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"What the naysayers don't understand," said Barack Obama, "is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you."
It was a striking line in his August convention speech. Obama evidently believed it, but only in one sense was he right.
After a ruinous start to the 21st century, Americans, anxious and disillusioned, are desperate to feel good about their country again. But it was Obama who tapped into their malaise, articulated it, shared it, and pointed a way out of it.
The election was very much about him.
He is a man who would change the political scheme of things simply by being who and what he is – a thoughtful consensus builder whose eloquence and calm authority has impressed the whole world, not just the United States.
People talk about American exceptionalism, but there is an exceptionalism about Obama. His victory is a racial milestone. But it now becomes irrelevant. There isn't a black way or white way of fixing the fault lines in the U.S. or balancing the foreign-policy problems coiled in wait that only begin, not end, with Iraq.
Obama may be part of the new, post-civil rights generation, a transformative figure to blacks, but he doesn't accept definition by skin colour. As he said at the 2004 Democratic convention when he first drew major attention:
"There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America – there's the United States of America."
He meant it.
an obama presidency would be defined by his first-rate intellect and even-keeled temperament, say those who've tracked him over the years.
His approach is to draw the best out of the people he's working with, mediate their inevitable differences, then make a judgment call. His cabinet will likely be the kind of "brain trust" unseen since the glory days of JFK.
"With anyone else, I'd say that given the inherent problems, it's going to be a failed presidency," says Joan Hoff, a presidential historian and author. "But Obama conveys a reflective intelligence, and that's what we need right now."
Hoff always votes third party on principle, but says she likes the "calming effect" he has on people, herself included. That, and the fact he's a multilateralist, not a Cold Warrior. She's less sanguine about his ability to repair the broken economy, but predicts he'll do something dramatic very early in his tenure, like shut down the Guantanamo Bay military prison.
Those who know Obama say there is nothing pre-packaged about him. He is an idealist, but a highly pragmatic one: if a plan works in theory but not on the ground, he'll find another option, or another after that, until the problem is solved.
Judy Erwin was a Democratic senator in the Illinois legislature when Obama was elected there in 1996. She says he sought out and worked easily with legislators from all over – the coalmining districts, farming centres, old manufacturing towns.
"He's an extraordinary person, a bridge-builder, terrific at finding consensus. Even the Republicans ended up liking him."
Time and again, Erwin noted his natural empathy, how attuned he is to people's feelings: "When he philosophically disagreed with someone, he always respected their point of view. He'll be so good for us internationally."
Obama's slender frame belies an inner toughness. Highly disciplined both in work and private, daily gym sessions are sacrosanct. He gave up smoking at the start of the long, stressful campaign – the price an ambivalent Michelle Obama exacted for joining him on his improbable journey.
Despite an often aloof demeanour, he does occasionally kick back (nothing is better than a pick-up basketball game). At the state legislature, he and a few others set up a weekly poker game conveniently called "The Committee Meeting." Shop talk was banned. Obama would show up in sweat pants and a baseball cap, drink a beer, cadge cigarettes.
"If his style of poker is like how he'll run the White House, I'll sleep well at night," Senator Terry Link has recalled. "He's very conscious of the odds. If he thought he had a chance of winning he'd stay in the game; if he thought not he'd fold straight away."
He's politically savvy, to be sure, says an old Chicago friend, Jay Doherty, but genuinely knows how to connect with people one-to-one. The standard politico's "looking over your shoulder for someone more important" just isn't in his character, says the Irish-American head of the City Club of Chicago.
"When Barack talks to you he really focuses on you," says Doherty, pronouncing the name Chicago-style, Braack. "He makes you think you're saying the most important thing in the world."
And when he speaks, people listen, intently. After his first primary win back in January in the freezing depths of virtually all-white Iowa, Obama drew roars of approval and not a few tears when he said:
"Years from now, when the world sees America differently, and America sees itself as a nation less divided and more united, you'll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began ... when we finally beat back the politics of fear and doubt and cynicism, (where) we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up. This was the moment."
his "exotic" background has been raked over repeatedly. But it's true that Obama would bring a rare multicultural perspective to the Oval Office.
He was born in 1961 in Honolulu to a Kansas-born mother and a Kenyan father who had met at the University of Hawaii. His father left the marriage when Obama was two, seeing him only once again eight years later.
His free-spirited mother, Ann Dunham, a humanitarian aid-worker, led an unconventional life. In 1967, with Barack and her second husband, an Indonesian Muslim, she moved to Jakarta to work on microcredit projects with the poor. His half-sister Maya was born there. When that marriage in turn ended in 1971, the three returned to Hawaii. But when Obama was 13, Ann returned to Indonesia.
Barry, as he called himself then, chose to remain in Honolulu, live with his grandparents and finish the private high school he attended. Of its 1,600 students, only five were black, none biracial. He's written that his time there helped him mould his identity. He was half-white, surrounded by white relatives, but looked black – and he knew that would shape his future.
"There was always a joke between my mom and Barack that he would be the first black president," Maya Soetoro-Ng has said. "He's always been restless. There was always somewhere else he needed to go."
In 1995, Ann Dunham died of cancer at age 53: "What is best in me I owe to her," he's said.
in 1985, two years out of Columbia University with a poli sci degree, Obama was toying with being a writer when he met Gerald Kellman, a Chicago community activist. He accepted his job offer to head the Developing Communities Project in Chicago's South Side, the largest black community in the U.S.
"I was offering him $10,000 a year and two grand for a car," Kellman recently recalled. "I remember thinking: someone who was smart enough to do it should have been smart enough not to do it." But Obama was motivated by a desire to learn and hungry for hands-on experience.
He spent three years trying to improve living conditions in the chronically depressed area. It was here that he learned community organizing wasn't enough: laws had to be changed. He also realized just how ambitious he was.
In 1988, he entered Harvard Law School – the "elite" part of his life sniped at by Hillary Clinton – courtesy of student loans. His constitutional law prof, Larry Tribe, recently said he's still struck by Obama's open mind, his "confidence in his own moral compass and a maturity that came from some combination of his upbringing and earlier experience ... There isn't a fibre of phoniness about this guy."
His debating skills, equanimity and affinity for hard work were also evident to other students. In his second year, he was elected the first black president of the renowned Harvard Law Review. Part of the arrangement was a book contract.
Obama could have had his pick of East Coast law firms, but in 1991, he returned to Chicago. After his peripatetic youth, it now was "home" and, a year later, he married Michelle Robinson, a Harvard law grad as well.
He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, then worked for a downtown law firm specializing in civil rights. The book contract was fulfilled when, rather precociously at 33, he unexpectedly produced a memoir, Dreams From My Father, which he explored his African heritage and its impact on him.
If you were a black male in America, he wrote, "people were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved – such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time."
In 1996, Obama won a seat in the Illinois Senate. He served there until 2004, pushing through bills expanding early childhood education and police videotaping of interrogations. With their two daughters, he and Michelle moved into their "dream house" in Chicago's exclusive Hyde Park. But he was becoming a time-pressured workaholic, he told biographer David Mendell:
"There are times when I want to do everything and be everything. I want to have time to read and swim with the kids and not disappoint my voters and do a really careful job on everything I do."
In 2000, he made a failed bid for Congress, but four years later, ran again, winning handily. The U.S. Senate would be the launch-pad for his subsequent remarkable rise to the summit.
As president, he would face the tyranny of exceedingly high expectations. Given America's position in the world, they'll be coming from all directions. But odds are, they say, he would cope just fine.
