October 14, 2022
Dear Interested Readers,
Looking Back For Guidance Going Forward
I am probably like a lot of Democrats who can remember the enthusiasm with which we once embraced heroes like JFK, RFK, Gene McCarthy, and even Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Some died tragically and some disappointed us, but they all excited us at some moment in time. As inspirational as all of these men were none of them touched me more or continues to influence my opinions more than Barack Obama.
At the core of Obama’s message was the theme of “hope.” More than a decade ago a colleague, Diane Gilworth, taught me the difference between optimism and hope. I first met Diane when she was a fantastic nurse in the cardiac unit at the Brigham. Later, after becoming an NP, she was my colleague in cardiology at Harvard Vanguard. Finally, when her immense leadership skills became obvious to everyone, she was my administrative partner as Harvard Vanguard’s vice president of nursing.
I can’t remember how Diane and I got on to the subject of optimism versus hope, but I well remember her point. Diane said that optimism was a vulnerable position. Optimism is usually associated with an expectation of success that is so certain that if failure is the outcome then there is often confusion and disillusionment in the aftermath of the unexpected failure. Perhaps, Hillary Clinton’s surprise loss to Donald Trump is a great example of Diane’s point. I was staggered by disbelief as the reality of her loss became obvious on election night in 2016.
Hillary’s loss was preceded by flawed surveys that gave us all a sense that she had an enormous lead. I attended a rally for her in Manchester that was so packed my seat was on the concrete floor of a parking garage where a video screen was barely visible. After the main show was over, she made an encore visit to say hello to those of us relegated to the garage. Our expectations were so high and our antipathy for Trump was so great that a lot of us were a set up for profound confusion when she lost. We could not believe that the nation would elect someone who was so ill-prepared by personal experience, temperament, and personal integrity for the office.
Hope differs from optimism in that it does not expect success, even as hard work is being done to gain success. Hope realizes that the momentum may favor loss, but even when the road is difficult and loss seems inevitable, hope is willing to stay on the field and remain engaged. Hope expects an uphill climb to success and knows that there are no guarantees. Hope realizes that it must work for what it desires even if it is deserved. Hope expects resistance from vested interests and the status quo. Hope counts on the fact that if today brings disappointment and loss there will be another opportunity in the future when what was learned in loss can be applied to the next opportunity. Intelligent hope realizes that it needs a plan if what it hopes for is ever going to become a reality. You may not “buy” the idea that there is a difference between optimism and hope, but Diane’s explanation produced an “aha” experience for me.
My lesson from Diane predated Obama’s 2008 presidential victory, but if you remember Obama’s campaign, its central theme was hope, followed by the assertion, “Yes we can.” His campaign poster was a powerful presentation of the idea that a vote for him was an expression of hope for a better America.
Even after a difficult first term, he returned to the theme of hope in his 2012 victory speech. In that speech he said:
Tonight, despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope.”
Hope does need a plan. In a New York Times opinion piece published last Sunday entitled “A Lost Manuscript Shows the Fire Barack Obama Couldn’t Reveal on the Campaign Trail” written by Timothy Shenk, we got a glimpse of just how much reflection Obama was putting into creating a better future almost two decades before he was elected while he was a community organizer in Chicago and a law student at Harvard Law School. Mr. Shenk sets the stage for his remarkable piece which I think contains lessons for this moment. He writes:
With Barack Obama’s presidency slipping into the not-so-recent past, it’s hard to remember the thrill — or dread — he once inspired. Even before entering politics, Mr. Obama had a way of telegraphing that he was headed for big things. Back in the early 1990s, journalists interviewing him for the flurry of profiles that appeared following his election as the first Black president of The Harvard Law Review discovered a young man brimming with confidence. “I really hope to be part of a transformation of this country,” he told Allison Pugh of The Associated Press, who came away struck by his “oddly self-conscious sense of destiny.”
Mr. Obama left Harvard with a blueprint for remaking American democracy. Written with Robert Fisher, a friend and former economics professor, the 250-page manuscript had the working title of “Transformative Politics.”
Mr. Shenk contends that though the book was never published Obama pursued the objective he had written into the book. After explaining how he learned of the manuscript Shenk continues:
…“Transformative Politics” today is a bracing experience.
