I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still feel the faintest stir of optimism at the sight of former President Barack Obama‘s once-ubiquitous “Hope” poster. Designed by street artist Shepard Fairey, the image of Obama gazing skyward in highly contrasted shadows of blue and red was perfectly suited to the caption, written in bold, blocked lettering: “Hope.” New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl called it “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.'”
It’s important to recall just how depressed the country was by the end of former President George W. Bush‘s second term. Hurricane Katrina had leveled a beloved city. The Iraq War had become a historic disaster. The housing market had crashed, which ushered in the Great Recession. The nation was starved for a fresh vision and a leader who embodied America’s promise of a harmonious whole emerging from a diverse multitude. Obama, the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan, seemed supernaturally suited to the moment.
I’ll always hold that voting for Obama was a good bet (I pulled the lever for him twice). Political figures with his singular capacity to capture the public imagination don’t appear often. Even my father, a constitutional conservative who hasn’t voted for a Democrat since Walter Mondale, couldn’t hide his excitement when I told him I was attending Obama’s inauguration. “Cheer for Obama, sure,” he said wryly, “just don’t cheer for Biden.” (He remains the most astute political observer I know.)
There are numerous data points that epitomize Obama’s failure to capitalize on the unprecedented goodwill afforded his political ascendency, from the chaos engulfing the Middle East as a direct result of his policies to the ruination of American manufacturing to the expansion of the surveillance state and drone warfare. But nothing captures the depth of his failure quite like the attenuation of American hope.
A recent Pew poll reveals that a staggering 86% of people now report feeling exhausted or angry about the state of our politics. This was echoed in a recent NBC poll that found 81% of people are confident their children’s lives will be worse than their own. The children don’t feel much better: A recent Harvard study found that two-thirds of young people report feeling more fear than hope about the future of democracy in America.
Obama didn’t simply fail to instill hope in America. He oversaw and managed its precipitous downfall.
The messaging of Obama’s Democratic Party has adapted accordingly. Long gone are the days of the soaring rhetoric of “hope and change” and “yes we can.” Today, Democrats take every opportunity to evoke fear and trembling in their voters.
Three of the Democratic Party’s most recognizable faces — former first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — have each taken to using ever starker terms to communicate their fears about the future of our nation. In a recent CNN interview, Michelle Obama shared that she’s “terrified” about what could happen in the election. Harris concurred on a recent visit with the ladies at The View by saying she was “scared as heck” and that “we should all be scared” of what’s to come. And recently on X, Clinton implored her followers to “be alarmed, and vote accordingly.” Clinton, of course, was a pioneer of fright politics. As early as 2015, she was tweeting about the reasons why a Republican presidency should “terrify you.”
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Of course, it is possible that fearmongering is the best bet in our current political climate. The failure of Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-SC) aspirational messaging to gain traction in the Republican primary is instructive here. If people were depressed and longing for inspiration in 2008, they are paranoid and longing for safety in 2024.
But as the campaign season drudges forward, it’s impossible not to long at least for the hope we felt in more innocent times — even if it was all an illusion.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
