Better in their words…

Poor Michelle. Breaks my heart.
=============
WSJ 12/22/2016

Amid all the sentiments, ideas and stress that enwrap the Christmas season, one idea abides: hope. On Christmas Day, in every church the world over, whether a cathedral or the shell of an ancient chapel in Iraq, congregants will sit down to hear a homily on hope.

This being post-election America in 2016, it is fitting that a dispute should break out the past week between Donald Trump and Michelle Obama over hope.

In an interview on CBS, Oprah Winfrey asked the First Lady if she thought her husband had achieved the “hope” that his presidency was “all about.”

Mrs. Obama replied, “Yes, I do. Because we feel the difference now.” She went on: “See, now we are feeling what not having hope feels like, you know. Hope is necessary. It is a necessary concept . . . What do you give your kids if you can’t give them hope?”

Donald Trump seemed taken aback by Mrs. Obama’s comment. At his thank-you rally in Alabama, Mr. Trump replied, “Michelle Obama said yesterday that there’s no hope.” The crowd booed. But Mr. Trump didn’t saddle up to ride the crowd’s emotions.

He insisted that “we have tremendous hope, and we have tremendous promise and tremendous potential.” Then he came back to Mrs. Obama: “I actually think she made that statement not meaning it the way it came out. I really do.”

In the spirit of the season, let us set aside whether Mrs. Obama believes the country is in despair over the Trump presidency. Still, a serious issue sits inside these comments, which is the role and reality of hope in politics.

Every politician since ancient Athens has run on hope to win office and power.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” was a brilliant slogan for his historic campaign and an apt summary of why most people cast votes in any democracy.

No one will better Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign commercial, which opens with the image of a train station called Hope: “I was born in a little town called Hope, Arkansas.”

Given hope’s roots in Bethlehem, it’s no coincidence that so many sky’s-the-limit politicians turn messianic.

Hillary Clinton, who considers herself the spiritual heir of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s politics, is no doubt shattered that those once-potent ideas, which are also Mr. Obama’s ideas, failed her this year.

Michelle Obama and other Democrats disconsolate since the election about the loss of hope in American politics leave the impression they believe that giving people the rhetoric of hope, lifting them with words, is more important than delivering results, which some might call change.

For example, when Mrs. Clinton promised free publiccollege tuition, Democrats seemed to think this sort of inchoate, grandiose promise would somehow strike voters as “offering hope,” and that this impassioned commitment alone—to hope—should be enough to validate their politics. But it doesn’t, not anymore.

Once past the voting, politics is about public policies, whose real-world effects either sustain or diminish hope. Hope is the helium-filled balloon of politics. Governing in office is the gravity that pulls it back to earth.

Post-Trump, Democrats are engaged in a pedestrian fight over who gets control of their party. More interesting is the evident political challenge to liberalism’s belief in large public bureaucracies as dispensers of hope.

Is the current welfare system still about hope? Obama-Care, as symbol and actuality, may be the apogee of modern liberalism’s politics of hope as mostly messaging.

Donald Trump, promiser of “a beautiful wall,” out-hoped the progressives who thought they owned it. Voters concluded that an ideology-free businessman would turn hope into change better than yet another bearer of liberal orthodoxy. Among the reasons for Mr. Trump’s win is the corrosive state of the nation’s culture, from the opioid crisis to political correctness. The notion that Donald Trump might help rehabilitate the culture would strike many as laughable. Maybe so. But Donald Trump seems to have been genuinely moved by the opioid crisis he discovered in New Hampshire and elsewhere. That kind of exposure is another argument for the 50state Electoral College.

Our electoral system, up and running since 1789, forces candidates to meet people living in a large, regionally complex country. Running for president may attract self-inflated personalities, but there is only one person looking into the faces of and listening to uncounted pleas on the campaign trail—from Iowans, Floridians, Ohioans, Mainers— and that is the candidate.

That system made Donald Trump spend more time than most of us will in some of the most dispirited places in white, black and brown America. I won’t go so far as to say Donald Trump will become Saul on the road to Damascus. But those in despair or grim doubt over the 45th president should not underestimate the effects an American presidential campaign had on his understanding of what hope means now in the United States.