Obama's Ascent

By Amanda Ripley/Chicago

In January Barack Obama, 43, will become the only African American in the U.S. Senate--and just the third in the past 100 years. Although that alone should be ample cause for contemplation, Obama's is really a story about what might be. In the past year, Obama has been compared, in all seriousness, to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bill Clinton. Democrats debate whether he should run for President in 2012 or 2016. "No Chicago pol has heard this kind of flattery since an alderman compared Richard J. Daley to Jesus Christ," noted the Chicago Reader.

In Washington the test begins. As the only black Senator, Obama will face expectations that will be hard to fulfill--especially if he wants to be a national candidate someday. "My greatest fear for Barack is that he'll be in the background, another black face in the sea of whiteness," says Donna Brazile, a veteran strategist who ran Al Gore's campaign in 2000. For now, she says, "he doesn't have to become the next black leader. He has to become a great Senator from the state of Illinois."

Luckily, one of Obama's gifts is that he is meticulously self-aware, and he knows that the frenzy that surrounds him doesn't entirely make sense. Shortly before his victory, we met at his campaign headquarters in Chicago--sandwiched between his appointments with Charles Barkley and celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. "What's going on? I'm not entirely sure," he said, looking tired but steady. "I think what people are most hungry for in politics right now is authenticity."

The inflection point in Obama's career came in Boston on the night of July 27, when he delivered one of the best speeches in convention history. Facing thousands of needy Democrats, he described a country that America wants very badly to be: a country not pockmarked by racism and fear or led by politicians born into privilege and coached into automatons. He described a place in which an African immigrant could marry a Midwestern white woman and their middle-class son could go to Harvard Law School and run for the U.S. Senate. Say what you will about America's current reputation in the world, but few would argue with his central, shining point: "In no other country on earth is my story even possible."

Since then, Obama has become a repository for all kinds of breathless hopes: black and white, red and blue. At rallies, people lean in to touch him, to whisper their thanks. The media often reduce his appeal to melting-pot Mad Libs, but no one raises a $14.3 million war chest just because he has an "unusual background." "I don't think that's by any stretch of the imagination the largest part of the story," says Ronald Walters, a former adviser to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "You have to ask yourself, Why has this guy been so successful?"

"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.

In 2003 Obama pushed through a bill requiring police to videotape homicide confessions. Similar bills had failed before. But Obama won over police and lawmakers because he didn't just talk about injustice. He talked about efficient policing, and he noted that videos could also serve as a "powerful tool to convict the guilty." Says New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine: "There's an optimism and lack of anger. There is a reach for a positive framing of even negative issues."

Obama walks a careful line on every issue, not just race. He delivers crowd-pleasing attacks on George W. Bush, the outsourcing of jobs and the Iraq war (which he unequivocally opposed from the beginning), but he always accessorizes with a reasonable caveat. His stump speeches call for more federal dollars for Illinois highways and schools. But he disarms critics by talking early and often about the limits of government. "When you've traveled across the state, what you consistently find is a common set of values: hard work, self-respect, delayed gratification," he says. "We all have to acknowledge that government cannot transmit those values. They come from the bottom up."

Luckily for us, when Obama wrote Dreams from My Father, his autobiography, nine years ago, his political radar was less refined. In Dreams, we are introduced to another, even more interesting Obama. Far from "wrapping himself in the American flag," as Walters and others have accused him of doing in his convention speech, this Obama railed against the suffocating strictures of race. At the elite Punahou prep school in Honolulu, he was one of only seven or eight black students. He found himself filled with a creeping rage for the assumptions his classmates made about him. At the same time, he was terrified by a sense of not belonging. "I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds," he wrote, "convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere."

He spent his afternoons on the basketball court, scraping and searching for an identity. He used marijuana and tried cocaine. His grades slipped. He was acutely aware of the low expectations some white people had for him. "People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves," he wrote. "Such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry."

Even then, though, "he had powers," remembers his half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. "He was charismatic. He had lots of friends." In high school, he used to stroll over to the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii to "meet university ladies," says Soetoro-Ng, who still lives in Honolulu.

