I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism (eBook)

Description

Is Barack Obama the savior of liberalism-or the last liberal president? Charles R. Kesler's spirited analysis of Obama's political thought shows that he represents either a new birth of liberalism-or its demise.

Who is Barack Obama? Though many of his own supporters wonder if he really believes in anything, Charles R. Kesler argues that these disappointed liberals don't appreciate the scope of the president's ambition or the long-term stakes for which he is playing.

Conservatives also misunderstand Obama, according to this leading conservative scholar, educator, and journalist. They dismiss him as a socialist, hopelessly out of touch with the American mainstream. The fringe Right dwells on Obama's foreign upbringing, his missing birth certificate, Bill Ayers's supposed authorship of his books. What mainstream and fringe have in common is a stubborn underestimation of the man and the political movement he embodies.

Reflecting a sophisticated mix of philosophy, psychology, and history, and complemented by a scathing wit, I Am the Change tries to understand Obama as he understands himself, based largely on his own writings, speeches, and interviews. Kesler, the rare conservative who takes Obama seriously as a political thinker, views him as a gifted and highly intelligent progressive who is attempting to become the greatest president in the history of modern liberalism. Intent on reinvigorating the liberal faith, Obama nonetheless fails to understand its fatal contradictions-a shortsightedness that may prove to be liberalism's undoing.

Will Obama save liberalism and become its fourth great incarnation, following Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson? Or will he be derailed by his very successes? These are the questions at the heart of Kesler's thoughtful and illuminating book.

About the Author

Charles R. Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, and coeditor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought.

Praise for I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism…

“Politically timely and of permanent importance to the study of the American mind. A serious but accessible study of the thinking underpinning the modern liberal project…This is a title - and an author - with a long shelf life and much to teach.”
-Washington Times

“Drawing on his wide reading in philosophy and American political thought, Mr. Kesler argues that Mr. Obama has been shaped by the political tradition of Progressivism and that his 2008 triumph has helped, in turn, to reshape it.”
-Wall Street Journal

“Obama has earned what he now receives, the tribute of a serious intellectual exegesis by a distinguished political philosopher.”
-George Will, Washington Post

“Kesler is the reader for whom Obama has long been asking, in the sense of ‘asking for it’, and this book is the examination of the One we’ve been waiting for.”
-Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review