I love Ana Marie Cox, but the premise of this post is all kinds of wrong:
As Ambinder and others have pointed out, Obama's San Francisco "gaffe" echoed some of the ideas laid out by Tom Frank in "What's the Matter with Kansas." An important difference: those ideas sound a lot less condescending at book-length, packed with reporting and supported by historical research. I'm not sure if it should matter or not that Tom is actually from Kansas, and grew up with and has demonstrable affection for the people he wrote about. He is, in some ways, one of the people he wrote about.
Obama, clearly, is not one of those "bitter" Midwesterners he referred to -- while marginally Midwestern, his whole brand is the opposite of bitter. And, of course, as far as we know, he has not "clung" to God or to guns. None of this means that there isn't a kernel of truth to Obama's point about why working class people sometimes vote against their economic self-interest, it just means that it is much, much harder for Obama to say it so bluntly without being attacked -- as he is now -- as being elitist
This is the most common and fundamental misunderstanding about Obama's campaign that there is. Obama talks about hope, faith, and unity, but that isn't the premise of his campaign. Underneath all of the happy talk is a deep frustration - perhaps even anger? bitterness even? - with the way this country has been run for the past 20-30 years. Yes, Obama calls on us to reject cynicism in favor of hope, but he also frequently mentions "the fierce urgency of now" If he's all sunshine and rainbows, why would there be a need for either ferocity or urgency?
This is what always baffled me about the "hollow hope" criticisms that for awhile there seemed so common. He wasn't suggesting we should all hold on to a blind faith that everything would be OK if we just believed hard enough. Or in his words:
Because hope is not blind optimism. I know how hard it will be to make these changes. I know this because I fought on the streets of Chicago as a community organizer to bring jobs to the jobless in the shadow of a shuttered steel plant. I've fought in the courts as a civil rights lawyer to make sure people weren't denied their rights because of what they looked like or where they came from. I've fought in the legislature to take power away from lobbyists. I've won some of those fights, but I've lost some of them too. I've seen good legislation die because good intentions weren't backed by a mandate for change.
The politics of hope does not mean hoping things come easy. Because nothing worthwhile in this country has ever happened unless somebody, somewhere stood up when it was hard; stood up when they were told - no you can't, and said yes we can.
Hope and anger are not opposites. Not even close. We can be angry and yet nevertheless hopeful that things can be set right. That's the entire premise of his campaign, and yet to this day no one seems to realize it. Not yet, anyway. But if my theory is right, that's all changing. It's been there from day one, but its never really been explicit. But if you pay attention, the dual themes of frustration and optimism have always been there:
The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we've changed this country before. In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots brought an Empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty. We welcomed immigrants to our shores, we opened railroads to the west, we landed a man on the moon, and we heard a King's call to let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done. Today we are called once more - and it is time for our generation to answer that call.For that is our unyielding faith - that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.
That's what Abraham Lincoln understood. He had his doubts. He had his defeats. He had his setbacks. But through his will and his words, he moved a nation and helped free a people. It is because of the millions who rallied to his cause that we are no longer divided, North and South, slave and free. It is because men and women of every race, from every walk of life, continued to march for freedom long after Lincoln was laid to rest, that today we have the chance to face the challenges of this millennium together, as one people - as Americans.
All of us know what those challenges are today - a war with no end, a dependence on oil that threatens our future, schools where too many children aren't learning, and families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can. We know the challenges. We've heard them. We've talked about them for years.
What's stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics - the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems.
For the last six years we've been told that our mounting debts don't matter, we've been told that the anxiety Americans feel about rising health care costs and stagnant wages are an illusion, we've been told that climate change is a hoax, and that tough talk and an ill-conceived war can replace diplomacy, and strategy, and foresight. And when all else fails, when Katrina happens, or the death toll in Iraq mounts, we've been told that our crises are somebody else's fault. We're distracted from our real failures, and told to blame the other party, or gay people, or immigrants.
And as people have looked away in disillusionment and frustration, we know what's filled the void. The cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests who've turned our government into a game only they can afford to play. They write the checks and you get stuck with the bills, they get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own this government, but we're here today to take it back. The time for that politics is over. It's time to turn the page.
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