Destiny's Child

Obama's ascent from rookie senator to presidential contender is one of the more startling and sudden acts in recent political history. Those around him aren't quite sure what has happened, and neither, for that matter, is the senator himself. Obama says he experienced the change as a call from the crowds that always stalk him, a summoning to a new role. First there was Hurricane Katrina, when the talk shows called him, assuming he had something to say. Then there were the throngs that lined the roads on his trip to Africa last summer, and the same excitement from domestic audiences on his book tour last fall. "I realized I didn't feel comfortable standing on the sidelines when so much was at stake," he tells me. "It was hard to maintain the notion that I was a backbencher." The early, wonkish humility was gone, replaced by a man who began to speak of himself in sprawling, historic terms. "Just being the president is not a good way of thinking about it," Obama says now. "You want to be a great president."

It is early January, a few weeks before Obama is set to announce his campaign for the presidency. He is sitting in his Senate office, dangling one leg over the other knee and speaking very, very slowly. It's not just that Obama searches for the right word; it's that the search seems to take him to distant worlds. When I first interviewed him last summer, his office was quiet and offbeat, a warren of tiny corridors and desks, the atmosphere of a faculty lounge. Now the place is intense, the faces drawn, the harried feel of a war room.

Most politicians come to national prominence at the head of a movement: Bill Clinton had neoliberalism, George W. Bush had compassionate conservatism, Reagan had supply-side economics. Even Obama's rivals have political calling cards: John Edwards has devoted himself to a poverty-fighting populism, Hillary Clinton is defined by a hawkish centrism. These identities give them infrastructures, ideologies, natural bases of support. Obama is trying to pull a less-conventional trick: to turn his own person into a movement. "I'm not surprised you're having trouble categorizing him," one of his aides says. "I don't think he's wedded to any ideological frame." With Obama, there is only the man himself — his youth, his ease, his race, his claim on the new century. His candidacy is essentially a plea for voters to put their trust in his innate capacity for clarity and judgment. There is no Obama-ism, only Obama.

"People don't come to Obama for what he's done in the Senate," says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "They come because of what they hope he could be." What Obama stands for, if anything, is not yet clear. Everywhere he goes he is greeted by thrilled crowds, trailed constantly by a reporter from The Chicago Tribune who is writing a book about the senator with a preliminary title so immodest that it embarrassed even Obama's staff: The Savior. The danger here is that the public has committed the cardinal sin of political love, forcing Obama onto the national stage before knowing him well enough to gauge whether he's ready for it. The candidate they see before them is their own creation — or, rather, it is the scrambling of a skinny, serious, self-reflective man trying to mold his public's conflicted yearnings into something greater. "Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test," says Cassandra Butts, a friend of the senator's from law school and now a leader at the Center for American Progress. "People see in him what they want to see."

The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city's far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like. There's the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones. "Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!" There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"