DENVER, Aug 28, 2008
Obama: The Journey Of A Confident Man
Politico: Lots Of People In Obama's Life Predicted His Success Story
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Photo Essay
Barack Obama
A look at the life and meteoric rise of the president-elect.
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Photo Essay
Obama Claims Nomination
Barack Obama secures the Democratic presidential nomination in historic race against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
It is natural to describe Barack Obama's flight from obscure state senator to presidential nominee, from a head-turning 2004 speech in Boston to the pinnacle of American politics in Denver in 2008, as a success story beyond imagination.
Except that’s not true.
Lots of people in Obama’s life not only imagined it, they flatly predicted it. And they said so years before Obama sprang on the national scene as part of a personality-driven phenomenon virtually unprecedented in this country’s presidential history.
“If there is someone who wore fate on his sleeve, it is Barack Obama,” said former Illinois Sen. Denny Jacobs, who served with Obama and played poker with him. “You could see it happen. You could feel it. It was a matter of time.”
There is a whiff of the mystical in Jacobs’s premonition of Obama’s destiny as leader.
But that misty, glittery terrain is precisely the ground on which Democrats have chosen to wage the 2008 presidential election.
It is a choice freighted with risks. It depends on winning, over the next ten weeks, many Americans whom polls show are reluctant to embrace a movement that places its faith in intangible qualities - charisma, vision, capacity for growth - rather than in such prosaic traits as national experience or long-term identification with a policy agenda.
Obama’s remarkable ascent has been fueled by two main engines.
The first is Obama’s own preternatural self-assurance. It is a seemingly imperturbable belief in his own rhetorical and intellectual gifts.
The second is the willingness of Democrats to invest in a particular notion of the presidency - that it is an inspirational office more than an administrative one, one that rewards the skills of the preacher more than those of the policy expert or legislative tactician.
These engines each have produced their own powerful backdrafts: Obama’s poise, to the eyes of skeptics, can too often curdle into arrogance.
And Republicans have served notice plainly that they will cast Obama and his partisans as a frivolous movement, lacking in substance and naive about the obligations of a commander in chief.
For now, though, hours away from Obama’s acceptance speech before an expected 80,000 people at Invesco Field, his story is a remarkable testament to the power of self-confidence.
These days, of course, his self-confidence is bolstered by many validators.
At a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Obama “a leader that God has blesses us with at this time.”
This is a theme echoed by supporters from the outset, despite Obama saying on the trail that the campaign isn't about him. Michelle Obama leads the way. The word she invokes in speeches about her husband is “special,” as in last summer in Iowa, when she rhapsodized that there was “something very special about this man.”
He understood earlier than most Democrats that the Iraq war was a mistake, she said, “because he’s special.”
To spend time in Obama’s campaign orbit, as this reporter has done since before the Iowa caucuses, is to see constant reminders, in both public and private moments, of his poise. Sometimes it comes off as the signature of a well-grounded man, who seems not to have the kind of hyperkinetic neediness of many politicians. Other times it simply looks brash.
At the same San Francisco fundraiser where Pelosi suggested his candidacy was divinely inspired, Obama said coolly, “I will win, don’t worry about that.”
In July, Obama smiled and offered a one-word answer when asked during a CBS interview whether he ever had doubts about his foreign policy experience: “Never.”
When he walks through a hotel lobby in the morning to catch a workout, Obama retreats with ease into an inward-lookng zone. He wears headphones and buries his head in a newspaper, bothering to look up only when shouts or cheering from onlookers becomes too loud to ignore.
By the end of Obama’s overseas trip last summer, which featured an adoring crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, an Obama sticker affixed to the wall of the campaign plane’s media cabin had been defaced: “Worship me,” it read, under a drawing of his face. (Someone has since tried to scrub the sticker clean.)
By now, the basic stepping stones of Obama’s biography are well-known: the bright child of a single mother, the Harvard Law School standout, the community organizer and rising, restless politician from Chicago.
What is less appreciated is how each of these chapters contributed to and reinforced Obama’s desire to succeed and his apparent sense of self-destiny.
At the outset, it was his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who built him up.
Fearful that her son would feel alienated as an African-American growing up in a white household in Hawaii, his mother reinforced Obama’s esteem at every turn. He moved between cultures and races as a child, learning lessons that would inform his political rise decades later.
“Barry was given a lesson that he would consume over and over: His unique racial ancestry made him someone who certainly was not to be ostracized or shunned. Far from it - he was a special person worthy of others’ deep admiration,’” Obama biographer David Mendell wrote in the 2007 book, “From Power to Promise.”
Obama traces his ambition to the successes - and shortcomings - of his Kenyan father, who was studying at the University of Hawaii when he met Obama’s mother. His father left when Obama was two years old, but was nonetheless built up by his mother.
She told Obama that he had acquired his intellect from his father, a Harvard-educated economist who, as the senator learned later in life, had fallen short in his own professional and personal pursuits. Barack Obama Sr. married and divorced several times, cycled through a series of government jobs in Kenya and suffered from alcoholism. He died in a car crash in 1982, at 46 years old.
By Carrie Budoff Brown
Copyright 2008 POLITICO
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