The Audacity of Hope

PrologueIt s been almost ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I d get some version of the same two questions. Where d you get that funny name? And then: You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics? I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism that at least in the South Side neighborhoods I sought to represent had been nourished by a generation of broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was and always had been another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. It was a pretty convincing speech, I thought. And although I m not sure that the people

Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms. He is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize and the New York Times bestselling author of Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope, and A Promised Land. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Michelle. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

"He is one of the best writers to enter modern politics Jonathan Alter, Newsweek

"[Barack Obama] is that rare politician who can actually write and write movingly and genuinely about himself. . . . In these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life. . . . [He] strives in these pages to ground his policy thinking in simple common sense . . . while articulating these venomous pre-election days, but also in these increasingly polarized and polarizing times." Michiko Katutani, The New York Times

"[Few] on the partisan landscape can discuss the word 'hope' in a political context and be regarded as the least bit sincere. Obama is such a man, and he proves it by employing a fresh and buoyant vocabulary to scrub away some of the toxins from contemporary political debate. Those polling categories that presume to define the vast chasm between us do not, Obama reminds us, add up to the sum of our concerns or hint at where our hearts otherwise intersect . . . Obama advances ordinary words like 'empathy', 'humility', 'grace' and 'balance' into the extraordinary context of 2006's hyper-agitated partisan politics. The effect is not only refreshing but also hopeful. . . . As you might anticipate from a former civil lawyer and a university lecturer on constitutional law, Obama writes convincingly about race as well as the lofty place the Constitution holds in American life...He writes tenderly about family and knowingly about faith." Los Angeles Times

"What's impressive about Obama is an intelligence that his new books diplays in aubundance." Washington Post Book World

"An upbeat view of the country's potential and a political biography that concentrates on the senator's core values." Chicago Tribune

The self-portrait is appealing. It presents a man of relative youth yet maturity, a