Speaking with a candor he would soon be unable to afford, Mr. Obama directed his fire across the entire political spectrum. He denounced a broken status quo in which cynical Republicans outmaneuvered feckless Democrats in a racialized culture war, leaving most Americans trapped in a system that gave them no real control over their lives. Although his sympathies were clearly with the left, Mr. Obama chided liberals for making do with a “rudderless pragmatism,” and he flayed activists — with the civil rights establishment as his chief example — for asking the judiciary to hand out victories they couldn’t win at the polls. Progressives talked a good game about democracy, but they didn’t really seem to believe in it.
As the story continues, Shenk writes:
Convinced that liberals had lost their way, Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher argued for a renewed commitment to democracy, starting with the difficult and often messy work of coalition building.
The story is a fascinating review and examination of the evolution of thought in a transformative figure. Shenk continues:
Although Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher’s assessment of politics was grim, they hadn’t lost faith in American democracy. In fact, as they worked on the title for their book, they considered a very Obama-esque alternative, partly scratched out in the top corner: “Promises of Democracy: Hopeful Critiques of American Ideology.” [Click here for a second chance to see bits of the actual manuscript.]
Being hopeful was at the center of his thought many years before it was at the center of his campaign. Shenk puts this little-known history into perspective:
“Transformative Politics” never became a book. But it laid out a strategy that helped bring Mr. Obama into the White House — and anticipated debates that Democrats are still wrestling with today.
So what was the vision and strategy in Obama’s book? Shenk turns back the clock to the sixties and Bayard Rustin, the gay African American intellectual who went to prison during World War II as a conscientious objector, was accused of being a communist, and was a member of Martin Luther King’s inner circle who did much of the work behind the successful March on Washington in 1963. Although he had some disagreements with Dr. King during the debate within the Southern Leadership Conference about the Poor People’s March on Washington and Resurrection City on the Mall in 1968, he shared King’s opinion that Black Americans would never gain the equality they desired without forming a coalition across races with other Americans who suffered from poverty.
Rustin and King were convinced that White Americans would never admit the role that slavery paid in the building of the country, how it was effectively perpetuated by the Jim Crow culture, and how much of White America’s current advantage was derivative of those violations of human rights. They rightly assumed that White supremacists would never voluntarily give up their benefits from the oppression experienced by Black Americans and would never offer “reparations” out of guilt and a sense of fairness.
Obama’s unpublished book and his actions in office suggest that he accepted the idea that emphasizing and combating racism as the origin of America’s divided politics was never going to be an effective strategy that lifted anybody out of poverty. The most likely outcome of the deep divisions that could be produced by an emphasis on racism would be more loss for everyone. We all saw him take the high road again and again when a man with less poise and personal discipline might have angrily played the “race card.”
Shenk argues that as a young community worker in Chicago in the late eighties, Obama saw Rustin’s point that an economic coalition between Black Americans and poor working-class Whites would be an effective coalition that would have the ability to overcome divisive politics and introduce lasting change. As a way of demonstrating the validity of his analysis, Shenk points out that Michelle and Barack Obama are currently producing a Netflix presentation of Rustin’s life.
If the hope for a more equitable America where new policies improve the social determinants of health and poverty is eliminated for everyone as imagined by Rustin and King was Obama’s objective during his presidency, he obviously did not enjoy the complete success that he had hoped might occur. He did do more for healthcare equity than any previous president. He did everything he could to avoid calling anyone a racist, but that did not prevent the obvious backlash from White supremacists that fueled the election of Trump. In the end, Obama joined Rustin and King in falling short of the dream of an America that had overcome the deep divisions of racism through an emphasis on equity in the social determinants of health and economic opportunity.
Just because what is hoped for has not happened over many years of trying and hoping doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Red Sox fans and Cubs fans both hoped for a World Series victory for over eighty years, and both have finally had their hopes become a reality. Forgive me if the Red Sox and Cubs seem to you to be an inappropriate example, but they make my point which is that we should not stop trying and hoping just because change has not happened even given the efforts of a very talented politician like Obama. Obama and Michelle both continue in their speaking and writing to emphasize that we should not stop working and hoping for real change. “Yes we can” is still the hopeful answer.