As he grew older, Obama wove in and out of the Establishment. After graduating from Columbia University in New York City, he moved to Chicago to be a community organizer--probably the most thankless job in activism, and that's saying something. He pleaded with people at the Altgeld Gardens public-housing project to come to meetings and listen to him patter on about community coalitions.

But he was ambitious, and the victories, like bringing a job-intake center to the neighborhood, were not enough. Four years later, Obama went to Harvard Law "to learn power's currency," he wrote. Laurence Tribe, who argued on behalf of Gore before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, taught Obama constitutional law and chose him as a research assistant. Of the thousands of students Tribe has had, he calls Obama the most impressive overall. "I've known Senators, Presidents. I've never known anyone with what seems to me more raw political talent," says Tribe. "He just seems to have the surest way of calmly reaching across what are impenetrable barriers to many people."

In 1990 Obama was the first African American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. With that came a glimpse of the challenges ahead. The media adored him, but black students criticized him for not choosing more blacks for top positions.

Meanwhile, Obama met Michelle, the woman who would become his wife, during a summer job at a large firm in Chicago, where she had been designated his attorney mentor. (They have two daughters, ages 3 and 6.) After law school, Obama declined higher-paying offers from big firms and joined a small civil-rights outfit in Chicago. But the partners at Miner, Barnhill & Galland never expected him to stick around. "There aren't many blindingly talented people, and most of them are pains in the ass," says George Galland Jr. "Barack is the whole package."

In 1996 Obama ran for state senate and won. Impatient, he leaped again in 2000, this time challenging four-term U.S. Congressman Bobby Rush. A former Black Panther, Rush ridiculed Obama as a Harvard-educated carpetbagger. Obama got hammered, losing 2 to 1. This year Obama chose a better race--for an open Senate seat. Then he got lucky. In the primary, his millionaire opponent, Blair Hull, was undone by media revelations that his ex-wife had sought a restraining order against him. In the general election, Republican Jack Ryan withdrew after reporters revealed that his ex-wife had complained that he took her to sex clubs. Finally, the state's straggling Republican Party gifted Obama with Keyes as an opponent. Though a powerful speaker, Keyes alienated even conservatives by calling homosexuality "selfish hedonism" and engaging in other such hysterics.

With no serious competition, Obama was free to make friends in the Senate early. His campaign has donated nearly $400,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and state parties with competitive races. The favors will cushion his landing in Washington, as will the affection of many veteran pols. "Obama could be President. There's nothing to stop him," says former Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder.

There is, however, a rather long list of politicians who have been anointed "America's first black President," from Jesse Jackson to Julian Bond to, well, Wilder. Just three months ago, Details magazine ran a feature story about the "Next, Next President of the United States." His name, according to Details, was Harold Ford Jr.

In 2002 the chosen one was Cory Booker, then a Newark, N.J., city councilman. He ultimately lost a close race against Mayor Sharpe James after Booker was accused of not being "black enough." At the Democratic Convention this summer, Booker walked into the hall and encountered a group of admirers. "One of them said I should be Vice President. I said I thought that might be going a little too far." One woman took out her camera and asked, "Could I take your picture, Mr. Obama?" Booker laughs as he tells the story. "I said, 'Ma'am, there's more than one sexy black man at this convention.'"

For Booker, who plans on challenging James again in 2006, his biggest obstacle has been the entrenched black leadership's resistance to new faces and different ideas. In the Senate, warns Walters, Obama will encounter similar challenges. "He could reach a point where he has some very serious conflict between the agenda of [a potential presidential] ticket and the agenda he's got to carry as the only African American in the Senate," says Walters. Says Rush, who has not fully forgiven Obama's audacious run against him: "In my community, the basic desire is to get a black into the Senate. Once he gets in, we can nudge him along on the path that might be less comfortable for him."

For now, Richard Durbin, the senior Senator from Illinois, counsels Obama to follow the model of Hillary Clinton. As a national figure entering the Senate with more buzz than clout, Clinton did her homework, kept her head down and stayed in tireless contact with her New York constituents. Gradually, her political capital rose. Obama says he plans to ask for her advice. Depending on how the conversation goes, maybe they could wager on the chances of them ever running together for the White House. --With reporting by David E. Thigpen/Chicago and Jeannie McCabe/Honolulu

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/Chicago; Jeannie McCabe/Honolulu