Turns out that running a political campaign on a vague, all-inclusive slogan like "Hope" can be a dangerous game. For the idealistic among us, Obama's call for us to unleash our hope meant unleashing that latent desire for a new kind of politics. For the needy, hope could mean emergency help right now, on the line.
"Hope for me is -- I'll finally get a good job."
"I'll be able to get my teeth fixed."
"I'll be able to pay for my wife's cancer therapy."
Hope was intrinsically too big a promise to run on. Hope unleashes dreams of the beautiful, while politics by its nature can only deliver the truly ugly and barely functioning compromise. For anyone who dared, even for a moment, to let go of a skeptical frame of mind and give flight to hope, disappointment is inevitable. Reality can never catch up with all the dreams that hope unleashes. If any of those things that were once imagined arrive, they will certainly be bent out of shape, maybe beyond recognition.
How do you like your end of war, high speed rail, Wall Street reform so far?
That's why hope is going to be replaced by a hope gap. Every time.
The nastiest of these hope gaps is coming early next year with the successful passage of health care legislation. Public option or not, Obama has given hundreds of millions of Americans reason to hope that the health care system will finally start working. The uninsured will be covered. Your doctor's bedside manner will warm up. You'll be able to get your teeth fixed. Chemo will be paid for. No more bankruptcies for medical bills. No more pre-existing conditions. No more turndowns from the insurance companies.
Our spirits will be lifted and hope will swell for many of us at that thrilling moment only a few months from now when President Obama gathers that huge crowd around him for the historic signing of the new Health Care For All legislation. Maybe it'll be a few weeks after Thanksgiving, with the White House Christmas tree as a backdrop. Maybe Obama will be wearing a tasseled red cap. I can see Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and maybe even Olympia Snowe crowded around the same desk that F.D.R. once used to sign Social Security. Obama signs the documents and hands out the historic pens. The crowd cheers. A star rises in the East.
But it's not going to happen that way. The real phase-in of health care change will take four years. Sure -- the politicos are jockeying to move up some cosmetic talking points, but in cold (and it will certainly be cruel) reality the deaths from neglect, the bankruptcies, the denials of care will continue over the many years of phase-in. And if the media front-pages the continued horror stories while the uninsured and under-insured continue their suffering, hope will not only vanish, but health care reform will seem like a cruel hoax to those who will have been betrayed.
Obama, of course, will continue to be cool. Yes, the man is generally cool for all the right reasons. Unfortunately, we're learning he can also be cool for some wrong ones.
Cool can be read as grace under pressure. Cool can be seen as smart, the calm of someone playing a deep game. But there is another side of cool, and when hope runs out for some, Obama's cool will be read as condescension:
"I'm cool because I know things that are just too complicated to explain to everyone at this moment. I can make deals with big pharma -- and I when I want you to know all the details, you'll see how smart I was. In the meantime, be cool."
What hope did Obama elicit in your heart during the campaign? Which of the many small and great wrongs of the Bush administration did you let yourself hope that Obama would somehow right? Big for me was torture. I believed we would shed a bright light on the evil perpetrated in our good name, and justice would be done. I'm sorry to report that I have entered my own little hope gap on torture.
And as far as your toothache that's getting worse every day? Try not to lose hope.