jackson's "common ground" theme that he built his ‘88
campaign around. Clinton picked up the phrase, and it is now a standard part of
the political lexicon.
But the use and meaning of Jackson's phrase has changed over the years since
Clinton co-opted it. Jackson's "common ground" meant bringing together a
coalition of workers, women, men, blacks, progressive whites, gays and
lesbians, environmentalists, anti-apartheid activists, those opposed to Ronald
Reagan's illegal war in Central America, farmers, Latinos, Arab-Americans and
other traditionally underrepresented or unrepresented groups. With Jackson's
phrase, all could demand a seat at the Democratic Party table.
By contrast, Clinton wanted the Democratic Party to renew its "common ground"
with those who left the party with Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats and those
who jumped ship when Ronald Reagan rose to power: white men. Clinton's "common
ground" was with the Democratic Leadership Council. Clinton's "common ground"
pushed aside those whom Jackson brought to the party. And The Audacity of
Hope places Obama squarely in the DLC camp, even if he never applies for a
membership card.
As a political tome, The Audacity of Hope is kind of a new and improved,
better-written version of Clinton's long-winded speech at the ‘88 Democratic
Convention in book form. Obama touches all the hot button words like the
"nuclear option," "strict constructionists," and the like but never really says
anything deep or brave or new other than to remind us that the hot buttons are
really hot.
"It's like he did not have a clue about the 1964
struggles of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party."
Give Obama credit for copping to the fact that his "treatment of the issues is
often partial and incomplete." Overall, the treatise reads like a very,
very long speech of sound bites and clichés arranged by topic and issue and
connected by conjunctions, pleasantries, and apologies. Pleasantries like
wishing for a return to the days when Republicans and Democrats "met at night
for dinner, hashing out a compromise over steaks and cigars." Or, leading with
apologias to describe painful parts of United States history or softening a
rightfully deserved blow as when he describes racist southern Senator Richard
B. Russell as "erudite." Or accusing his mom of having a "incorrigible,
sweet-natured romanticism" about the ‘60s and the civil rights era as he waxes
romantically about Hubert Humphrey's Democratic Party. It's like he did not
have a clue about the 1964 struggles of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party.
The shame of Obama's lack of depth is that Hamer's conflict over representation
pretty much set the table for how the Democratic Party deals with blacks today.
But of course he was only three years old and living in Hawaii when Lyndon
Johnson went on national television to give a speech so that Hamer's image and
the MFDP challenge would be off the airwaves. Hamer's fight was a precursor to
the candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first black to seriously run for
President in 1972 (if you exclude Dick Gregory's 1968 bid). Chisholm continued
Hamer's fight for a greater black and female voice in politics and government.
Throughout, Obama proffers an unnaturally romantic view of the Democratic Party
for a person of his age. His appreciation of party seems as times deeper than
his understanding of the civil rights movement, which comes across as
antiseptic. And he goes out of his way to comfort whites with a critique of
black Americans that could tumble out of the mouth of William Bennett.
"Many of the social or cultural factors that negatively affect black
people, for example, simply mirror in exaggerated form problems that afflict
America as whole: too much television (the average black household has the
television on more than eleven hours per day), too much consumption of poisons
(blacks smoke more and eat more fast food), and a lack of emphasis on
educational attainment," he writes. "Then there's the collapse of the
two-parent black household, a phenomenon that...reflects a casualness towards sex
and child rearing among black men."
"Obama goes out of his way to comfort whites with a
critique of black Americans that could tumble out of the mouth of William
Bennett."
The book has no soul. That perhaps explains why some (with motives good and
bad) in the black community complain that he "is not black enough," or "he has
no respect or appreciation for the past," or "he is the amalgamation of
everything white folk want a black man to be," or "he's a white boy being
scripted by smart-ass white boys."
The book is surprisingly short on substance. Given all the policy disasters of
the Bush Administration, what troubles Obama about the Bush era is not so much
the policies Republicans championed but "the process" or lack of process "by
which the White House and its Congressional allies disposed of opposing views."
In the end, all he offers is the promise of a "hope" that he will manage the
process better than the other guy or gal.
So then, why write the book?
Obama's face is everywhere. And, there is no shortage of opinion about him,
which makes it difficult to read his book and sort things out without
atmospheric bias. But The Audacity of Hope plays on the creation of a
Kennedy-like mystique. I've spoken to a couple of writer friends who attended
an Obama event and in both conversations the comparison to John Kennedy was
bandied about. On cue, Obama plays the Kennedy-card throughout his book,
tossing in passages from Profiles in Courage.
Although we now know that John F. Kennedy did not write Profiles in Courage,
the book is one you have on your shelf that you might look through on occasion
and actually enjoy rereading. Profiles in Courage is a historical marker
in a way Audacity of Hope will never be. Not that I am a fan in the
slightest regard of the early John and Robert Kennedy. Even before the days
when the brothers authorized then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to bug Dr. King,
after which the top cop and closet cross dresser (no disrespect to cross dressers)
in turn authorized his agents to try to prod King into killing himself.
Not everyone writes a book before running for the Presidency. But some do, and
those books reveal things about the person and the time. Rev. Jesse Jackson's Straight
from the Heart, to which many people contributed, still holds up as a
record of where progressives stood at a particular point and where many
progressives stand today. Ross Perot's United We Stand at least tried to
confront some familiar problems such as the federal debt. And he actually wrote
of reforming the system of campaign finance, increasing electoral
participation, and eliminating the Electoral College.
"The book feels trapped in a valley of buzzwords,
catch-phrases, and insider jargon."
The title of a book usually tells the story. Sometimes it may take reading the
entire book, down to the last page before you realize how telling or
appropriate a title is. The Audacity of Hope. You can't chant it
in a crowd like, well, "Keep Hope Alive!" Or "Keep the Faith, Baby!" or "Power
to the People!" And while the book is technically well-written with
aspirations to inspire, Obama falls far short of the mountaintop. In the end,
the book feels trapped in a valley of buzzwords, catch-phrases, and insider
jargon with words like "halcyon" thrown in for good measure.
So, if you are searching Obama's book for hints or even the language of the
kind of change that means something in a structural and systemic way, it's not
there.
But I'm afraid people are going to discount Obama not for what he says, but for
who he is. I was at the bank talking politics, among other things, with Maria,
the head teller. As I spoke in my usual unrestrained and audible way, so as to
let anyone hear me without having to eavesdrop, Obama's name came up. An older
white gentleman standing next to me said, "Ya know his middle name is Hussein?
This country will never elect a man named Hussein President!" To which I could
only respond, "Well, the country elected a man that is insane!"
Kevin Alexander Gray is lead organizer of the Harriet Tubman Freedom House
Project in Columbia, South Carolina, which focuses on community-based political
and cultural education. He is also a contributing editor to Black News in South
Carolina. Gray served as 1988 South Carolina coordinator for the Presidential
campaign of Jesse Jackson and as 1992 southern political director for Iowa
Senator Tom Harkin's Presidential bid. He can be contacted at [email protected].