The Audacity of Hope

I WOULD BE lying if I said that the positive reaction to my speech at the Boston
convention—the letters I received, the crowds who showed up to rallies once we got
back to Illinois—wasn’t personally gratifying. After all, I got into politics to have some
influence on the public debate, because I thought I had something to say about the
direction we need to go as a country.
Still, the torrent of publicity that followed the speech reinforces my sense of how
fleeting fame is, contingent as it is on a thousand different matters of chance, of events
breaking this way rather than that. I know that I am not so much smarter than the man I
was six years ago, when I was temporarily stranded at LAX. My views on health care or
education or foreign policy are not so much more refined than they were when I labored
in obscurity as a community organizer. If I am wiser, it is mainly because I have
traveled a little further down the path I have chosen for myself, the path of politics, and
have gotten a glimpse of where it may lead, for good and for ill.
I remember a conversation I had almost twenty years ago with a friend of mine, an older
man who had been active in the civil rights efforts in Chicago in the sixties and was
teaching urban studies at Northwestern University. I had just decided, after three years
of organizing, to attend law school; because he was one of the few academics I knew, I
had asked him if he would be willing to give me a recommendation.
He said he would be happy to write me the recommendation, but first wanted to know
what I intended to do with a law degree. I mentioned my interest in a civil rights
practice, and that at some point I might try my hand at running for office. He nodded his
head and asked whether I had considered what might be involved in taking such a path,
what I would be willing to do to make the Law Review, or make partner, or get elected
to that first office and then move up the ranks. As a rule, both law and politics required
compromise, he said; not just on issues, but on more fundamental things—your values
and ideals. He wasn’t saying that to dissuade me, he said. It was just a fact. It was
because of his unwillingness to compromise that, although he had been approached
many times in his youth to enter politics, he had always declined.
“It’s not that compromise is inherently wrong,” he said to me. “I just didn’t find it
satisfying. And the one thing I’ve discovered as I get older is that you have to do what is
satisfying to you. In fact that’s one of the advantages of old age, I suppose, that you’ve
finally learned what matters to you. It’s hard to know that at twenty-six. And the
problem is that nobody else can answer that question for you. You can only figure it out
on your own.”
Twenty years later, I think back on that conversation and appreciate my friend’s words
more than I did at the time. For I am getting to an age where I have a sense of what
satisfies me, and although I am perhaps more tolerant of compromise on the issues than
my friend was, I know that my satisfaction is not to be found in the glare of television
cameras or the applause of the crowd. Instead, it seems to come more often now from
knowing that in some demonstrable way I’ve been able to help people live their lives
with some measure of dignity. I think about what Benjamin Franklin wrote to his
mother, explaining why he had devoted so much of his time to public service: “I would
rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich.”