The handsome, athletic 45-year-old is the new wonder boy of US politics. From being "Whatshisname, Alabama? Yo, mama?", as he likes to joke, he found instant fame when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention, where he easily outshone John Kerry, the ponderous presidential nominee. A few months later he was elected to Congress as senator for Illinois, and he is now toying with making his own bid for the White House, to the consternation of Hillary Clinton, the Democrat frontrunner. Could he push her aside and become the first black president?
The French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy thinks so, and identified white voters’ attraction to him in his new book, American Vertigo, wondering if Obama would be "the first black man to understand that you should stop playing on guilt and play on seduction instead? The first one to want to be America’s promise rather than its reproach?" Shelby Steele, a conservative black commentator, has noted the same phenomenon: "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn’t rub their noses in racial guilt.. White people go crazy over people like that."
Wherever Obama appears, Democrat admirers beg him to run in 2008. Why wait, the argument goes. In another four to eight years, he may have missed his moment. But Obama understands the fickleness of the public: "Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame. I’ve already had an hour and a half. I mean, I’m so overexposed, I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse." The two celebrities have more in common than you might think. The blonde airhead is famous for being famous but, out of nothing, she has made quite a success of it. Obama has next to no experience of running anything in government, but he knows how to charm the public. If anybody can concoct a presidential run out of thin air, he can. "You know, ultimately I trust the judgment of the American people," he explained recently. "We have a long and rigorous [election] process and, if I ever did decide to run, I’m confident that I’d be run through the paces pretty good."
In his two years in the Senate, he has done his best to work with Republicans over the killings in Darfur and efforts to rein in pork-barrel spending. His record does not add up to much, even though it is helpfully bipartisan.. But if he is not yet experienced enough for the White House, he aims to be by 2008. All his on-the-job training will be conducted in the full glare of an election campaign. He is certain to be grilled on his lack of foreign-policy expertise and his opposition from day one to the Iraq war – a great plus among Democrats, but something that could undermine his national-security credentials. He could fly too close to the sun and flame out, or dazzle voters with his brightness.
Once this week’s elections are out of the way, he says he will think carefully about "how I can be most useful to the country" and whether he can really run for the White House and be a "good dad and a good husband". He is sincere about this. There has been a lot of heart-searching at home in Chicago about the strains a presidential election would impose. Michelle Obama, a high-powered, Ivy League-educated lawyer, is in charge of community affairs at the University of Chicago hospitals. They have been married for 14 years and have two young daughters, Malia, 7, and Sasha, 5. "Barack didn’t pledge riches, only a life that would be interesting," Michelle said when he became a senator. "On that promise he delivered." But the presidency? Michelle is not wholly convinced it is a good idea. And nor, for that matter, is the sorely tempted Obama. African-American candidates have reached for Democratic nomination before: think the Rev Jesse Jackson or Rev Al Sharpton. They are populists whose political base was formed in the grievance politics of the black community. Their presidential runs were about sticking their issues on the table, not winning a plurality of the vote in such a racially divided country.
Obama is a 21st-century politician who personifies the American dream of a melting pot where anybody with talent and courage can succeed. As an African and an American, as opposed to a descendent of slaves, he is free of historical hang-ups. He can cite the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and not sound corny.. Throw in the line that all men are created equal, and people get positively weepy. He is as inspirational as John F Kennedy and as optimistic as Bill Clinton, without the Monica baggage. To cap it all, he is a churchgoing reformed sinner, having dabbled in drugs as a young man. He is determined to appeal to America’s powerful Christian lobby, which was critical in securing George W Bush’s success, and to prove that faith need not be the preserve of the right wing.
In the 1990s, Colin Powell, hero of the Gulf war, thought long and hard about running for president before he settled for selling his memoirs. The black historian Henry Louis Gates Jr noted that Jackson had wanted to be the first black president, whereas Powell wanted to be the first president who was black. "I don’t think those two are necessarily opposing," Obama has said. "I don’t want people to pretend I’m not black or that it’s somehow not relevant. But ultimately I’d want to be a really great president, you know? And then I’d worry about all the other stuff."
African-Americans are noticeably more reserved than whites about his prospects. They may admire him, but they are afraid he is too inexperienced to run and will be chewed up. What if he turns out to be just another black politician who is rejected by white America, and leaves his community dumped at the roadside with him? Jackson has warned that the test of whether America is ready for a black president is "not a Barack test. It’s America’s test. Phenomenal blacks are wonderful but they ain’t new".
The only way to know if America can pass that test is for Obama to run. Perhaps, deep down, he always suspected he would. A little over a decade ago he published a memoir, Dreams from My Father. It didn’t sell, because nobody had heard of him (reissued in 2004, it was an immediate hit).. But the young Harvard-educated lawyer already had a sense that who he was and where he came from might one day matter. There were gaps and longings in his life that he felt compelled to explore.
His grandfather had served as a cook to the British in colonial Kenya and converted to Islam. Barack’s father, also called Barack, grew up herding goats and attended a tin-roof school. He went on to win a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he wooed an 18-year-old white girl from Kansas. Barack senior graduated top of his class in econometrics and was offered a scholarship to take a PhD at Harvard, but he went alone, lacking the money to bring his wife and two-year-old son. From there he returned to Kenya, where he already had one family, and started another. Obama only saw him again once, for a month, when he was 10. At 21 he received a phone call from an aunt in Nairobi saying: "Barry," as he was known, "your father is dead. He is killed in a car accident… I can’t talk now, Barry. I will try to call you again." That was all, Obama recalls. "The line cut off."
His white grandparents had disapproved of the marriage, but they would talk up Obama’s absent father and tell anecdotes about him, such as the time he sang African songs at an international music festival. "Your dad could handle just about any situation and that made everybody like him," Gramps would say. They used to whisper to tourists with cameras that Obama was the great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first monarch.
Obama’s mother married an Indonesian foreign student and the family moved to Jakarta. It was there, at the American embassy library, that he saw a shocking picture in Life magazine of a black man who had poisoned his skin with chemicals in the hope of turning white. "I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror… and wondered if something was wrong with me," Obama recalled. He also observed how his mother’s privileged, middle-class whiteness created a gulf with his stepfather. They divorced and Obama returned to Hawaii, where he enrolled in an elite school and boasted to his friends that his real dad was an African "prince". When his father suddenly returned to Hawaii, Obama trembled at the thought that he would smash his fantasies. The man in front of him was thin and had the yellowing eyes of a malaria sufferer. But when a teacher invited his dad to school, he spoke with dignity and authority about Kenya’s struggle for independence and impressed everybody.
