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.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. Obama remains a protean political figure, inspiring devotion in supporters who see him as a transformative leader even as he remains inscrutable to critics. 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 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.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 TV that he is a “regular guy.”The Obamas’ friends are black and white, upper-middle class to wealthy, University of Chicago law professors and historians and lawyers. When the news media calls, they put the shovel only so deep in the ground of revelation.You return to that question again: You really don’t read profiles of yourself?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. 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.” 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 han— “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.”
