Obama finds common ground on political plain

IS there more to unite Americans than to divide them?

As we argue ourselves into a fever about Iraq, global warming, free versus fair trade, values, immigration, safety nets versus self-reliance, wealth and poverty, the place of religion in our affairs, the definitions of family, and all the rest, the question gathers like storm clouds over our politics.

Are “we the people” still “a people”?

Or is that just a Pollyannaish wheeze that lost whatever mythical significance it may have had in the rising arguments over whether George W. Bush stole the presidency or Bill Clinton defiled it, whether homosexuals should marry, or whether Christ would have driven an SUV and voted GOP.

Barack Obama strides into these political whirlwinds with an arresting assertion: “Not so far beneath the surface,” he writes, “I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike.”

From this optimistic vantage, the junior senator from Illinois takes sight on “reclaiming the American dream.” The result is an easy-reading, congenial book that is at least halfway successful in making its point.

To take a step back, Obama attracts far more than an ordinary share of political interest these days. With this second volume of memoir and musings, he jokingly acknowledges the stratospheric expectations that have attached themselves to him. After all, didn’t some wag declare that any mention of the senator must, according to unwritten law, “be preceded by the words ‘rising star’?”

Make that “rising star in the Democratic Party,” a designation not to be regarded lightly if only because so few in our nation’s capital have earned it.

Fewer still anywhere on the partisan landscape can discuss the word “hope” in a political context and be regarded as the least bit sincere.

Obama is such a man, and he proves it by employing a fresh and buoyant vocabulary to scrub away some of the toxins from contemporary political debate. Those polling categories that presume to define the vast chasm between us do not, Obama reminds us, add up to the sum of our concerns or hint at where our hearts otherwise intersect.

At town hall meetings, he writes, “[a] young flaxen-haired woman in the middle of farm country will deliver a passionate plea for intervention in Darfur, or an elderly black gentleman in an inner-city neighborhood will quiz me on soil conservation.”

Obama advances ordinary words like “empathy,” “humility,” “grace” and “balance” into the extraordinary context of 2006’s hyper-agitated partisan politics. The effect is not only refreshing but also hopeful.

“Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discover that most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows. Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa.”

Not that he sweet-talks his way past the yawning deficits of empathy, humility, grace and balance in today’s America. For all the clamor about traditional values, the Golden Rule is seldom evoked or even expected anymore. “It’s hard to imagine the CEO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for his workers if he thought they were in some sense his equals.”

As you might anticipate from a former civil rights lawyer and a university lecturer on constitutional law, Obama writes convincingly about race as well as the lofty place the Constitution holds in American life, not always an easy pairing for African Americans. He writes tenderly about family and knowingly about faith.

Readers, no matter what their party affiliation, may experience the oddly uplifting sensation of comparing the everyday contemptuous view of politics that circulates so widely in our civic conversations with the practical idealism set down by this slender, smiling, 45-year-old former state legislator who is included on virtually every credible list of future presidential contenders.

Obama becomes more conventional and less assured in his terse overview of American foreign policy. Iraq is discussed chiefly by anecdote, and challenges elsewhere in the world are better explained than answered.

But where “The Audacity of Hope” most painfully founders is when Obama moves beyond the historic strengths of America to today’s glaring vulnerabilities. That is, the free-fall economics of globalism that threatens the jobs, the security, the pensions, the health and the self-esteem of millions of Americans and that leaves millions more in justifiable dread.

He is a smaller, more partisan, less confident leader when he apes conventional wisdom about education being the foremost cure for a domestic economy that increasingly outsources the work of engineers, lawyers, doctors and other educated white-collar Americans. Not until 2022 will today’s kindergartners graduate from college. What of the years in the meantime? What of those Americans who have no gift for math or science?

The ominous truth is that the nation is in deep debt. Wages are stagnant in the face of huge productivity gains and soaring corporate profits. Personal savings are at a record low and personal debt is at an all-time high. Retirement promises are unraveling, health insurance problematic. Income disparities threaten the foundations of the middle class. Social Security is heading for insolvency, while Medicare and Medicaid, to quote Obama, “are broken.”

On the eve of a portentous midterm election, it may serve the purposes of Democrats to decry these eerie circumstances and then move the conversation to Bush or the congressional page scandal. But a party that claims to represent working Americans on bread-and-butter issues is unlikely to prosper for long unless it finds ideas to match the scale of the challenges.

Here, one of the party’s most incandescent lights plainly disappoints. Obama’s optimism recedes. Too many of his responses are incremental, timid, tangential -- anything but audacious. He seems to sum up his uncertainty for the future by citing an observation from former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin: Even if Americans alter economic course and “do everything right,” it may not be enough.

At this point, one might recall the unhappy consequences when Jimmy Carter or Jerry Brown told voters to expect less.

Obama, for instance, laments the fact that the jobs being lost in the American economy pay better than those being created. That itself should be a five-alarm concern for Democrats.

Instead, the senator is content to lean on “a slew of good ideas out there” that could soften the blow.

Exactly what ideas? How about retraining workers in vulnerable industries before they are laid off? How about “flexible education accounts”? Wait, isn’t that a GOP idea?

Or how about “wage insurance, which provides 50 percent of the difference between a worker’s old wage and his new wage for anywhere from one year to two years”?

Alas, a nation evermore unified by creeping anxiety is not the stuff of America’s dreams.

john.balzar@latimes.com