Audacious, perhaps – Important, for certain!

It’s a lose-lose situation for even the legislators with honorable intentions – which, according to U.S. Senator Barak Obama, most of them actually are!
The possibility of conceiving, developing, writing and passing ‘clean’ legislation is, because of the nature of the process itself, fundamentally not permitted. As bills move along, things get added in and subtracted out by other players and interests so that the final product is NEVER the straight-forward, clean, single-targeted notion that drove it at inception. This leaves legislators in the position of either voting NO on bills on the basis on which they can later be legitimately faulted for having voted against something that was ‘good,’ or voting YES on bills on which they can be equally faulted, after the fact, for having not voted against something ‘bad.’ All legislation is, in this way, imperfect and corrupted – just like the people and process from whence it is created. It’s a no-win situation. A sausage factory at it’s worse.

And yet, through the pages of this book, rather than conveying a dark cloud of desperate fatality, Obama writes about a spirit of honest, self-reflective (and, at times, even self deprecating) hopefulness that begins with the recognition that there are things that are wrong. I found this book to be a truly uncommon piece of political exposition.

The timing, published as it was prior to the Democrats gaining control of both Houses of Congress in the past year, causes it to have been written from the minority point of view.
There is a lot of attention paid in the press to Barak Obama is; his racial, ethnic, religious and socio-economic background. While he does address and discuss each of these things in this book, also in what comes across as being an honest and straightforward way, I will not dwell on them here because I believe they are less important than what he has to tell us about the nature of the political/legislative processes in this country and about the required attitude that would allow for the possibility – as unlikely as it might seem to the more cynically inclined among us – of positive and constructive change of our own arguably corrupted system.

While he is admittedly and proudly a liberal Democrat, this book is really not the partisan treatise that some might write it off as being, especially since he has subsequently declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 2008. It’s not about Democrats and it’s not about Republicans, Greens, Independents or any particular political set of beliefs and values. It’s about the nature of what has become of a structural political idea, designed as a profound alternative to 18th Century monarchist rule, and it’s evolution over the past couple of centuries. Some has evolved well – and some has become a part of what we might all agree is the ‘problem.’ In this book, Obama gives the reader a thoughtful, honest review of what seems to work about it and what needs attention. All Americans, whatever their political affiliations or preferences, should be interested in what Obama has to say, because ultimately the book is less about promoting a specific ideology than it is about promoting an attitude – an audacious attitude, if you will, - in the face of all that has gone before us, of HOPE.

After all, we know that in a situation where a person or a people believe that change is not possible, it is simply impossible for change to occur. Change starts with the beliefs that 1) things need to change and that 2) they can. This is Mr. Obama’s point and hope; This is my hope and needs to be everyone’s if we are to leave our children and grandchildren an improved version of what we Americans have worked so hard for the past 230 years to develop and sustain. A Republic predicated on the idea of democracy.

This is not a Frank Capra film, with fragments of political truisms woven into a primary fiber of melodrama or star vehicle: this is a slice of real political life from the perspective of a relatively untarnished eyes of one of our newer United States Senators – one with ambition for certain, but one with humanity, dignity and self-reflective honesty not commonly seen amongst his seniors. For both students of government and devotes of hope, this is a necessary read.