A Hopeful Kind of Greatness
Four years before he’d make history by becoming the first Black man to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, a state senator from Illinois strode on stage at the FleetCenter in Boston and opened by acknowledging the unlikelihood of the moment.
He was, after all, young and Black. And he was delivering the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, endorsing John Kerry for president.
He described America as “a magical place” — where his Kenyan father and Kansan mother could share “a common dream born of two continents.” A place distinguished from every “other country on earth” by the very reality of his presence on that stage. A place his parents believed in, deeply.
So deeply, that they gave him an African name, “believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to your success.” Believing, “in a generous America,” that their modest means would not preclude him from “going to the best schools in the land.”
But the America of which — and to which — Barack Obama spoke didn’t exist. And it proved more challenging to create than it was to conjure.
A few months later, the American Economic Association would publish a groundbreaking study on racial biases in hiring, finding that applicants with white names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews than equally qualified applicants with Black ones. In the next three years, 25 of the 30 highest ranking American universities would shrink their percentage of low-income students.
And while Obama would earn the opportunity to put his prose into practice four years later, two terms under the first Black president weren’t sufficient to eradicate the legacies of racial oppression on which this country was built.
It’s challenging today — 16 years later — to imagine describing as “tolerant” a society in which police officers kneel on Black people’s necks until they die. It’s challenging to defend as “generous” a nation whose three richest men have more wealth than half the country, some 160 million Americans combined.
So what did we do to deserve such hope?
Probably nothing. But maybe that was the point. After all, the title of Obama’s speech — and the book that followed — was “The Audacity of Hope,” not the rational justification for it.
“Hope,” he declared, was “the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.”
2004 was a different time. A time when a promising young politician could stand before 35,000 people and affirm “the greatness of our nation” without evoking images of white men with tiki torches chanting “blood and soil.” A time before police body cams and the ubiquity of social media — when our belief in things not seen was enabled by a convenient inability to see them.
And yet, there is something enduring about the ferocity of Obama’s optimism. When he stepped up to that podium, he had never held federal office. He was an outsider — on the precipice of winning a U.S. Senate race by the largest margin in Illinois history — but an outsider nonetheless.
His faith in our greatness was unconcerned with “the height of our skyscrapers or the power of our military or the size of our economy.” Instead, he suggested “a very simple premise” for the source of our pride: the idea that all of us “are created equal.” “That is the true genius of America,” he mused. “A faith in simple dreams. An insistence on small miracles.”
Obama’s faith lay in democracy itself — the unseen ideas and ideals of this nation, rather than our government’s ability to execute on them.
Of the latter, he had no delusions. He warned — with tragic prescience — against “the almost willful ignorance” of those who would simply wish away our country’s unemployment and health care crises. He framed the upcoming election as an opportunity “to hold [our values] up against a hard reality and see how we’re measuring up.” And he conceded, “we have more work to do.”
Like so many others historically excluded from America’s democracy, Obama was unafraid of reimagining it. He understood that our democracy’s strength lies in its potential for inclusivity — its ability to be conceived and applied in ever more expansive ways. And his eagerness to tug at its corners was contagious. He believed it could — and ought to — be an accessible thing, that would serve well those who served it.
To him, democracy was a promise that extended as much to “immigrants setting out for distant shores” as American troops “patrolling the Mekong delta.” It was a gift with the power to “give jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless,” and prove right “a skinny kid, with a funny name, who believes that America has a place for him, too.”
It’s been sixteen years since Obama introduced himself to America on that stage. And in the four years since he left office — and frankly, in the past year alone — reasons for hope seem to have dwindled.
This fall, however, Democrats — and Obama’s own vice president, in particular — have an opportunity to build the America Obama so eloquently imagined. At a time when the disparities in our country’s systems of wealth, education, health care, and policing have been laid so disturbingly bare, it’s imperative that we spend as much time designing the America we need as we do critiquing the America we have.
That was Obama’s message. That a politics of hope begins with bravery — with the audacity to do more, grounded in a willingness to believe that it will make a difference.
Combating the forces of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and ableism upon which this country amassed its power is no small task. But if we are to succeed, we can’t afford to be more committed to protecting the myth of the American Dream than we are to repairing the American reality.
Doing so will require all of us to “participate in a politics of hope”; to rediscover our belief in things not seen and revive our faith “that out of this long political darkness, a brighter day will come.”
In “Orations Worth Ovations,” professional speechwriters analyze great speeches (real or fictional, historic or personal) and explain what makes them so good.
Read then-State Senator Barack Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address here.
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