Barack Obama talks a lot about hope but he doesn’t seem to understand it. Hope is what you resort to in a situation over which you have no control. If a friend’s daughter is seriously ill you say to him that you hope that the treatment she is undergoing will work and that she will make a full recovery. Your friend would probably be looking for another doctor if the doctor said to him, I hope I’ve diagnosed your daughter’s problem correctly and prescribed the right treatment.

Obama is peddling false hope. He is telling voters that if they elect him he will give them hope that their lives will turn around. Hope is okay but it’s not sufficient. He should be telling voters that all the hope they can muster won’t make any difference if they don’t take some action to change their lives themselves. A wise, but coarse, man once told me to hope in one hand and defecate in the other and then see which hand fills up first.

Perhaps Obama is confusing hope with opportunity. More opportunity for training, education or employment would be more likely to help people than mere hope. But opportunity is harder to deliver. On second thought, maybe Obama does understand the hope thing. Hope is harder to measure than opportunity. It will be hard to hold him to account for not delivering the promised hope.

And how do you measure change? This dude is one clever demagogue!