Barack Obama will make his formal entry into the 2008 presidential race today at the old state capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, invoking the legacy of another man who began his political career against the same backdrop of Doric columns — Abraham Lincoln.

The choice of venue is laden with heavy symbolism. The first black candidate with a realistic chance of making it to the White House said in an interview yesterday that he regards President Lincoln, who emancipated slaves and fought a civil war to preserve the union, as one of his political heroes.

But Mr Obama says he does not want to be defined by his race. Since emerging into national politics little more than two years ago, he has sought to present himself as a politician who can bring America together again, echoing Lincoln’s line — delivered in Springfield — that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.

The comparison does not end there, with both men having spent most of their careers in the backwaters of Illinois politics before seeking the presidency. “Like Lincoln, I served for seven years in Springfield in the state senate,” Mr Obama said yesterday, claiming that such local experience — or even inexperience — was his “greatest strength” among voters who have “an enormous hunger for a new kind of politics, an enormous desire to end ‘business as usual’”.

If donning the mantle of America’s most beloved president smacks of bravado, so be it, say his supporters. Not for nothing is his bestselling autobiography entitled The Audacity of Hope.

Mr Obama’s candidacy is generating extraordinary levels of excitement and expectation. Vast crowds are expected this weekend in Springfield and at a series of campaign stops across Iowa and New Hampshire — the states that kick off the Democratic presidential nomination process — as well as at his political base in Chicago, where he will address a rally tomorrow.

Although Hillary Clinton has a strong lead in the polls and is regarded as front-runner for the nomination, she has neither the charisma nor that “next generation” message of Mr Obama. One of her supporters in Washington this week threw her hands up in despair, saying: “We’re on the brink of getting the first woman president and somehow Hillary has become the Establishment candidate — everybody is talking about Obama, Obama, Obama.”

But in all the buzz around Mr Obama, there is still an air suggestive of the “Fragility of Hype” as much as the “Audacity of Hope”. It is possible to sense it here in icebound Iowa, where campaign staff are hastily assembling the infrastructure needed if he is to make an impression in the state’s crucial caucuses which may, as so often before, determine which candidate gathers the momentum to propel them towards the nomination.

One problem is that his campaign is far less advanced in its preparations than those of his chief rivals, Mrs Clinton and John Edwards — a candidate for the nomination in 2004 and a man who has more or less camped in Iowa since.

Although the caucuses are still almost a year away, this presidential election has begun earlier than before and Mr Obama is having to play catchup in establishing a database of supporters, raising money and hiring staff.

Steve Hildebrand, one of his senior strategists, told The Times: “Barack Obama is not one of the candidates who have been running for the presidency for the past six years, so we are obviously going to be a bit behind.”

He suggested that the campaign could contrast Mr Obama’s status as a fresh-faced newcomer with his opponent, whose campaign apparatus and vast entourage may be seen as a barrier to the face-to-face contact so beloved by Iowans. He said that Mrs Clinton’s Secret Service protection team, which she gets as a former First Lady, was a “roadblock for her to deal with”.

Mr Obama’s aides also appear to be puzzling over how to create a campaign that feels sufficiently new and different to match the spiralling expectations of those who invested their hope in his audacity.

Significantly, polls indicate that his support is strongest among white liberal voters who are entranced by the prospect of a black president who seems so unthreatening. Colin Powell, who was once considered a possible presidential candidate, and like Mr Obama is an immigrant rather than a descendant of American slaves, once explained his popularity by saying: “I speak reasonably well, like a white person and . . . I ain’t that black.”

Mrs Clinton currently commands most support among African-American voters — a legacy of the close bond that was formed with this constituency by her husband — while some black commentators have already started attacking Mr Obama for not truly being one of them.

He says that he does not want to be defined by race, but his difficulty in the next year may come from the same source as his appeal, namely that he is so hard to define. Mr Hildebrand said: “It’s yet to be seen how we do make the campaign different, but I’m 100 per cent confident that we will, and that’s because our candidate is different. When people see him, hear him and meet him they know he is a serious vehicle for change.”

Mr Obama will today travel from Springfield to Cedar Springs, then on to smaller cities in Iowa such as Ames and Waterloo for town hall-style meetings, before heading back to Chicago and on to New Hampshire.

Such events, which are ingrained as one of traditions of US politics, will not feel substantially different to the hundreds — if not thousands — of similar meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire held by presidential hopefuls before him.

In Cedar Springs, where Mr Obama hopes to fill a 2,400 capacity gymnasium this afternoon, some effort has gone into getting a demographic and ethnic mix in the crowd that will make for good television pictures, with tickets being distributed through community and African-American centres.

When The Times bumped into some of Mr Obama’s campaign workers on Thursday night, they were not bubbling over with enthusiasm to talk about a new kind of politics.

Instead, they behaved like old-fashioned disciplined political operatives anywhere and politely declined to talk to the press.

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