January 4, 2008--Hope Is Alive

Most post-Iowa analyses see the message of last night’s caucus results to reflect Iowans’ and perhaps American’s desire for change. A willingness ironically, to quote Bill Clinton, to “roll the dice.” How else to explain Barack Obama’s stunning victory or, for that matter, Mike Huckabee’s?

Perhaps, though, it was about something related to a desire to see fundamental change, something beyond change--the release into the political atmosphere of something rarer and more powerful: the intoxicating power of hope.

The following words were spoken last night by Barack Obama in one of the best political speeches in decades. Note the nuances as he speaks about the deeper meaning of hope:

This was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism.

It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.

It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.



Hope is what I saw in the eyes of the young woman in Cedar Rapids who works the night shift after a full day of college and still can't afford health care for a sister who's ill. A young woman who still believes that this country will give her the chance to live out her dreams.

Hope is what I heard in the voice of the New Hampshire woman who told me that she hasn't been able to breathe since her nephew left for Iraq. Who still goes to bed each night praying for his safe return.



Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause.



Hope -- hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.