The Audacity of Hope
Barack Obama Canongate, 384pp, £14.99
ISBN 1847670350
You'd be hard pressed to find a leading Democrat who hasn't written a book in recent years (or paid someone else to do so). Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and John Edwards have all put their names to tomes, and the lesser-known nomination hopefuls Joe Biden and Chris Dodd are rushing out offerings later this year.
The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's second book, its title a soundbite first used in his rousing address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. The speech was a bright moment in John Kerry's otherwise lacklustre presidential campaign, and propelled Obama, a young mixed-race senator from Illinois, into the national limelight.
His arrival on the scene was timely: a fresh face for a country suffering a crisis of self-image. Born to a Kenyan father and an American mother, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, he does not make white voters feel guilty about slavery, and he was one of the few to oppose the disastrous Iraq invasion from the outset.
And he says the right things. Americans, he argues, regardless of race, gender or creed, are tired of the "continuous menu of false choices" offered by their leaders. He is critical of the Bush regime, but he also sees how the Democrats have become "the Party of Reaction" - caught between blind subservience to the tenets of the 1930s New Deal or capitulating to the Republicans.
Of course, you don't need to look far into the past to find a would-be president making a similar case. Obama tells us America must rid itself of its "either/or" thinking, in much the way that Clinton wanted to break free from the "zero-sum game". Clinton felt people's pain, Obama wants to fill the "empathy deficit".
If not revolutionary, though, his ideas do at least make sense. Rather than hiking up tariffs or drilling for oil, his response to globalisation and America's "oil addiction" would be to invest in education, science and technology, and energy independence. And he is unequivocal in his criticism of Bush's foreign policy - or, indeed, lack of it. Bush, he says, has simply given people "an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped together, and with new labels affixed". Reagan's "Evil Empire" has become the "Axis of Evil", Roosevelt's Monroe Doctrine simply Bush's "Bush Doctrine", and the 19th-century notion of Manifest Destiny - the belief that it is America's God-given right to expand the sphere of "freedom" - has been crudely rehashed.
America does not face a choice between belligerence and isolationism, he argues. Beyond matters of immediate self-defence, the US should act multilaterally - and "I do not mean that we round up the United Kingdom and Togo and then do what we please". He frames all of this in the context of what serves America's interests: legitimacy, he says, is a "force multiplier".
He gets God, too. Around 95 per cent of Americans believe in a God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, and larger numbers believe in angels than in evolution. Democrats, he says, need to wake up to this. If not, others will fill the vacuum, and they will be those peddling the most insular, extreme version of religion. Here, he chooses his words carefully. America's founding fathers may have trusted in God, he says, but they also trusted in "the minds and senses that God had given them". He is pro-choice, pro-civil partnerships, but respects "the sanctity of marriage".
The book comes with plenty of smart disclaimers: he "doesn't have all the answers", Obama tells us; he is merely taking "broad strokes" on policy issues. This may sound self-serving, buying crucial wriggle-room for later on, but it conveys a rare frankness and humility. The Audacity of Hope is light years ahead of his rivals' books. Obama writes in lucid prose, enlivened with colourful details - like the unforgettable moment when Bush, after shaking his hand, reaches for some hand-sanitiser.
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