Obama's Ascent

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"This young man has set Illinois on fire and set America on fire. He's the future of the Democratic Party!" said Gwen Moore, a Democrat running for Congress, when she introduced Obama at a rally for Senator Russ Feingold in Milwaukee, Wis., on Oct. 9. By then, Obama45 points ahead of his opponent, Republican Alan Keyeswas spending much of his time campaigning for other politicians. On this bright Saturday morning in a swing state, Moore could be forgiven for getting carried away. "He's all of us! He's not black! He's not white! He's not, you know ...," she faltered in mid-sentence. "I was going to say, 'He's not male. He's not female,'" she said, laughing.

Obama strode onto the stage wearing a black blazer and a white collared shirt, squinting into the sun as the crowd roared. He kept one hand in his pocket and surveyed the scene. As always, the bigger the crowd, the better his speech, and he warmed up quickly this time. "My wife knows whether I'm a man or a woman. I just wanted Gwen to know that," he said calmly. Then he got louder as he talked about how, until recently, no one knew his name. And if people did know it, they couldn't pronounce it. Then, with his humility established, Obama began to describe his vision for the Democratic Party. "There is another tradition in politics that says we're all connected," he said. "I don't just have to worry about my own child. I have to worry about the child that cannot read. It's not enough that I am part of the African-American community. I've got to worry about the Arab-American family that John Ashcroft is rounding up, because I might be next." It was Obama as Everyman, and the crowd was mesmerized.

Obama is charismatic, but not in a jovial, Clintonian kind of way. He is intense, surprisingly so. He has a way of telling you something as if it's the only time he has told it to anyone (even if, like all politicians, he is working you with the same line he has used at every ballroom in the state). His brow is almost always furrowed, and his voice is deep, even somber, despite his boyish face.

And unlike, say, John Kerry, Obama is a master at shaping his own mythology. When he talks of his childhood, we hear little of his Hawaii years, of his fondness for bodysurfing and sashimi. Instead we hear in every speech that his mother was from Kansas ("That's why I talk the way I do") and his father was from Kenya ("He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack").

Ahem. Obama does not have a Kansas accent; he grew up in Honolulu except from ages 6 to 10, when he and his mother lived in Indonesia. His father, though a potent symbol in his childhood, left when Obama was 2. Aside from letters and one visit, he was absent from his son's life. When Obama was 21, his father died in a car accident in Kenya.

But Obama's background resonates because it proves his points. Like other young African-American politicians, from Congressmen Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee to Artur Davis of Alabama, Obama doesn't sound like a civil-rights-era black politician. His style is, as he puts it, "not accusing but challenging Americans to live up to the highest ideals." Some call that pandering to whites. But it can appeal to blacks too. "When he talks, you don't think about his color," says Eric Robinson, an African-American barber from Decatur, Ill., at an Obama rally in October.