Saturday, January 13, 2007
The Audacity of Hope by Barak Obama
The Audacity of Hope is a look at Barak Obama's politics with a personal history behind what brought him to his world vision. It is clear throughout the book that the fact his father was an immigrant and his mother a U.S. Citizen colours his opinions strongly. He has spent a great deal of his formative years in Indonesia and Hawaii further engaging him with the outside world. His writing style is easy and familiar making the read a pleasure.
In many ways, Senator Obama's politics mirror my own. He believes in societal responsibility for its citizens. While not a pacifist, he doesn't move quickly to military solutions to U.S. Problems. He believes strongly that the U.S. must be a peaceful partner in driving poverty from the world.
He writes quite extensively on the Religious Right and how it has become something more than its original roots.
There's the religious absolutism of the Christian right, a movement that gained traction on th eundeniably difficult issue of abortion, but which soon flowered into something much broader; a movement that insists not only that Christianity is America's dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.
Obama returns to this theme often--he obviously is highly conflicted on the issue of abortion but champions the right to choose. He clearly is a defender of cival liberties and abhors the secrecy and the abuses that appear to have occured under the current adminstration. He discusses at length the idea of partisanship and illustrates the current leadership's attitude with a quote from Carl Rove. A senator suggested that the President make certain small changes to a piece of legislation that would benefit the centrists in a meaningful way.
"Make these changes," the senator told Rove, "and not only will I vote for the bill, but I guarantee you'll get seventy votes out of the Senate.
"We don't want seventy votes," Rove reportedly replied. "We want fifty-one."
It lays out, in an intelligent and lucid way, the need for a strong centrist--perhaps slightly left leaning--voice in the U.S. leadership. It outlines the need for social activism, not just on a micro-level but at every level of American society. It makes a compelling case that the choice to help pull the world out of poverty, to fight AIDS, to be decent Christians (not in the Religious Right sense) as a methodology of safeguarding the country.
