Destiny's Child

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright."

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church — the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

Obama has now spent two years in the Senate and written two books about himself, both remarkably frank: There is a desire to own his story, to be both his own Boswell and his own investigative reporter. When you read his autobiography, the surprising thing — for such a measured politician — is the depth of radical feeling that seeps through, the amount of Jeremiah Wright that's packed in there. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Obama's life story is a splicing of two different roles, and two different ways of thinking about America's. One is that of the consummate insider, someone who has been raised believing that he will help to lead America, who believes in this country's capacity for acts of outstanding virtue. The other is that of a black man who feels very deeply that this country's exercise of its great inherited wealth and power has been grossly unjust. This tension runs through his life; Obama is at once an insider and an outsider, a bomb thrower and the class president. "I'm somebody who believes in this country and its institutions," he tells me. "But I often think they're broken."

Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, back when the Hawaiian islands were still a wary and weird part of America, half military base, half pan-Pacific outpost. His own background was even more singular and chancy: Obama's father was a Muslim from Kenya, the son of a farmer, who grew up tending his father's goats and who, through an almost impossible succession of luck, won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii. At the time, Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, was eighteen, a student at the university, the daughter of a blue-collar couple from Kansas. When Barack was two, his father left the family and returned to Kenya. Barack's mother remarried, moving with her son to her new husband's home in Indonesia.

To Barack, the country seemed exotic (he briefly owned a pet monkey named Tata) but also "unpredictable and often cruel." He recalls watching floods swamp the countryside and seeing the "desperation" of poor farm families who "scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away." (In January, the conservative online magazine Insight alleged that Obama had attended a hyper-religious Islamic madrassah as a child in Indonesia — a charge that the senator has denied.)

Obama spent four years in Jakarta before moving back to Honolulu, where he lived with his grandparents and won a scholarship to the private Punahou Academy, the place in Hawaii where all the Ivy League-bound kids go. (In his autobiography, he notes that when he hung out with a black friend, they together comprised "almost half" of the African-American population of Punahou.) He cops to "experimentation" as a teen, saying he smoked weed and even did "a little blow." He played basketball — "with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent." Even today, his friends say, Obama talks a mean game. "He's a bit of a trash-talker," says Butts. "You see that competitive side of him come out when he's playing Scrabble or basketball."

After graduating from Columbia University, Obama spent four years as a street-level organizer in Chicago, where he met and worked with Wright, before attending Harvard Law School, where he was made the first black president of the law review. Winning the position required political savvy: "He was able to work with conservatives as well as liberals," recalls his friend Michael Froman, now an executive at Citigroup. Laurence Tribe, the renowned constitutional scholar, considers Obama one of his two best students ever: "He had a very powerful ability to synthesize diverse sources of information."

When Obama returned to Chicago, he turned down big-money firms to take a job with a small civil rights practice, filing housing discrimination suits on behalf of low-income residents and teaching constitutional law on the side. He had thought he might enter politics since before he left for law school, and eventually he did, winning a seat in the state Senate at the age of thirty-seven.