Marty and Obama share hope.

"That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves."

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"Marty was right: There was always a community there if you dug deep enough. He was wrong, though, in characterizing the work. There was poetry as well - a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask." (190)

I think that these excerpts are quite essential to understanding how Obama took on an open-minded, yet uncompromising idealist perspective of leadership. What I mean by "idealist" is that his ultimate goal is to help the oppressed population overcome their bleak social and economic circumstances, specifically the black community (an extremely "high aim").

However, by focusing on individual stories and cases, Obama could find hope in what he was doing. I believe that this is where Marty's words (to focus on fundamental similarities between people and getting to know what is central to each of them) took merit. It's possible that this advice of Marty's gives an explanation for how someone as seemingly cynical as he to have stayed in the community organizing work, despite his failures and negativity, some kind of hope that even he could believe in although he may not express it in such an optimistic way. This is a hope that Obama became a catalyst for in the organization because of his youth and fervor for his cause, but even more relevantly, his own perspective combined with the advice of Marty.