The Tattered Idealism of Barack Obama
I
f you are north of a certain age, you might remember where you were when Barack Obama gave his star-is-born keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I was in a broadcast booth in the mezzanine level up above, with Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer, watching tears run down Lehrer’s face. He turned to me when it was over and all I could say was, “This is why we go into this business.”
Watched again at the end of the bitter and scabrous Trump years, the speech is even more remarkable. Obama tapped into our dreaming, hoping, aspiring nature. He reminded us of our common ideals and our common responsibilities to one another. He painted hope as a tough-minded, audacious act: “It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores. The hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta. The hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.”
[Barack Obama: I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America]
Obama doubled down on that idealism during his 2008 presidential campaign. That hope-and-change presidential campaign was a thrilling secular revival, with its soaring moments and fervent recitations: Yes, we can! Fired up, ready to go! Obama set the modern American benchmark for lofty rhetoric, for inspiring a passionate sense of optimism, for repeatedly rejecting the cynical politics of the past, symbolized first by Hillary Clinton and then by John McCain. Crowds always gather for presidential campaigns, but not with stars in their eyes the way they did for Obama in 2008.
At times, that campaign transcended politics and promised some sort of more fundamental rebirth. “If we
