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 Two studies in the charisma of hope: Obama and Bill Clinton
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Posted on 02-28-08 11:02 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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....Wednesday, February 27, 2008

NEW YORK: One of the advertising posters prominently on view in New York City's subways these days shows a man's head in silhouette beneath a dreamy blue bubble inside of which is this caption: "If I can dream it, I can win it."

The poster is an inducement to buy tickets for the state lottery, the profits of which go to the worthy cause of public education. So why not? Buy lottery tickets. They're only a dollar apiece, and, as that subway poster says just below the dreaming man: "Hey, you never know."

Well, actually, you do know, or you should know, because the lottery's official Web site tells you. The odds that a single ticket purchase will get you the jackpot, currently $12 million, are exactly 175,711,536 to 1, the Web site informs us. To have a 50-50 shot of winning the $12 million, you would have to buy roughly 88 million $1 tickets.

In other words, being able to dream it has nothing to do with being able to win it. And yet, as they say, hope does seem to spring eternal, and never more so than in America these days.

It is, needless to say, Barack Obama who has explicitly put hope way up there on the national agenda and it's been that way since the beginning of his national prominence.

"Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope," Obama said in his famous speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, using the phrase that got him national attention and became the title of his bestselling campaign book "The Audacity of Hope."

"In the end," Obama said, "that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead."

What I'm wondering is why that appeal has such power, and whether there isn't a link to the poster urging people to buy lottery tickets, with its promise that all you have to do is dream in order to win. Both would seem to draw strength by defying objective conditions. Both seem to go beyond ordinary ideas into the realm of faith.

"Hope is daring to envision something that is beyond either optimism or planning," Ted Jennings, a professor at the Chicago Theological Seminary told the Chicago Sun-Times the other day. "It is an articulation of a vision, and, as the Bible says, without a vision, the people perish."

But is having more hope really the answer to our problems? To be sure, many of us have our anxieties, especially lately with recession looming in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis.

There are millions of Americans whose lives are hard and whose hopes have been frustrated by the costs of things, the prevailing unfairness, the indifference of the system.

But for most of us it's a bit like the way Hillary Clinton put it the other day in her debate with Obama in Austin, Texas. Yeah, she said, she's taken some hits over the years, but they are nothing compared to the hits that many Americans - she was referring specifically to a group of wounded veterans she had met sometime before - take every day.

The objective truth would seem to be that a lot more of us live in circumstances closer to Hillary Clinton's than to those of the wounded veterans. In fact, the objective truth would seem to be that rarely in history have there been so many people living in conditions of prosperity, security and freedom as there are now in the United States.

Hillary, perhaps knowing that fact, never tried to take up the hope thing. Her T-shirts just say "Hillary '08" on them. It's Obama's that say "Vote for Hope" or "Hope For America." But are we really so collectively beaten down that we have lost the faith to hope? When it comes right down to it, do we really need or want some skillful tinkering with the system, rather than the sort of sweeping change that most of us would actually find terrifying?

Of course, there's more to Obama's appeal than his elevation of hope to a mantra. There's the simple fact that he's a remarkably attractive figure, extremely articulate and smart, and he represents a moderate sort of economic liberalism that many Americans yearn for after these years of tax-breaks-for-the-rich conservatism.

But one of the more remarkable things about Obama's appeal is how closely its use follows the model elaborated, paradoxically, by the husband of Obama's only remaining Democratic rival.

Indeed it's uncanny how much Obama has adopted as his own the rhetorical and spiritual essence of the first Clinton campaign, when the boy from a small town in Arkansas parlayed his capacity to "feel your pain" into two terms as president.

"We've got to be one nation again," Bill Clinton said in "The Man from Hope," the documentary on Clinton distributed during the 1992 campaign by the Democratic National Committee, eerily anticipating Obama's rhetorical tropes. "I still believe in a promise called America and I still believe in a place called Hope."

"Hope is back in America," he said in his 1996 nomination acceptance speech.

If that sounds like Obama today, it's not by accident, though in fact both Hillary and Obama have borrowed from Bill's speeches of a decade and more ago. When she allowed the other day that others take much worse hits than she does, Hillary was using almost word for word a sentence that Bill used in "The Man from Hope." Namely: "The hits I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits that the people of this state and this country are taking every day of their lives."

But the main borrowing - let's avoid the loaded word plagiarism here - is the one that leads from "The Man From Hope" to "The Audacity of Hope." Both Bill Clinton and Obama have shown the power in this country of a sort of vague inspirational appeal - the belief that you can win if you can dream. And both of them gained enormous credibility from their remarkably similar biographical circumstances - as boys whose fathers were dead or absent, who grew up without money or connections, and who possessed enormous ambition and talent.

It's like that subway poster: "Hey, you never know."



 
Posted on 02-28-08 11:42 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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The other person who also spoke a lot about  hope was Reagan. The trend has been the winning candidate always has a message of optimism and forward momentum. It's hard to run as the anti-hope candidate and say "no, we can't" Needless to say, hope has been as much a political tactic as  a campaign message in successful campaigns in recent history.


Last edited: 28-Feb-08 11:43 AM

 


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