this is a historic moment yall. but we're not done…
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He gives the appearance of a strikingly laid-back victor, this presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
On
the day before the night he made history, Barack Obama shot hoops at
the Back Bay Club in Chicago, and called the odd superdelegate or two.
Then he and his wife, Michelle, kissed their daughters goodnight and,
with a half dozen of their best friends, rode to Midway Airport to
catch a flight to St. Paul to claim his prize. He sat on the plane,
legs crossed, chuckling, chatting, giving little hint of what roiled
within.
Mr. Obama has written of his “spooky good fortune” in politics, and vaulting ambition and self-possession define his rise.
He
turned down a prestigious federal appellate court clerkship while at
Harvard to work as a community organizer. He wrote an autobiography at
the age of 33, and another 11 years later. He brushed aside a liberal
mentor who stood in his way in Illinois. After just two years in the
United States Senate, he announced that he would run for the presidency
and then upended a Democratic Party powerhouse.
On
the cusp of becoming the first African-American to capture a major
party nomination, Mr. Obama remains a protean political figure,
inspiring devotion in supporters who see him as a transformative leader
even as he remains inscrutable to critics.
‘Rorschach test’ for voters
He has the gift of making people see themselves in him and offers an enigmatic smile when asked about his multiracial appeal.
“I
am like a Rorschach test,” he said in an interview with The New York
Times. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might
gain something.”
He is a liberal who
favors regulating Wall Street and stanching housing foreclosures,
negotiating with foreign enemies and disengaging from the war in Iraq.
He speaks eloquently about America’s divisions of race and class, and
says the old rhetoric of racial grievance has exhausted itself.
But
his insistence that he can bridge the nation’s ideological chasms
without resort to partisan warfare leaves some with the nagging sense
that he makes it sound too easy, and that his full measure as a
politician has yet to be taken.
He has
stumbled and fumbled more than once. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
confounded him, pushing him back on his heels, his irritation too
apparent. He falls in love with his words and perhaps his celebrity,
acknowledging after Texas that he had become too dependent on arena
politics and too aloof in smaller settings.
He
is a deliberative fellow in a manic game. When his now-retired pastor,
the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., offered incendiary views on race and
politics, Mr. Obama was slow to recognize how quickly Mr. Wright’s
words inflamed voters’ doubts about him.
Michelle
Obama, who is also a Harvard-trained lawyer and whose fires often burn
hotter than those of her husband, pointedly advises Mr. Obama to
forswear the cerebral and embrace the visceral. As Republicans attack
him as unknown and untested, Mr. Obama could recall her advice in the
months to come.
He was raised literally
and metaphorically offshore, in Indonesia by his white mother and in
Hawaii by his white grandparents. He is very much an American but tends
to view the incongruities of politics with the distancing eye of an
outsider.
A life examined
One
of the curiosities about Mr. Obama is his professed lack of interest in
the writers who pore over that life, trying to deconstruct his
fractured family and geography. He claims not to read profiles that
pile high in his plane.
“It just
encourages the narcissism that is already a congenital defect for a
politician,” he says. “I find these essays more revealing about the
author than about me.”
The same might be
said of Mr. Obama’s autobiography, which is less a straightforward
chronicle than a carefully framed coming-of-age narrative. He describes
himself as a young man adrift, although few friends recall thinking him
so lost. And he just might have overstated his youthful experimentation
with marijuana.
(Last November, an Iowa
voter asked if he, unlike Bill Clinton, had inhaled. Mr. Obama looked
puzzled. “I never understood that line,” he said. “The point was to
inhale.”)
He carries a reputation as a
Natural, and insists on calm. He did not interview each prospective
campaign aide, but he laid down a rule: No drama kings or queens
welcome. He confides in only a handful of advisers, particularly David
Axelrod, the campaign guru with the appreciation for Chicago-style
politics, and rarely displays public agitation about the measuring
stick of his profession, electoral wins and losses. Told in February
that he had won the caucuses in Maine, an overwhelmingly white state
that he had expected to lose, he nodded, mumbled “That’s great,” and
turned back to a phone call.
A man of moderate tastes
He
jokes with his Secret Service agents and carries his own bags off
planes and buses. (In this fishbowl world, a candidate knows he is
being studied; carrying your own bags can be good manners, good
politics, or both.) He jogs to the stage with the cocky ease of a jock.
He favors moderate tastes, preferring
organic tea to a tumbler of gin, salmon to steak, a fruit plate to
fries. He jokes about tossing back a beer, but his tippling amounts to
a swig or two, most often to try to prove to television cameras that he
is a “regular guy.”
But his greenness as
a candidate also shows. His debate performances tend toward the
erratic, authoritative one moment, defensive and diffident the next. He
waxes incandescent at rallies, but in the 18-hour days leading up to
primaries, he can sound aloof and querulous before smaller audiences.
Condescension can creep in. He suggested, for example, that his
youthful travels to Asia and Europe had left him more knowledgeable
than Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain about foreign affairs.
“When
I speak about having lived in Indonesia, having family that is
impoverished in Africa, knowing the leaders is not important,” he told
a crowd. “What I know is the people.”
At
a fund-raiser in San Francisco, he speculated unhelpfully about the
psychic hold that guns and religion had on the white working class.
His
ache for time lost with his daughters feels palpable. On his plane
recently, he described the nightly calls home. Malia, 9, is loquacious,
rattling off every detail of her day. Six-year-old Sasha, whom he has
nicknamed Cool Breeze, goes monosyllabic.
How was your day? “Fiiiine,” Mr. Obama mimics her uninterested voice.
But the campaign has allowed this ambitious man just 10 days home last year.
