For those who find themselves turned off or "deceived" by Senator Obama's faith-based initiatives proposal today, I would direct you, once again, to his second book, "The Audacity of Hope," page 221 in the hard copy version:

And one can envision certain faith based programs -- targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers -- that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems and hence merit carefully tailored support

Perhaps Senator Obama's view of the separation of church and state is different from yours, but make no mistake about it, he has a very clear and thought out position from which he has never strayed: government can work with religious organizations on targeted secular programs; government can not discriminate between religious and non-religious organizations in administering these programs; and any money allocated to religious organizations can not be used to proselytize or fund religious activities.

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble.  I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.  As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.
-"The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama

There is no clearer insight into Senator Obama's political and personal views than his two books.  While "The Audacity of Hope" is most definitely a political book, it also has a level of honesty that speaks to the reader.  The question is, did people listen?  

Obama's not a left winger, centrist, liberal Democrat, conservative Democrat, progressive or any of the other generalizations that we try to use to group us together in defiance of "them."  He has always rejected such ideological rigidity in favor of a more pragmatic politics.  This is just reality.

What I learned reading his 1994 memoir Dreams of My Father. Seen in detail, his "inexperience" as a community organizer and state senator stops looking like a liability, and actually the greatest source of his strength as a campaign organizer and agent of change.

Barack Obama saw this coming years ago, and its finally happened. From Politico.com:

Obama had greater role on liberal survey

During his first run for elected office, Barack Obama played a greater role than his aides now acknowledge in crafting liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion — positions that appear at odds with the more moderate image he has projected during his presidential campaign.

The evidence comes from an amended version of an Illinois voter group’s detailed questionnaire, filed under his name during his 1996 bid for a state Senate seat.

POLITICO

I bet a few people here on DailyKos have read "Audacity of Hope" and Obama speaks directly about those questionnaires.

A hit job on Obama by a Wall Street Journal opinion editor - who cares? Well, this one, by WSJ deputy Taste editor and Fox News panelist Naomi Schaefer Riley, tests some lines of religious attack we're sure to hear a lot more of.

In her rush to belittle Barack Obama's integration of faith in his political persona, Riley displays a breathtaking -- probably willful -- ignorance of Obama's religious practice, his stated beliefs about how faith should and should not inform politics, and of the multi-staged process of conversion recounted in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father.

Obama's speech on race and Wright will go down in history, beside Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech, as a defining moment in America's conception of itself. Its organizing trope is the oxymoron in the preamble of the Constitution -- the aim to create a "more perfect" union. Obama's overarching vision is of an America that's a work in progress. He embraces the commitment to "perfecting" while portraying the instruments -- Wright, his own grandmother-- as flawed but but fundamentally to be embraced as instruments of progress.

Below is the transcript of Jeremiah Wright's sermon "The Audacity of Hope."  Let's make this viral.

-----------------------------------
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE

Several years ago while I was in Richmond, the Lord allowed me to be in that city during the week of the annual convocation at Virginia Union University School of Theology. There I heard the preaching and teaching of Reverend Frederick G. Sampson of Detroit, Michigan. In one of his lectures, Dr. Sampson spoke of a painting I remembered studying in humanities courses back in the late '50s. In Dr. Sampson's powerful description of the picture, he spoke of it being a study in contradictions, because the title and the details on the canvas seem to be in direct opposition.

[MORE BELOW THE FOLD]

Audacity of Focus: HOPE

Ever since an accident I had that left me disabled, I’ve wanted to learn a new trade. One that would allow me to work either from my home or an office. I used to be a construction worker in the skilled trades industry, and that line of work is forever gone from my abilities. Since I can now walk with the help of a cane, I thought it time to try to learn a new trade.

So, someone told me about a training facility named Focus: HOPE. I’ve always loved computers, and they taught many aspects of the I.T. industry there. So I went there for a personal interview. There was a problem, the facility did not accept psychically disabled  people. There was a certain criteria that had to be met in order to qualify for job placement.

Obama-Wright, Black-White?

More...

In the media frenzy, the thing that is certainly lost is these hopeful and thoughtful words from Jeremiah Wright's sermon, The Aucacity of Hope.