Last year Ezra Klein interviewed President Obama after his book A Promised Land was published. Much of the conversation was about Obama’s challenges as our first Black president and his unfulfilled hopes during his eight years in office. I think it is fair to say that Mitch McConnel and others had only one objective during Obama’s time in office and that was that the hopes he espoused in his campaigns would never become legislative realities. Klein lifts Obama’s own description of the tension and strategy out of his book.
…I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.
As Michelle Obama said in 2016, “When they go low, we go high.” The question these days, and for the upcoming mid-term elections is whether those old strategies of hope and tolerance can ever overcome the divisiveness and venom that characterizes the politics of the last quarter century. It is my opinion and one that Obama shares in his conversation with Klein that President Biden is trying hard to follow the Obama playbook. Not all Democrats are convinced that attempts to work across the aisle with opposition politicians will ever work. There are real problems between the views of the two parties. It is also true that there are significant divisions within the Democratic party over what the right strategy for change should be. Despite the divisions between parties and within the Democratic Party, I believe that our best path to equity that improves the social determinants of health, healthcare, and the economic opportunities every American deserves is to continue the effort to build a coalition that crosses cultural lines by emphasizing shared objectives. It hasn’t worked yet, but neither has conflict and name-calling. Seeking bipartisan coalitions is a strategy that calls for harmony that benefits all, and it still might still work as more and more people come to realize that any other course is a threat to our democracy. “Yes we can!” built on hope and not “It can never work!” arising out of frustration is still the only logical way forward in a Democracy. It is the lesson Obama, Rustin, and King have tried to teach. I believe it is the truth.
Shink points out that a cross-cultural coalition worked for FDR and produced legislative majorities that gave us the New Deal. He ends his piece on a hopeful note:
Reversing electoral trends half a century in the making is the work of decades, not a single election. But recent history is filled with examples of candidates who built winning coalitions by tamping down polarization (like Mr. Obama) or ramping it up (like Mr. Trump). And if you put together enough successful campaigns, then a realignment starts to come into sight.
All of which brings us back to the place where, in 1991, Barack Obama started. It’s chastening to reflect that the fate of American democracy turns on whether we can pass a test that the most talented politician of his generation failed. But that’s no excuse for giving up today. Because the road to freedom that Bayard Rustin dreamed of still goes through a majority movement — a coalition rooted in the working class, bound together by shared economic interests and committed to drawing out the best in the American political tradition.
There is no question in my mind that without a majority political coalition that accepts the injustice of inequality and the lasting advantages to everyone, including the wealthiest one percent, of lifting every American out of poverty, we will eventually fail as a democracy and descend into some form of more obvious authoritarian control by a wealthy micro minority. The president is right about how critical this election is for our democracy, and I would add for the health of the nation. I am certain that Obama remains hopeful. Having hope is necessary to give us the motivation and the strength to turn cherished hopes into life-sustaining realities.
Better Than Expected
Last week I had low expectations for the fall colors. It’s nice when the disappointments you expect don’t fully materialize. I was sort of wrong about the fall colors. They are not the “best ever” this year, but they are definitely better than expected. Other years have been worse. I can remember other falls when the color show was over shortly after it started. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the fall colors this year a seven.
Last week I referenced a New York Times article that explained why this year was going to be disappointing. This week I will offer you a terrific article on fall foliage written by Matthew Capucci and Kasha Patel for the October 7 Washington Post. It showed up as a reprint in my local paper, The Valley News, on Tuesday. The piece is entitled, “Is drought dulling fall foliage?”
The Washington Post article makes many of the same points that the NYT article made last week. The authors also predict that this year is not going to be “primo,” but I think their tone is a little more “hopeful,” not optimistic, but definitely hopeful. It is “a glass half full” rather than a “half empty” forecast.
Despite my apprehensions, my foliage experience this week has been pretty good. On Monday I took a long walk with a friend, five and a half miles, around the lake that you can see in the header. During our walk the sky was dark, but just as we finished the clouds cleared and I rushed to a favorite overlook to capture a picture of Mount Kearsarge, Pleasant Lake, and the foliage. My effort was rewarded.
We have had very chilly nights with temps falling into the thirties. I sit in front of a fire most evenings, but after the fog burns off in the morning we have had some pretty spectacular days. On Wednesday the temp made it almost to seventy. We are awash in reds, yellows, oranges, and yes some brown. The colors are a tad dull, but it is still beautiful! I hope that wherever you are some color has come or will be coming soon.
Be well,
Gene
