What Happened To The Audacity Of Hope?

Four years ago then Senator Obama ran for President on a platform of “hope and change.” He declared himself to be a “post-partisan” and “post-racial” candidate. His biggest claim of course was that his candidacy was about hope and change, in particular the audacity of hope. Fast forward four years and the post-partisan President Obama has spent his time talking about enemies (read: Republicans) and questioning whether Mitt Romney ran Bain Capital for three years when nothing of interest happened at Bain and when Romney was clearly running the Salt Lake Olympics. Perhaps by post-partisan Obama actually meant that the Republicans would simply disappear. Obama has never been short on audacity, these days however he is short on hope.

It is hope that captured the hearts of many Americans. Every Presidential candidate talks about change. If they didn’t want to change something, they wouldn’t be running and people wouldn’t vote for them. Talk of change is a dime a dozen, it was hope that drew people into Obama. At a time when the economy was collapsing, Obama offered the nation hope in a more stable future. Not surprisingly the American people went with hope rather than four more years of the Bush administration via John McCain.

What happened to hope over the last four years? The Obama campaign still claims their re-election is about hope, but no one really believes that anymore. Was hope really just about Obamacare or eliminating the GOP? President Obama last week provided some of the more hopeless comments of his administration when he said the following:

 look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there…… If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

There is no more hopeless comment to make to a man than to tell him he cannot make it on his own. Yet that’s exactly what Obama is doing here. He’s telling us that we cannot make it on our own, we need the collective. That would be news to the millions of people who have made it on their own, through their own hard work and ingenuity. Yet what Obama is telling us is that even our own ingenuity, our own unique ideas don’t allow us to make it in America. It’s a truly hopeless worldview Obama offers, if not outright anti-American.

Obama sounds like a Marxist in these comments. The Marxists of course believe that the capitalist didn’t make it on his own, he made it off the backs of workers. It’s really the workers who made it according to the Marxist, the capitalist is just exploiting them. It’s simple to dismiss Obama as a Marxist though, in truth he’s really a state capitalist: read a Fascist.

What Obama said in his speech though is something we’re increasingly seeing from the left, this notion that we don’t make it on our own and in fact we cannot make it on our own. It would be one thing if they harkened back to our historic Christian faith and acknowledged that all things come from God, including our intelligence, and thus we cannot make it on our own without God. We all know the left isn’t coming from this angle, they’re coming from a big government angle. As though we couldn’t make it without failed government schools, crumbling roads and various other big government programs.

Obama is selling us the audacity of hopelessness in a nation built on the American dream of self determination. It’s an incredible turnaround in just four years. Granted, Obama likely never changed his position. What he said last week has always been his viewpoint, he just did a better job of keeping it hidden four years ago. But that’s an important point, the public is just now beginning to see how hopeless an outlook Obama actually has. The idea that we cannot make it on our own is foreign to most of the country and it isn’t going to go over well, if people know this is what Obama believes. We’ve gone from a candidate running for President who presented the country with an oppertunity to vote for hope. Now we’re discovering Obama is running for re-election on a platform of hopelessness.