It doesn’t take long to drive through Hope, a sleepy town of about 10,000 set back in the undulating woodlands of southwest Arkansas. But its small size hides enormous contributions made to state and national politics, and it has a lesson to teach to anyone willing to hear it.

On a chilly, gray Saturday morning last December, I drove the two hours from my hometown of Little Rock to Hope on a whim. Inside an aging business called “Ret’s Dominoes, Recording Studio and Self Storage,” four old men had gathered to pass the time.

“It’s a small town,” owner Robert Epps said, describing Hope as the kind of place where everyone knows each other and crime is considered uncommon. Like many towns in Arkansas, Hope is in a “dry” county. Conservative laws prohibit the sale of alcohol for miles around. Churches and horse shows become the fora of social life, and the first day of the high school football season might as well be a national holiday.

But, as the calculus predicts, gathering four old men together in one place necessarily requires that the conversation soon turn to politics, which was fine by me. And around Hope, there’s plenty to talk about.

By now, all but one of these gentlemen are retired from their jobs as a school bus driver, teamster and municipal wastewater employee. They have been around Hope for quite some time and are somehow not surprised to see someone from a Washington, D.C., newspaper coming in to visit with them. That’s because, among other notables, Hope is the birthplace of former Arkansas Governors Bill Clinton (SFS ’68) and Mike Huckabee.

Until those two fellas showed up, Hope was really only known for its annual Watermelon Festival.

In 1992, Hope’s relevance was made clear to the world. At the Democratic National Convention, then-Gov. Clinton ended his presidential nomination acceptance speech proclaiming that “I still believe in a place called Hope.” He seemed to explain the general, exciting sentiment permeating the years that followed the United States’ victories in the Cold and Persian Gulf wars, when MTV still had music and the world was arriving in an uncharted information age. And, being from Hope, Clinton was familiar with the can-do attitude of a town born with its back against the wall but that refuses to give up.

Sixteen years later, as the economy slows down, it’s small towns like this one that may demonstrate the most courage of all. Clinton’s statement and emotive appeals like it have become rallying cries, which presidential candidates like Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), campaign re-run Sen. John Edwards (D–N.C.) and even Huckabee himself use to remind us of the value and virtue of having and pursuing dreams.

Locals disagree about the reasons why such a small town could do something like breed powerful leaders. Epps thinks it’s the water. I think it’s the barbecue. But many agree on something else: They admit that Clinton and Huckabee didn’t find their success because of their humble origins, but rather in spite of them. And as their careers flourished, something magical happened in Hope. People began to stop seeing themselves as small-town folk, and instead as the kind of people who actually could change the world.

There are no prep schools in Hempstead County, of which Hope is the county seat. If the people there aren’t yammering for organic food and hybrid cars or worrying about corporate environmental sustainability, I don’t blame them because they’re occupied with the concerns of families struggling to subsist in a poor town in an unstable economy.

Many of us at Georgetown, having grown up on the coasts or in wealthy cities, are unfamiliar with the challenges faced by poor, isolated communities. And that’s why it’s even more impressive that, in spite of setbacks, this town tries to do its part to help others.

Hope volunteered its small airport to store hundreds of FEMA trailers which, following Hurricane Katrina two and a half years ago, were intended to help the devastated areas around New Orleans and southern Mississippi. Unfortunately, the trailers, like Louisiana itself, were abandoned by the federal government, leaving Hope to pick up the pieces. Only today are they being relocated or sold.

But, Hope will keep trying. They had Clinton. And now they have Huckabee reminding them that, far from being an oddity confined to small paragraphs in textbooks, Hope will forever be remembered for proving to us why it matters to believe.

You see, for a small town, seeing the meteoric rise of a native son to the pinnacle of higher education and national import isn’t a political novelty to be remembered only by aging men. To see it twice in one lifetime serves to inspire a more important generation — children — to believe that they, too, could some day follow that path to which two humble men pointed the way, and eventually have the opportunity to improve others’ lives.

Some will argue that Clinton’s journey from a forgotten hamlet to Georgetown and beyond changed the world. And maybe they’re right. But on a gray December day, I saw in the proud eyes of four old men that Clinton provided something more: proof to at least a few people that they could have reason to embrace a real and infectious kind of hope — the kind that grows inside their hearts, painful and burdensome, yearning to believe that neither poverty nor remoteness of geography reduces the importance of their dreams.

As the political narrative of this presidential campaign monotonously runs its course, searching for common themes between candidates, the story of Hope will certainly come up again and again. For all I know, I may be the only person at Georgetown to have ever been to Hope. But we should all take a lesson from its citizens and see that an austere beginning isn’t a reason to give up. It’s just a different place to start.

D. Pierce Nixon is a senior in the College and contributing editor for THE HOYA. He can be reached at Nixon@THEHOYA.com. DAYS ON THE HILLTOP appears every other Tuesday.