Obama's Political Philosophy

CHAPTER 1

RENEWING THE AMERICAN DREAM: OBAMA’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew. We must bring the war to a responsible end and then renew our leadership – military, diplomatic, moral – to confront new threats and capitalize on new opportunities. America cannot meet this century’s challenges alone; the world cannot meet them with- out America. The mission of the United States is to provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity. (Obama, 2007) The first African American to do so, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America on January 20, 2009, with 52.6% of the popular vote and 364 Electoral College votes to John McCain’s 162. His rise to the presidential office has been spectacular: from community organizer and civil rights attorney, to lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago (1992–2004) and leader in the Illinois Senate (1997–2004), to US Senator (2004–2008) and President. Obama is one of the few presidents born outside the continental mainland and his early background sensitizes him to the world and a global vision that few before have shared or experienced. He was born in Hawaii of a White American mother, Anne Dunham, a field anthropologist, and Barack Hussein Obama, a Black Kenyan father. His parents divorced after three years and Ann Dunham married an Indone- sian man, Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Jakarta where Obama completed his early schooling before moving back to Hawaii to live with his grandmother. He completed his high school education in Los Angeles before attending Columbia University to study political science and international relations and then after a stint as director of the church-based Developing Communities Project in Chicago he was admitted to Harvard Law School where he was elected as president of the Law Review, graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1991.1 The bare facts of this remarkable chronology do not do justice to the subtle ways in which Obama’s birth and life experiences have shaped his vision for America, for reclaiming the American dream, and his political and economic philosophy. Perhaps, above all, Obama’s political philosophy is based on a moral vision in- formed by his own religious beliefs as a practicing Christian, his experience as a community organizer, his understanding of the law, and a set of democratic ideals enshrined in the best traditions of American political life and exemplified in the speeches of Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Kennedy – three presidents to

9 CHAPTER 1

Figure 2. whom he refers constantly. The elements of his political philosophy are not hard to discern even if they are not developed as a coherent theory:2 − the value of national unity that transcends all divisions – ‘one America’, the United States of America, bipartisanship; − accordingly, a rejection of 1960s dualisms that have bedeviled American pol- itics since the 1960s – ‘Left’ & ‘Right’, ‘market’ & ‘State’, ‘Black’ & ‘white’ – and a cross-party; − a narrative of freedom anchored in an awareness of the history of oppression and the corresponding choice of the historical Black Church; − a theory of community as the basis of democracy, identity and self- transformation; − a belief in the ethos of community service as an essential component of civic education; − a philosophy of hope and inclusiveness based on his ‘favorite’ thinkers – Friedrich Nietzsche, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich; − cosmopolitanism (based on the equal moral worth of all individuals) and a global sensitivity and outlook, with personal experience in Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii, as well as mainland USA (Chicago, IL, Cambridge Harvard); − legal constitutionalism and theory of jurisprudence; − an American pragmatism and experimentalism with a strong emphasis on ‘what works’;