The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, III

For the past several days I have been discussing President-Elect Obama's 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. On Friday I focused on the first half of the text, and yesterday I discussed the chapters on faith and race. Today I want to finish with the last two chapters of this extraordinary book, which cover foreign policy and family.

This seems a strange way to end the book. Certainly each is an important topic, and there is no requirement that each chapter flow easily into the next. But the initial sense that these chapters don't fit next to one another is misplaced. Look at what they tell us about this man, our next President. He is a Democrat who knows Democrats can own foreign policy, that, "We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy." And he is a loving husband and father, who understands why America needs to be safe and strong, not for the sake of power, but for the sake of preserving the American dream that has been our motivating force for centuries. He is a man comfortable in his own skin, who knows why he sought the position he just won.

Obama opens the chapter on foreign policy with a lengthy discussion of his experience as a child in Indonesia, followed by a brief outline of the country's history since that time. Combined with having a Kenyan-born father, it seems fair to suggest that Obama has the most personal connection to the world beyond our shores than previous occupants of the Oval Office. He uses American involvement in Indonesia as a start point for analyzing the isolationist/expansionist/internationalist cycles that our foreign policy has experienced since the country's founding.

As the campaign debates over Iran and "preconditions' made clear, Obama is in favor of expanding the use of high-level diplomacy far beyond what the current administration pursued for most of the past eight years. And his rhetoric on Iraq has been consistent: it was a mistake to go there and we need to figure out a responsible way to leave. He pulls no punches in the book, calling the invasion "a strategic blunder" and squarely rejecting the Bush doctrine:

[W]e have the right to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat to our security--so long as an imminent threat is understood to be a nation, group, or individual that is actively preparing to strike U.S. targets... and has or will have the means to do so in the immediate future. Al Qaeda qualifies under this standard, and we can and should carry out preemptive strikes against them wherever we can. Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not meet this standard.

It was really amazing to see how over the course of 2008, the Bush administration slowly began to adopt so many of the Obama foreign policy positions. Obama favored talks with Iran and North Korea, and we had talks in North Korea. Obama favored striking into Pakistan against high-value Al Qaeda targets, and we struck into Pakistan. Obama pushed for a firm timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, and we negotiated a timeline. Now comes word that Obama's election has already created progress in Iraq:

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqiscould ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month.

"Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011," said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. "If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama."

What a change for foreigners to believe in the good faith of the American President.

In the final chapter of his book, Obama turns inward once again, to the family that has been his sustaining force these past few strenuous years. He recounts how he met and fell in love with the beautiful, powerful woman who would be his wife, how he was welcomed into her extended family, conventional in a way he'd never enjoyed in his own. He segues from their experience to the nationwide shift toward dual-income households where both parents work, often because they have to, and this is having an effect on their children. But he rejects the notion that this implies less care for the children, pointing out that there are sacrifices either way:

[F]or the average American woman the decision to work isn't simply a matter of changing attitudes. It's a matter of making ends meet... for most families, having Mom stay at home means living in a less-safe neighborhood and enrolling their children in a less-competitive school. That's not a choice most Americans are willing to make. Instead they do the best they can under the circumstances, knowing that the type of household they grew up in.. has become much, much harder to sustain.

He reflects on the hardships his own career ambitions placed on Michelle, and is sufficiently self-aware to recognize that she was the one who make adjustments. He also recognizes that as professionals, they had more flexible schedules than most, "enough income to cover all the services that help ease the pressures of two-earner parenthood," and a semi-retired mother-in-law to babysit. Since these luxuries are unavailable to most Americans, however, he recognizes that additional support is needed. An opportunity for government, not to solve the problem, but to assist those who are working diligently to better themselves and their families:

[I]f we're serious about family values, then we can put policies in place that make the juggling of work and parenting a little bit easier. We could start by making high-quality day care affordable for every family that needs it. In contrast to most European countries, day care in the United States is a haphazard affair. Improved day-care licensing and training, an expansion of the federal and state child tax credits, and sliding-scale subsidies to families that need them all could provide both middle-class and low-income parents some peace of mind during the workday--and benefit employers through reduced absenteeism.

He has further proposals centered on investments in education, flexible work schedules and mandated paid family leave (the U.S. stands nearly alone among wealthy nations in its failure to provide this benefit). What is striking about all his ideas is that they do not presume that government should be a big brother, dictating the terms and conditions of parenting. They presume that government should be more like that semi-retired mother-in-law, giving that extra bit of support that gives parents the time and energy to fulfill their own plans to raise successful children.

Again, a truly extraordinary book. I'm eager to see these ideas put into action.