Hope hype won't get us anywhere

Obama needs to offer us something real to hang onto

The word "hope," defined by the Merriam-Webster OnLine dictionary, stems from the Old English "hopian." It meant "to cherish a desire with anticipation."

The dictionary says the word today is used as a verb and means a) desire with expectation of obtainment or b) to expect with confidence.

The word hope is the central part of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

As he noted Wednesday afternoon, talking to a crowd in Sumter, S.C., there are those in Washington who try to wring hope out of him, to stew it out of him, season it out of him, boil it out of him. (He obviously don't know a darn thing about cooking.)

Despite these naysayers, such as the pragmatic Hillary Clinton who says he should take a "reality check," Obama says he intends to continue to talk about hope.

"I will talk about hope. I put hope on my signs. At the Democratic Convention in 2004, I gave a speech about hope." And his second book is called The Audacity of Hope.

Hope is a sunny word, a word meant to inspire, to suggest a better future, but what does it really mean? Hope for what? We all want better lives for ourselves and our global neighbors.

But hope as a political promise or a way to unify Americans is too vague; it isn't as concrete as saying the goal of my presidency is to put a chicken in every pot or send a man to the moon, which was also a dream, but a dream one could really visualize.

Hope reminds me too much of Jimmy Carter and the word healing. Carter intended to heal the nation after the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate. But, despite his gift of amnesty to draft dodgers, the healing never happened.

There was only pain. At the gas pump and in foreign diplomacy as American diplomats in Tehran were kidnapped and kept for 444 days. Voters became impatient with the dithering of the president, and after Carter's one term in office, they voted for Ronald Reagan, who didn't even mention the word healing but could read a speech off a TelePrompTer like nobody else.

This morning, as I sat with a crowd at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., watching Obama again speak about hope, I gazed around the room where we sat.

The former dining room, timbered medieval-style and lighted by chandeliers, looked like Harry Potter's alma mater, Hogwarts, and I began to wonder if this hope thing was really just a wonderful fantasy, a well-intentioned ploy to raise people's spirits and get them politically engaged, particularly after the disillusioning Bush years. But then what happens after the hope is promised?

Maybe I am just a hard-core cynic.

Some of my friends, such as Iowan Pete Newell, say they want to be inspired, they want to believe in Obama's promise of hope.

"Hope," Obama says in the Hogwarts-style room, "does not mean blind optimism."

And then he goes into his usual speech about how this country was founded on hope -- who would have placed bets on the founding fathers as winners against the mighty British Empire? And here is where he employs his oratorical skills, recalling the hope of Abraham Lincoln and the greatest generation who "defeated fascism and brought us out of the Great Depression." And he recalls civil rights workers who were beaten and set on by dogs and "they did not turn back" and "some of them died for freedom's cause.''

"That is what hope is and what we need right now," he says.

I don't disagree that we need to be pulled out of the funk we've fallen into because of George Bush's disastrous foreign and domestic policies. But we need something beyond hope. Obama must translate hope into realities we can grasp. He calls himself a hopemonger, but what he really needs to become is a wizard.

According to the dictionary, wizard didn't originally mean someone who practiced magic. It came from the medieval words wis, wys, wise. A wizard is a wise man. And that's what America needs. A wise man. Or woman.