Obama madness: is the junior Illinois senator the Democrats' savior?

IN late October, during the home stretch of the most intensely contested midterm election in years, many Democrats seemed to drop everything, forget about 2006, and fall into a swoon over somebody who is not, at the moment, running for anything. Illinois senator Barack Obama appeared on Oprah, Meet the Press, and the cover of Time--in a story headlined "Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President"--and in no time found himself anointed the Future of the Democratic Party.

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Or maybe even more than that. The online magazine Slate flatly declared that in the course of ten days Obama "turned American politics upside down." Time's Joe Klein called him "the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy." Other admirers threw around phrases like "American idol" and "rock star."

The Obama boomlet just happened to coincide with the publication of the senator's new book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. And sure enough, with Oprah's help, the book shot to number one on the Amazon.com sales chart. But the wave of publicity was much more than book hype. The speed with which some Democrats and their allies in the press rushed to embrace Obama said more about the state of the party and its presidential prospects than about Obama himself. And what it said was: We're really, really nervous about Hillary Clinton.

"There is a ton of nervousness about Hillary," says a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. "There are a lot of people looking for an alternative, and they don't see it yet." Everybody knows the problem: Mrs. Clinton has tons of money, huge name recognition, and a big organization, yet a significant number of Democrats believe she is unelectable, given the baggage that she carries from her husband's years in the White House. For those Democrats, the first contest of the 2008 Democratic presidential race will be to determine who becomes what the strategist calls the "anti-Hillary."

For a while, former Virginia governor Mark Warner looked like a front-runner for that honor. Then Warner pulled out, confessing that he just didn't want it bad enough to undergo the trials of a campaign. Former senator John Edwards is another candidate, having emerged from the party's 2004 loss mostly untouched. Perhaps even John Kerry is in the running, although it's not clear Democrats would give him another chance. Whatever the case, now they've all got Obama to contend with. "He gets even with those guys just by getting in," says the strategist.

But what if Obama won the race to be the anti-Hillary, and then won the Democratic nomination? Were that to happen, Democrats would almost certainly go from being extremely nervous about Hillary to being extremely nervous about Obama. Because for all we've read about him--at age 45, he has already written two books about himself--we don't really know that much about the junior senator from Illinois.

All many of us know is that Obama has, in the phrase his admirers use a lot, a "compelling life story." But Obama's biography is not what we might normally describe as compelling. He has not overcome great deprivation, tragedy, or hardship. When he was born in Honolulu in 1961, his mother and father were students at the University of Hawaii. The father, who was black, was from Kenya; the mother, who was white, from Kansas. (Obama has joked that he worried his political career was over after 9/11 because his name sounded too much like Osama. In fact, it's better than that: Named after his father, his full name is Barack Hussein Obama Jr.) His parents divorced when Obama was two, and his mother, who earned a Ph.D. in anthropology, took him to Jakarta when she married another student, this one from Indonesia. When he was ten, Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and attended an elite prep school. He went to Occidental College and then to Columbia University, and then to Harvard Law School. He ended up in Chicago, working in community activism and teaching at the University of Chicago. In 1996, he won election to the Illinois state senate; in 2004, he won his current seat.

A success story, certainly. But compelling? Perhaps exotic, as Obama himself has sometimes called it, but not the stuff of John McCain. In a presidential race, Obama will have to rely on more than just his biography. And what is there? Yes, he has won election to the U.S. Senate, but that was in a race--if it qualifies to be called that--in which the Republican candidate destroyed himself in scandal and was replaced by stand-in Alan Keyes, who ran a laughable campaign. All in all, not exactly a trial by fire. "He's never been tested, never been scrutinized," the Democratic strategist says of Obama. "There's never been anyone who's pored through his past the way the Republicans will. He would be a stronger candidate if he had gone through that crucible of fire."

But he hasn't. And he won't before 2008. So rather than impressing the Democratic strategists who are looking for a scrapper (the left-wing blogosphere, for one, doesn't like him, thinking he's too much of a get-along guy), Obama appeals to the ones who are looking for a thinker. In June 2001, when Obama was still in the Illinois senate, Will Marshall, a top official of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, visited him in Chicago. Marshall had heard good things about Obama and wanted to get a firsthand look. They talked about social policy after welfare reform, about the effects of globalization, about a number of DLC-type issues. "I was deeply impressed," Marshall says. "He has an analytical capacity, but he doesn't talk like a wonk--sort of like Clinton." Bill, that is.

As good as that may sound, the fact is that Obama hasn't done a whole lot in his two years in the Senate, and he probably won't do much in two more years in the Senate. "If he had gone from state senator to governor, and he had served one term as governor and was running for president, it would be a much more compelling case [for running in 2008]," says the Democratic strategist. "Then he would have been in a situation in which he was a final decision-maker." It would be nice, in other words, if Obama had ever run something. But he hasn't.

Obama's fans don't necessarily disagree with that. "Is four years [in the Senate] enough?" asks Will Marshall. "It may be too many. Long service in the Senate doesn't necessarily prepare you well for the rigors of a presidential campaign and for crafting a broad message." Marshall didn't say so, but one can just ask Joe Biden or Christopher Dodd. In 2008, the people advising Obama might say to him: Run now, before the Senate ruins you.

He has time to wait--at 45, assuming he stays healthy, Obama could plausibly run in any race until 2028--but 2008 is possibly a unique opportunity. There's no incumbent, no locked-in front-runner on the Democratic side. But if Democrats win, there will be an incumbent in 2012, and possibly in 2016 and 2020, too. If Obama believes Democrats have a good chance to win in 2008--well, now is the time to go.

In late October, Clemson University conducted a poll of presidential candidates in South Carolina, an important state for Democrats who hope to broaden the party's appeal at the presidential level. Among state Democrats, 98 percent knew of Hillary Clinton, and 69 percent had a favorable opinion of her. It was the highest favorable opinion in the field, with the exception of Barack Obama. Just 59 percent of those polled recognized his name, but of them, 82 percent had a favorable opinion.

If Obama runs, the 59 percent will go up, and the 82 percent will go down. And he'll finally undergo the test that will show whether he can live up to his hype, or whether he is better suited to the world of Oprah than to hand-to-hand politics.