Hewitt Blog

Having already reviewed “Dreams from My Father,” I wasn’t planning on offering a review of Barack Obama’s other book, “The Audacity of Hope.” Unlike his first book, “The Audacity of Hope” isn’t a serious book, and as such it doesn’t warrant being dealt with seriously. Besides, the incomparable Andy Ferguson has gone through the bother of reviewing it for us.

If you’ve read Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” the politician that emerges on the pages of Obama’s more recent effort is predictable - cautious, introspective, a cipher who tries to reflect the views of everyone while having only a vaguely defined sense of himself and what he really stands for.

Here’s how Ferguson sums up the Obama we see in his current bestseller.

“I am new enough on the national political scene,” he writes in the book's prologue, “to serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” “The Audacity of Hope” can best be understood as an extended effort on the part of the first-term Illinois senator to keep that screen as blank as possible.

The one place I differ with Andy is that I don’t think Obama is really making an effort to keep the screen blank. I think the screen actually is blank. My impression having read both of his books is that by the scale applied to leaders, Obama is not a man of action and not a man of deep conviction. When he equivocates on the value of religion or the intrinsic worth of self-reliance and independence, he’s not doing so to effect a political straddle or to keep all his political doors open. Rather, his ambivalence on such fundamental matters is a reflection of who he fundamentally is. Obama is by nature a witness, not a player. When he enters the ring, he does so only half-heartedly and with one foot remaining on the outside.

Obama may well have the politician’s pathological need to please, and that might explain why he seldom risks saying anything that might offend anyone. Still, I have a feeling based on having curled up with over 800 pages of his ramblings, Obama’s just a compulsively non-judgmental and non-combative guy.

Before reading the following, bear in mind that I’m the guy who thought the Republicans would hold the House and Senate last November: Obama doesn’t have what it takes to be a successful politician at the presidential level. I predict that the Obama campaign won’t even make it to the Iowa caucuses. And if it does, it will have become a carcass of a campaign long before Iowans assemble at their little coffee klatches to anoint the next presidential nominees.

(Programming note: I have no intention of reviewing every book I read. I am, however, going to offer one review a week of books that I think are topical or timely. Hopefully, some of these books will even be good. These reviews will typically run on Sundays. Special note to publishers – feel free to send me free books! But be careful what you wish for!)

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.