Here are links to the audio of that sermon that inspired Barack as well as some others that one likely won't be hearing in the the media. The media will attempt to portray that every one of Wright's sermons are filled with the same anger and fiery rhetoric of the recently overly played clips. I think it is good to hear what a typical sermon actually is like....

In considering the strum and drang over Jeremiah Wright, two things came to mind

1.  Has anyone on any media outlet shown any evidence that Barack Obama has ever uttered or held any of the hateful thoughts that have received so much attention.

2.  Has any MSM outlet played so much as a phoneme from the sermon of Dr. Wright that actually DID influence Barack, namely "Audacity  to Hope"?  If they have, I certainly haven't heard it.  You should listen to it. It is beautiful and nothing like the "greatest hits" video now making the rounds:

Christopher Caldwell's excellent analysis of What Obama Owes to Reagan sent me back to The Audacity of Hope, in which Caldwell sees "an interest in Reagan that borders on fascination." He's right. Obama not only admires Reagan's political skills, his ability to "change the trajectory" of American politics as he put it in his notorious interview with The Reno Gazette-Journal in January. He also acknowledges the legitimacy of the course-change that Reagan drove and pays tribute to substantial accomplishments.

At a stroke (as it were), Obama did two things. He established himself as a unifier capable of, as he likes to say, "disagreeing without being disagreeable." And he demonstrated his respect for the blogosphere by arguing with its members in their own space.

That is a paragraph from a piece by E. J. Dionne in today's Washington Post entitled The Battle That Clinton Didn't Expect in which he examines, and I think with a fair amount of accuracy, how Clinton misjudged the nature of the current campaign.  But he also follows Matt Bai in interpreting the direct interaction of Obama with this community.  So I wondered if people here thought the assessment is correct.

Let me explain.

Golly gosh, Gideon! The Financial Times' Gideon Rachman, one of the most acute and fact-based columnists writing in English, has charged that Obama the Orator is an emperor wearing no clothes:

   his most famous phrases are vacuous. The "audacity of hope"? It would be genuinely audacious to run for the White House on a platform of despair. Promising hope is simply good sense. "The fierce urgency of now"? It is hard to see what Mr Obama means when he says this - other than that some inner voice has told him to run for president. [snip]

Are you worried the Mountain Top looks high?

Do you know a voter anywhere that you know may open their mind to Obama, given the opporunity?

Do you have undecided family in Texas or Ohio? Pennsylvania?  North Carolina? Indiana? Wisconsin? Oregon?  All of these states are coming up, all matter, and there is one profound thing you can do today that can lay the groundwork for future victory.

Ship your friends and Family some HOPE TODAY

Polls always indicated that Americans were willing to cut Bill Clinton some slack on the question of honesty: people recognized his mendacity but approved of his policies. "No one died when Clinton lied" expressed not only a cost-benefit analysis but also a sense that Bill Clinton did act on a genuine commitment to extend economic opportunity and tighten the social safety net -- in effect that he was honest where it counted most. That commitment to good policymaking shone ever more brightly through the Bush years -- burnished all the more by Bill's emergence as a global Santa Claus, a benevolent ghost of Americas past.

...and hopefully among the last you read. Those who have picked apart and parsed Obama's recent comments have not only excluded the necessary context of the full statement but also the context of Obama's fundamental character. They have neglected his statements from the past in word and writing, when it is fairly simple to pick up a copy of The Audacity of Hope and observe how little Obama sympathizes with Reagan policy. The notion that Barack Obama has spoken out in "praise" of Ronald Reagan is absurd on its face, given these two men who take the fundamental question "what to do with government that does not work for the people," and receiving two antithetical answers.

1. Take it apart.

2. Make it work.

Interwoven with his rhetoric, Obama has always referred to the shortcomings of government as an opportunity to build up those neglected segments of society. That is the central theme of his candidacy... to build a popular, progressive majority towards issues which speak to the poor and the middle class.

"Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention, just fans on the sidelines. We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side and if it takes a late hit or a cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

  But I don't think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives-to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.

"Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention, just fans on the sidelines. We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side and if it takes a late hit or a cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

   But I don't think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives-to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.