An American vote for hope?

Barack Obama positioned himself to be a mesmerising bridge builder as far back as 2004, when he was handpicked by then US presidential candidate John Kerry to be a keynote speaker at the Democratic Party National Convention.

Mr Obama, who is now running for president himself on the Democratic Party ticket, then said to rapturous applause: “’There is not a liberal America and a conservative America: there’s the United States of America.” Mr Obama portrays himself as just another American dude in his most successful book, Dreams from My Father (1995), which won him fame and recognition that led to striking a deal for another, The Audacity of Hope (2006).

The thing about bridge builders is that they have to develop an approach of “shifting positions for different audiences”, leaving people wondering where they really stand. Much like Jacob Zuma on South Africa’s political scene.

In modern politics policies count for less than sense of trust (the “ordinary dude” effect) in a candidate. Mr Obama prefers to talk about improving civic culture. He believes that Americans have lost “those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans”. He says “Americans are turned off by bickering, partisan politics, which seems to cause Washington to stall and avoid solving problems”. But he is a little vague with the practicalities of restoring good behaviour. He seems to think his taking of reins will solve everything. But one cannot govern by charm and good tone alone.

Mr Obama is modest enough to state at the outset of Audacity of Hope that his political manifesto, his “treatment of the issues are partial and incomplete”, and that he does not “offer a unifying theory of American government”. His take is to offer “something more modest: personal reflections on those values and ideals that have led me to public life”. What I’ve discovered about the Democratic Party in the US is that it treats Mr Obama as “a blank slate upon which to project their hopes”.

Mr Obama seems to have learned to milk the therapeutic culture of our times to his advantage; substituting personal biography for ideas. He seems to think a politician who has struggled with his own demons (his “divided personal identity”), will therefore know how to unite and advance a country. That’s the ultimate message in his “audacity to dream”.

Dreams are fine; but when they become naïve they are dangerous. We in South Africa also need what Mr Obama calls an organised autonomous civil society. In these times, when our leading politicians are emboldened by their ignorance, Mr Obama’s relevance to our situation is in how he seems to argue for what the Hellenes called “political art” for citizens. Political art, according to Plato, produced men of quiet dignity and sincerity, high spiritual, mental and physical endeavour. It does not take much to realise that there is a dearth of those things in the modern political scene.

Another thing we need is Mr Obama’s audacity of hope. “In the end,” he writes, “that is God’s greatest gift to us…the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead.”

The theme of Obama’s campaign was sounded mostly in his seminal speech at Atlanta in January. He insisted that the essential problem in America (read world) today is “a moral deficit…an empathy deficit…inability to recognise ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr [Martin Luther] King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny”. He went on to say true political change “starts with a change in attitudes — a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts”.

In short, the world is crying out not for activists or preachers, but for saints, people who are what they preach. Is the world up to the challenge? Or, as the eternal Galilean put it: will the Son of Man find faith when he comes back again?