AUDACITY OF HOPE Barack Obama

by: Barack Obama

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In the bestselling The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama discusses the importance of empathy and inclusiveness, his hopes, ideals and his faith. He asserts that, amid all the scepticism, there is another tradition to politics; a tradition based upon the simple idea that we all have a stake in one another and if enough people believe and act upon that proposition, we can get something meaningful done. He offers a vision of the future that involves repairing a 'political process that is broken' and restoring a government that has fallen out of touch with the people. He discusses his hopes for a different America, and how the ideals of its democracy can be renewed. With intimacy and self-deprecating humour, Obama describes his experiences balancing the many facets of his family life and his public vocation, in a book of transforming power with relevance far beyond politics, that will inspire and uplift people the world over.
380pp, 130mm x 197mm, Paperback, 2008

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Extract
There is a constant danger, in the cacophony of voices, that a politician loses his moral bearings and finds himself entirely steered by the winds of public opinion. Perhaps this explains why we long for that most elusive quality in our leaders ? the quality of authenticity, of being who you say you are, of possessing a truthfulness that goes beyond words. My friend the late US senator Paul Simon had that quality. For most of his career, he baffled the pundits by garnering support from people who disagreed, sometimes vigorously, with his liberal politics. It helped that he looked so trustworthy, like a small-town doctor, with his glasses and bow tie and basset-hound face. But people also sensed that he lived out his values: that he was honest, and that he stood up for what he believed in, and perhaps most of all that he cared about them and what they were going through.

That last aspect of Paul's character ? a sense of empathy ? is one that I find myself appreciating more and more as I get older. It is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule ? not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes.

Like most of my values, I learned about empathy from my mother. She disdained any kind of cruelty or thoughtlessness or abuse of power, whether it expressed itself in the form of racial prejudice or bullying in the schoolyard or workers being underpaid. Whenever she saw even a hint of such behaviour in me she would look me square in the eyes and ask, 'How do you think that would make you feel?'

But it was in my relationship with my grandfather that I think I first internalized the full meaning of empathy. Because my mother's work took her overseas, I often lived with my grandparents during my high school years, and without a father present in the house, my grandfather bore the brunt of much of my adolescent rebellion. He himself was not always easy to get along with; he was at once warmhearted and quick to anger, and in part because his career had not been particularly successful, his feelings could also be easily bruised. By the time I was sixteen we were arguing all the time, usually about me failing to abide by what I considered to be an endless series of petty and arbitrary rules ? filling up the gas tank whenever I borrowed his car, say, or making sure that I rinsed out the milk carton before I put it in the garbage.

With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the merits of my own views, I found that I could generally win these arguments, in the narrow sense of leaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding unreasonable. But at some point, perhaps in my senior year, such victories started to feel less satisfying. I started thinking about the struggles and disappointments he had seen in his life. I started to appreciate his need to feel respected in his own home. I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but to him it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.

There's nothing extraordinary about such an awakening, of course; in one form or another it is what we all must go through if we are to grow up. And yet I find myself returning again and again to my mother's simple principle ? 'How would that make you feel?' ? as a guidepost for my politics.

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favour of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.

Empathy calls us all to task. We are all shaken our of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.

From The Audacity of Hope, ?2008 by Barack Obama, published by Canongate Books.