So
the contradictions pile up. He is a watcher and a wanderer who found a
home in Chicago where he fashioned his adult identity, not least as a
black man. He is an idealist who pursues the national spotlight with
the intensity of a bloodhound and finds the top prize almost within
grasp. Yet he holds tight to the belief that he can draw a curtain of
normalcy about his family.
For months, he
tried to keep his old e-mail address and cellphone number until friends
convinced him he was nuts. “We were like, ‘Barack! Give it up!’ ” said
Cassandra Q. Butts, a senior vice president at the Center for American
Progress and a former Harvard classmate. “He asks: ‘Why don’t you
call?’
“I tell him, ‘Hey, Barack, you’ve got a few things going on, right?’ ”
Making his way
Friends
talk of his sixth sense for career timing as if there were a
Barack-the-immaculate-pol quality to his rise. But he is no accidental
political tourist.
He studies his chosen
world like a Talmudist, charting trends and noting which rivals are
strong and which weak. His politics are liberal but his instincts are
accommodationist; he cultivates older, powerful mentors, Democratic and
Republican, and he made his peace with the Chicago Democratic machine.
“You
don’t go from being a community organizer to running for president in
15 years unless you have a lot of ambition,” said Paula Wolff, a
Chicago Republican and a mentor. “He likes to listen carefully, and
naturally you assume that’s very smart of him.”
If
there is an art to seeking advice, Mr. Obama holds a master’s degree.
He favors a hand on the shoulder, a whisper in the ear. In 1996, when
he pondered a race for the Illinois Legislature, Jean Rudd, a mentor in
the foundation world, took him to lunch with a prominent lobbyist. The
appetizers had no sooner arrived than the lobbyist framed the question:
Why would a Harvard-educated lawyer want to step into a hellhole like
that? You’ll leave your wife behind, you’ll be in the minority party,
you’ll be treated like dirt. Mr. Obama chuckled and asked questions.
The lobbyist later became an adviser.
Abner
J. Mikva, the former judge, asked Mr. Obama, fresh out of Harvard, to
apply as his clerk. Mr. Obama declined, preferring to labor as a
community organizer. But, characteristically, he later befriended the
older man.
The judge recognized his
talents, but oh that speaking style. Too many ers and uhs, too Harvard
and not enough South Side. Mr. Obama did not argue the point; he began
paying attention in church.
“He listened
to patterns of speech, how to take people up the ladders,” recalls Mr.
Mikva, now 81. “It’s almost a Baptist tradition to make someone faint,
and, by God, he’s doing it now.”
When
he gained election to the Springfield statehouse, Mr. Obama taught
himself poker; politics happened around card tables. Then he took up
golf. He hit one shank after another. “He was no Tiger Woods,” said
State Senator Terry Link, an older white Democrat. Eventually Mr. Obama
learned to drive and putt — and found a new place to conduct politics.
All
of which sounds disarming, but there is a glint of steel. With his eyes
on the State Senate in 1996, Mr. Obama told a former mentor that he
would not stand down and let her reclaim her seat. And he used
technicalities to bump rivals off the ballot until he ran unopposed.
His operatives slapped down attempts to rerun primaries in Michigan and
Florida; a recent party compromise on counting delegates from those
states worked to his advantage.
An old Chicago hand notes that Mr. Obama seems to have read his Niccolò Machiavelli.
An 11-year path
Once,
months ago, Mr. Obama preferred novels, meaty chews by John le Carré,
E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth that transported him far from the
cacophonous here and now.
“Fiction kind
of took me out of myself and what we were doing every day,” he noted as
he sat in his campaign plane, waiting to fly to another rally at a
far-too-early hour.
And lately?
He
motions at the platoons of Secret Service agents and staff members
taking their seats. “I’m lucky if I get through a chapter of anything,”
he says. “I have come to realize the secret to sleeping on the road is
to get very, very, tired.”
He returns to
Chicago and his Hyde Park home as a celebrity. Neighbors cross the
street to shake his hand and point from afar. Mr. Obama rolls his eyes.
“Look, I don’t want to sound too noble:
The first time you’re on the cover of Time magazine and the crowds are
cheering, that’s not bad, right?” he says on the airplane. “But one
thing I’ve learned about myself is that the surface glitter, the vanity
element of this campaign, becomes less satisfying as I go along.”
That
sounds too easy. He does not evince Bill Clinton’s animal need to work
a rope line until every sweaty hand is shaken. But he has taken just 11
years to run the course from state senator to the first black
presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, and holds thousands
spellbound, and that suggests an ambition that runs swift and powerful.
As a banker who plays basketball with Mr. Obama notes, he starts off
quietly but he is known for talking a little smack if his shots are
falling in.
It is not easy to sort out.
The Obamas’ friends are black and white, upper-middle class to wealthy,
University of Chicago law professors and historians and lawyers and
foundation types. When the news media calls, they put the shovel only
so deep in the ground of revelation.
‘It’s like I’m just the excuse’
You return to that question again: You really don’t read profiles of yourself?
Mr.
Obama was sitting on his campaign plane a few months ago as it began
the rumble down yet another runway to yet another campaign stop. He
shakes his head but it sounds hard to believe; this introspective
candidate ignores all those words? A reporter reads aloud from the
novelist Darryl Pinckney’s essay in The New York Review of Books. Mr.
Obama, the novelist writes, “comes across as someone who stored away
for future consideration practically everything that was ever said to
him, and who had a talent for watchfulness, part of the extraordinary
armor he developed at an early age.”
Mr.
Obama nods. That’s intriguing. But he prefers his own riff, which not
incidentally trains the eye not on him but on his crowds. “I love when
I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over
hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and
Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each
other as much as on me."
He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.
“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”
This article, Calm in the Swirl of History, first appeared in The New York Times.
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