There hasn’t been a book by an active politician as popular as The Audacity of Hope since John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1956). It has been at the top of the New York Times best-seller list and others since its publication last October. This appeal is not surprising. Barack Obama has attracted extraordinary attention since his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention and subsequent victory in the race for a Senate seat in Illinois. This interest has of course become even more intense now that he has become a contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Time will tell if Audacity will help his candidacy, as Profiles helped Kennedy’s. Obama’s personal history is by now pretty well known: born in Hawaii in 1961 to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father; raised by his mother and Indonesian step-father in Jakarta and then in Hawaii by white grandparents originally from Kansas (family gatherings, he writes, take on “the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting”). He went to Columbia University, then worked for a nonprofit church-related service group in Chicago before attending Harvard Law School (where he was president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude). He practiced civil-rights law and taught at the University of Chicago Law School, and later served three terms in the Illinois State Legislature. The views expressed in this volume were reflected in the statement Obama made in January when he entered the presidential race, and in a number of the major speeches he has made since becoming a senator. Thus a close reading should offer insight into his coming campaign. The personal anecdotes sprinkled throughout the text also reveal, unless he is badly fooling us, a warm, intelligent, and thoughtful man, one who is patient, compassionate-and a good listener. (I could have done without the sentimental description of his home life-busy politician struggling to meet family obligations to wife and young daughters-at the end of the book.) Obama does not put forth a programmatic, detailed “platform,” or what he calls “a manifesto for action, complete with charts and graphs, timetables, and ten-point programs.” He is more interested in setting the parameters within which one can discuss broad, even abstract issues such as race, economic opportunity, and the role of religious faith in the political arena. What he offers the reader are personal reflections on those values and ideals that have led me to public life, some thoughts on the ways that our current political discourse unnecessarily divides us, and my own best assessment-based on my experience as a senator and lawyer, husband and father, Christian and skeptic-of the ways we can ground our politics in the notion of a common good. He delivers on this promise. His prose is accessible, precise, and clear-free of the usual and tiresome political clichés and leavened by a quiet sense of humor. It is refreshing to those of us inured to such impurities as “the axis of evil” and “the death tax.” He reminds me of his fellow Chicagoan, Adlai Stevenson. Obama’s easy eloquence presents a problem for the reviewer. One simply has to quote him; paraphrases just don’t do him justice. So here, in his own words, is how he describes the present political climate: At the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences.... They remain alive in the hearts and minds of most Americans-and can inspire us to pride, duty, and sacrifice. I realize the risks of talking this way. In an era of globalization and dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting cultural wars, we don’t even seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss our ideals, much less the tools to arrive at some rough consensus about how, as a nation, we might work together to bring these ideals about.... You don’t need a poll to know that the vast majority of Americans...are weary of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of ¬absolute truth.... Religious or secular, black, white, or brown, we sense -correctly-that the nation’s most significant challenges are being ignored, and that if we don’t change course soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves behind a weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited. An example of the senator’s approach is his treatment of the broad subject of “opportunity,” under which he groups a set of issues that, taken individually, would provoke heated debate-trade policy for example, with free-traders on one side and protectionists on the other. Obama widens the focus, discussing not only the economic benefits of “globalization” but its effects on ordinary workers in businesses that are “automated, downsized, outsourced, and offshored.” Asserting that he doesn’t “pretend to have all the answers,” he nonetheless touches on a broad range of policies that would enhance “opportunity,” ranging from broad reforms in the educational system and energy independence down to the makeup of the National Labor Relations Board. Not bound by the usual shibboleths, he argues that in the end we should be “guided by what works.” It is refreshing to read a Democratic politician unafraid to invoke enthusiastically the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Obama has high praise for the New Deal-a social compact that was “a bargain between government, business, and workers that resulted in widespread prosperity and economic security for more than fifty years.” He advocates a similar compact today, appropriately modified to reflect twenty-first-century circumstances, with government playing a positive role in supporting the market economy, rather than being denied participation in an every-man-for-himself “Ownership Society.” Obama’s observations on “faith” should be of particular interest to Catholic readers. He writes movingly of his own religious development from doubter (following parental example) to membership in the United Church of Christ, to which he was drawn in part by “the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.” He terms it a “mistake” to “fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people.” Problems of “poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed” require not only technical economic solutions but “changes in hearts and minds.... We need to take faith seriously not simply to block the Religious Right but to engage all persons of faith in the larger project of American renewal.” Obama’s view of religion in the public square would, I believe, have been approved by John Courtney Murray. For example, Obama writes: What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. The discussion of foreign policy in Audacity was recently dismissed by Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker. He condescendingly wrote that “it reads like a tentative primer on the history of American foreign policy.” It is indeed more than a little didactic, but with its enunciation of basic principles, it should be required reading for President George W. Bush and his colleagues. And anyone who could write the following before the Iraq war (in an October 2002 speech quoted in the text) deserves to be listened to: I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. Those who campaign against Senator Obama on the basis of his “inexperience” may have a little trouble explaining away that quote. At a minimum, Barack Obama has written a thought-provoking book on the state of American politics. We will see whether it will supply the framework for a successful presidential campaign in the next few months. Only then will we know whether the irreverent jingle going around Washington-“Don’t tell Mama, I’m for Obama”-has traction.