As the new administration moved beyond its first year in office, Obama spolitics of hope increasingly has been transformed into a politics of accommodation. To many of his supporters, his quest for pragmatism and realism has become a weakness rather than a strength. By focusing on those areas where Obama grounded his own sense of possibility, Giroux critically investigates the well-being and future of young people, including the necessity to overcome racial injustices, the importance of abiding by the promise of a democracy to come, and the indisputable value of education in democracy. Giroux shows why considerations provide the ethical and political foundations for enabling hope to live up to its promises, while making civic responsibility and education central to a movement that takes democracy seriously.

Part I Introduction; Introduction; Part II Youth; Chapter 1 War Talk, the Death of the Social, and Disappearing Children; Chapter 2 Hard Lessons; Chapter 3 Commodifying Kids; Chapter 4 Disney, Casino Capitalism, and the Stealing of Childhood Innocence; Chapter 5 Ten Years After Columbine; Chapter 6 Child Beauty Pageants; Part III Race; Chapter 7 Youth and the Myth of a Postracial Society Under Barack Obama; Chapter 8 Disposable Youth in a Suspect Society; Chapter 9 Locked Out and Locked Up; Chapter 10 Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the New Racism; Chapter 11 Children of the Recession; Part IV Democracy; Chapter 12 Beyond Bailouts, Susan Searls Giroux; Chapter 13 Educating Obama; Chapter 14 Beyond the Audacity of Hope; Chapter 15 The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media; Chapter 16 Obama's Tortured Democracy; Part V Education; Chapter 17 Obama and the Promise of Education; Chapter 18 Obama's Embrace of the Corporate Model of Education; Chapter 19 Against the Militarized Academy; Chapter 20 Higher Education in Search of Democracy?; Chapter 21 Obama's Postpartisan Politics and the Crisis of American Education; Chapter 22 Educating the Rest of Us;