The Audacity of Hope vs The Reality of America

After the election I was challenged by a center-left friend to read Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. The literary hubris of the title aside, the President-Elect is clearly as good a writer as he is a speaker. However, my feelings have largely been reinforced, not really changed. I will deal with three realities which I believe to be true about Obama. First that he is an intellectual without enough realism to come up with common sense policies, second that he is more of a talker than a doer, and third, that while he possess a good heart and wants to help, he is philosophically wrong as to how this should be done.

In his book he talks at some length about how we should fix the nations educational system, and he correctly points out many of its flaws. However, he seems to have spent no real time talking to people who teach for a living before prescribing his remedy. Thus his policies represent an intellectual approach not a realistic one. He claims that money matters and that schools need to be better funded to succeed. As a teacher I know that a well-funded school is always a plus, but simply throwing money at the problem doesn't help. He uses as his proof of money being the driving force the fact that many people move into districts which have higher per-pupil spending. Why else would they move to these communities, he rhetorically asks? While in truth, a stronger motivating factor for people moving into these areas is to avoid having their kids in with certain populations. While this does correspond with a lower economic situation, it doesn't change the fact that people are avoiding "bad influences" not going towards high funding.

Next he states the way to fix our schools is through starting school at a younger age, making the school year longer, and going for more hours per day. At the same time he states that the first line in responsibility is the family, specifically the parents. Yet he can't seem to see the contradiction he is setting up. How can the government (at the same time) take on more of the job of parenting, while expecting the real parents to step up to the plate? You can't have it both ways. He is right to say families are the first line of defense, and in fact the most responsible. The problems that beset our modern families are deeply cultural and will require much more than simply more funding or a longer school day to fix. We need a government that starts valuing the traditional family unit as the most important unit in our society, not as a hinderance. Our current fascination with a consumerist culture which necessitates the need for two income families has much more to do with our lower educational standards than anything else.

Lastly in terms of education he correctly points out that there are teachers who are not entirely qualified for the job. However, his plan to fix the issue is to have people with degrees in, for example, chemistry, be fast tracked into the teaching profession without having to get certified as teachers. This again shows Obama's main weakness as a leader. His ideas make perfect sense on paper, but they do not work in the real world. I can not tell you how many midlife career changers I have seen come through the teaching profession simply to burn out because they have not had the appropriate training. Teaching children is much more than having mastery of content, it is about understanding children and how to teach them.

Education is obviously an important issue, but there is more to Obama's upcoming presidency than education policy. There is also the much repeated line that he is a great speech giver but not much else. While there is admittedly not much of a record to go on here I feel that that simply gives more weight to the few instances we do have. Obama wrote very convincingly about the need to reform how politicians are elected and how the keep their positions. One point he dramatically made the case for was campaign finance reform. Specifically, he called for public financing as a big step towards honest elections. He even quoted JFK and his idea of courage in explaining how hard will be, but also how necessary. So when Obama had the chance to, literally, put his money where his mouth was, what happened? He went on to raise more money than any other candidate in history, essentially buying an election. I realize this is just one example, but we have potentially more in his reversal of a 16 month troop withdrawal deadline, his reversal on wire tapping, his potential reversal on shutting down Guantanamo Bay. The list could go on; we'll see.

Finally we come to his overall economic philosophy. His heart is clearly in the right place. His empathy towards those less fortunate is sincere and I really do think he wants what is best. He wants everything to be even handed and fair. He brings up Warren Buffet and his desire for a more fair tax code that has the wealthy shouldering more of the impact and having a bigger safety net for the lower classes. As a political philosophy this is simply misguided philanthropy. Warren Buffet is right to want his wealth to go to positive uses. But it is his responsibility to do that, not the governement's. He wants someone else to do it for him. He should be setting up foundations, grants and scholarships. Using the government as the leveler allows the population as individuals to wash their hands of their responsibilities towards each other. When we see a neighbor or a family member suffering it is up to us as individuals to help that person. It is our responsibility as human beings to do what we can to alleviate the pain of others. By ceding our responsibility to a 3rd party government agency we are robbing the sufferer of his dignity and ourselves of our duty to be connected to our fellow man.

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Again, I understand his empathy, but his solution, much like his solution to the education problem will simply exacerbate our distancing ourselves from each other, further eroding what used to be, and still can be, a sense of what it means to be American. To paraphrase Rod Dreher- small, local and particular solutions are almost always better than large, global, new and abstract. In the end culture is more important than politics and if we go down this road our culture will continue to change. The institution most in need of conservation is the family, but as the government creeps further into our lives by raising our children, taking care of our elderly, and helping our neighbors, what is left?