Presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote a book called "The Audacity of Hope." Mr. Obama is an excellent orator, and he is probably going to win the Democrat nomination in the next few days. And Mr. Obama has run an audacious campaign focusing on change and hope.

Hope and change are wonderful platitudes. We all hope to change for the better, to make more money, to be more successful, to be more healthy, etc. It's easy to focus on the what-ifs and dream big. But the intellectually honest person will always end up considering what it is that will actually cause change to occur, and lead to that hopeful result.

It's not enough to talk about change and hope, because for one thing, change has to be associated with a vector. Is it good change, or bad change. Is it enough change. Or will a short term change with a positive result lead to a bad term change with a negative result. And hope must similarly be tempered. Is the hope towards a realistic goal? Is the hope politically feasible? We don't hope to cross a busy street, we look both ways. And we don't change - lanes without looking to see if there is already a vehicle where we are headed.

Hope and change without concrete action is meaningless. So after the emotion of an Obama oration subsides, a prudent voter will research Obama's website for statements of his positions to find out what we can expect in the way of change, and where his hopes might really lead this country.

And when one follows through on hard work of a rational assessment of Obama's ideas, the hope begins to fade. For example, the 20th century was rife with many attempts to establish collective political structures. Both communism and socialism have failed where they have been tried. And yet Mr. Obama hopes to change this country more towards a socialist structure. Socializing health care, is only one step in that direction. A step with poor results given the widely reported problems with socialized healthcare in Canada and the UK. Mr. Obama hopes to address mortgage problems by offering mortgage credits and preventing foreclosures. And he hopes to solve credit problems by eliminating "predatory lending practices." But mortgage and credit problems are of the same root; poor individual decisions where income is not high enough to meet expense obligations. No one used force to get consumers in to mortgages or credit cards, but now Mr. Obama wants to use the force of government to get them out. And Mr. Obama hopes to provide permanent job protection for striking workers. Thus, even if a long term strike causes a company to go bankrupt, Mr. Obama assures us that those workers will still have jobs.

Regarding energy, Mr. Obama's website proposes to spend $150 billion on clean energy, yet there's no mention of nuclear technology. Instead there is talk of solar and wind energy, and biomass fuels such as ethanol and methanol. That represents a hope to change, but there is no possibility that we can supply the energy needs of this country based on only the clean sources cited by Mr. Obama. He also will require 25% of our total energy comes from renewable energy sources by 2025. That's just 17 years for biomass, solar and wind energy to jump from their current combined total of roughly 6% of the total energy production. With wind and solar providing the least amount of energy with only .14% and .06% percent of total US energy respectively. And yet, since 1970, "renewables" not including hydro have received the highest amount of federal funding of all energy sources, at $20 Billion. The hope to change is not enough, we require a dense energy source such as nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, etc. to actually produce what we need. And each day when the night falls on solar and the winds of change die down, there must still be a real energy source turning the turbines. Consider too that it will be doubly hard to reach new energy goals, which will require trillions of joules and kilowatts of research effort, while simultaneously knee-capping our energy research economy with Mr. Obama's proposed cap and trade carbon regulation.

Similarly, Mr. Obama's foreign policy is laced with hope and change. He proposes to bring all the troops home from Iraq, and hopes to restore diplomacy as a primary means of dealing with those countries who formally declare their intent to harm the US and Israel. Diplomacy that didn't work to appease a rise in radical fundamentalist Islam even during 12 previous years with Democrat presidents. And a diplomacy that didn't help reform the dictators in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, or Cuba. We know we will get a change from Mr. Obama in the form of a troop reduction in Iraq, but it's only his hope that appeasement and diplomacy will bring about a change to turn back the 40 year tide of increasing terrorism.

Mr. Obama's candidacy of hope is indeed audacious. It's supremely naive to base future hope on policies that have proven failures in the past. But his campaign is not about the boring detail of concrete actions that will need to be taken to create successful outcomes. The campaign is simply about the emotion of hope and the promise of change without regard to direction.

Awestruck Obama supporters will gleefully charge real world problems to his credit card of hope and change, only to be dumbstruck later by the audacity of the payments of personal responsibility, energy demand, plentiful healthcare, mortgage obligations, pharmaceutical research, productive corporations, angry terrorists and stifling dictators that will all come due with very high interest rates.

Why worry about investigating the most rational, factual and moral judgments you can make regarding our most pressing issues, when you can vote for the Irrationality of Hope today.