Hope for Obama

The set of things that can be known differs in both quantity and nature from the set of things that can be believed. Which implies the possibility that sometimes they complement each other. Beliefs are sometimes more desirable than facts for these reasons:

1. Facts don't give a complete picture, because there are inevitably facts you don't know.
2. Facts can seduce you into believing something false, because facts correlated with one perspective don't necessarily justify that perspective. E.g. it may be a fact that you met a Communist in College, but that doesn't justify the perspective that higher ed is Communist. This is how logical fallacies work. However, the fact that you met a Christian in church does work to justify the perspective that church is Christian.
3. Facts may produce a picture that's incoherent. This is why PR firms for immoral companies always seem to drum up a litany of facts to justify whatever they want to do.

Beliefs, on the other hand, can be more powerful than facts (especially when supported by facts), because the picture is complete enough to justify action, true enough to work from, and coherent enough to get people to buy onto it. If beliefs didn't have power, religion, advertising, public relations, politics, etc. would have never come about.

Case in point: cynicism about how bad congress is and how ineffective politics are is what allows Republicans to do whatever they want, because people continue to vote for them out of cynicism.