[Restoring America] I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still feel the faintest stir of optimism at the sight of former President Barack Obama’s once-ubiquitous "Hope" poster. Designed by street artist Shepard Fairey, the image of Obama gazing skyward in highly contrasted shadows of blue and red was perfectly suited to the caption, written in bold, blocked lettering: "Hope." New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl called it "the most efficacious American political illustration since ’Uncle Sam Wants You.'" It’s important to recall just how depressed the country was by the end of former President George W. Bush’s second term. Hurricane Katrina had leveled a beloved city. The Iraq War had become a historic disaster. The housing market had crashed, which ushered in the Great Recession. The nation was starved for a fresh vision and a leader who embodied America’s promise of a harmonious whole emerging from a diverse multitude. Obama, the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan, seemed supernaturally suited to the moment.
I’ll always hold that voting for Obama was a good bet (I pulled the lever for him twice). Political figures with his singular capacity to capture the public imagination don’t appear often. Even my father, a constitutional conservative who hasn’t voted for a Democrat since Walter Mondale, couldn’t hide his excitement when I told him I was attending Obama’s inauguration. "Cheer for Obama, sure," he said wryly, "just don’t cheer for Biden." (He remains the most astute political observer I know.)
There are numerous data points that epitomize Obama’s failure to capitalize on the unprecedented goodwill afforded his political ascendency, from the chaos engulfing the Middle East as a direct result of his policies to the ruination of American manufacturing to the expansion of the surveillance state and drone warfare. But nothing captures the depth of his failure quite like the attenuation of American hope.
A recent Pew poll reveals that a staggering 86% of people now report feeling exhausted or angry about the state of our politics. This was echoed in a recent NBC poll that found 81% of people are confident their children’s lives will be worse than their own. The children don’t feel much better: A recent Harvard study found that two-thirds of young people report feeling more fear than hope about the future of democracy in America.
Obama didn’t simply fail to instill hope in America. He oversaw and managed its precipitous downfall.
