Thomas Frank: The Hope Diet: Would the Tea Party fall for this?

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both peddled a diet of hope. It's time for Democrats to demand more of a sure thing 

It is a peculiar coincidence that the last two Democratic presidents, men unusually anxious to compromise and capitulate, have also chosen to market themselves as homegrown philosophers. More curious still, both have presented their hard-won insights in the great American tradition of positive thinking. Like so many aphorists-on-the-make before them, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama entered the marketplace of ideas selling tidy homilies on the very same concept: Hope.

Then again, perhaps there is something more to all this than coincidence. Maybe this high-minded creed and these two presidents’ fecklessness actually complement and explain one another. Maybe “hope” is the ideal philosophical doctrine for a party determined to dump its old constituents and chart a brave new course in a marketized world. As a slogan, “hope” is vague and ethereal—as opposed to former, more earthly Democratic concepts like “shared prosperity” and “equal rights for all”—but perhaps that is what makes it the consummate brand identity for a party that so often triangulates away the concerns of its rank and file.