Hillary Clinton’s campaign was working hard to paint Barack Obama as a candidate of hollow rhetoric as voters were starting to the polls in Wisconsin and Hawaii today.
But Obama himself has long recognized the hazards inherent in the politics of hope, especially when starry-eyed followers become disenchanted.
“I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” Obama wrote in his 2006 memoir, “The Audacity of Hope.” “As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”
The political potency of Obama’s ability to market hopefulness was recognized early on by Mitt Romney, who recently dropped out of the Republican presidential contest. Romney sounded the alarm bell back in July 2007, when Obama was trailing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by double digits in the national polls.
“I think there’s a real shot for Barack Obama,” Romney told The Examiner. “I would weigh that more heavily than I think the insiders are weighing it.
“Part of that is from my experience here in Massachusetts, having watched a fellow, Deval Patrick, run for governor here with no particular political experience, as I recall, virtually no positions on important issues, but wonderful rhetoric about hope and you know, a brighter future. And people glommed on and just loved the rhetoric.”
Patrick succeeded Romney as governor last year. Like Obama, Patrick is a black Democrat who was advised by David Axelrod, a specialist in the marketing of hope.
Clinton has belatedly realized the potency of Obama’s message and is now attempting to diminish him as someone who merely gives good speeches. “Speeches don’t put food on the table,” Clinton told a Michigan audience last week.
Republican John McCain is also taking aim at Obama’s message.
“To encourage a country with only rhetoric, rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people, is not a promise of hope,” McCain told supporters last week. “It’s a platitude.”
Obama has a ready response for such criticism.
“We hear some other candidates speak almost scornfully about this idea of hope,” he told supporters last month. “They make it out that somehow your head’s in the clouds. That Obama, he’s talking about hope again. He’s so idealistic. He’s a hope-monger. They imply that hope means you’re naive or passive or you can’t fight.”
Wayne Fields, an expert on political rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis, said the resonance of Obama’s message of hope reveals a public hunger for idealism.
“In a democracy, you’re always moving back and forth between a kind of cynicism — or skepticism, at least — and hopefulness,” Fields said. “I mean, it’s part of what feeds democratic politics.
“One of the reasons we get excited every four years is because of the possibility that it might be different this time, even when we know, to some extent, that’s never the case. It sort of keeps us going.”
