Barack Obama: Calm in the Swirl of History

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Barack Obama: Calm in the Swirl of History
By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: June 4, 2008

He gives the appearance of a strikingly laid-back victor, this presumptive Democratic presidential nominee....

Mr. 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.

On the cusp of becoming the first African-American to capture a major party nomination, Mr. 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 the war in 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, and that his full measure as a politician has yet to be taken....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/us/politics/04obama.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all