The Audacity of Hope

The media’s influence on our politics comes in many forms. What gets the most
attention these days is the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, Fox
News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-show circuit, and most recently the
bloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week. As others have noted, this style of opinion journalism
isn’t really new; in some ways, it marks a return to the dominant tradition of American
journalism, an approach to the news that was nurtured by publishers like William
Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick before a more antiseptic notion of objective
journalism emerged after World War II.
Still, it’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and the
Internet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust. And
whether we politicians like to admit it or not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit.
Oddly enough, the cruder broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if Rush
Limbaugh’s listeners enjoy hearing him call me “Osama Obama,” my attitude is, let
them have their fun. It’s the more sophisticated practitioners who can sting you, in part
because they have more credibility with the general public, in part because of the skill
with which they can pounce on your words and make you seem like a jerk.
In April 2005, for example, I appeared on the program to dedicate the new Lincoln
Presidential Library in Springfield. It was a five-minute speech in which I suggested
that Abraham Lincoln’s humanity, his imperfections, were the qualities that made him
so compelling. “In [Lincoln’s] rise from poverty,” I said in one part of my remarks, “his
self-study and ultimate mastery of language and of law, in his capacity to overcome
personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all of this, we
see a fundamental element of the American character, a belief that we can constantly
remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”
A few months later, Time magazine asked if I would be interested in writing an essay
for a special issue on Lincoln. I didn’t have time to write something new, so I asked the
magazine’s editors if my speech would be acceptable. They said it was, but asked if I
could personalize it a bit more—say something about Lincoln’s impact on my life. In
between meetings I dashed off a few changes. One of those changes was to the passage
quoted above, which now read, “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of
language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the
face of repeated defeat—in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”
No sooner had the essay appeared than Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and
columnist for the Wall Street Journal, weighed in. Under the title “Conceit of
Government,” she wrote: “This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama,
flapping his wings in Time Magazine and explaining that he’s a lot like Abraham
Lincoln, only sort of better.” She went on to say, “There is nothing wrong with Barack
Obama’s resume, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it is also a greatness-free zone. If
he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.”
Ouch!
It’s hard to tell, of course, whether Ms. Noonan seriously thought I was comparing
myself to Lincoln, or whether she just took pleasure in filleting me so elegantly. As
potshots from the press go, it was very mild—and not entirely undeserved.