HE WAS only six years old and displaced in Jakarta, didn't know the other kids and didn't speak their language. He was the only foreign child in town, and towering over the rest he was hard to miss.
Most of them were freaked out by young Barack Obama, and one day they decided to do something about it. A large group of them jumped on him, picked him up, carried him to the nearby lake and, without caring if he could swim or not, flung him in.
Obama was underwater for the longest time. Where was he? What had happened? When eventually he surfaced there wasn't a look of anger in his eyes or a face of thunder. There was a broad smile and a hearty laugh. In that moment the distance between him and his peers narrowed to nothing. Suddenly they thought he was cool, a boy they wanted to be around. By reacting the way he did, Obama had won them over. Is it possible to be a politician at six?
He remembers lots of things from his four years in Jakarta. He remembers having a pet monkey called Tata. He remembers watching flash floods swamp the countryside, remembers farmers and their children running to protect their goats and their hens as bits of their wooden homes were washed away in the rain. He wondered about the injustice of it.
Aged ten, he moved to Honolulu, the city of his birth, where he was raised by his grandparents and won a scholarship to attend the exclusive Punahou prep school. Black kids didn't usually go to Punahou. White folk often mistook him for a car-park attendant, and he suffered racism. He was very aware of the low expectations people in the neighbourhood had of him. "People were satisfied," he says, "so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. Such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered black man who didn't seem angry."
Obama says he had to reconcile the different threads of his life. He was scared of not belonging. He found a way to flit coomfortably between his black and white worlds. Even at school was he auditioning for the White House?
Later. Much, much later. After Columbia University and Harvard. After working with the poor on the south side of Chicago as a community organiser and civil rights lawyer, after publishing his first book, Dreams From My Father, a journey through his thoughts on race and identity and his relationship with the father who left his mother when he was two and who he never knew – bar one meeting and some letters before his father's death in a car crash in Kenya when Obama was 21. After all of that, we come to the evening of March 21, 2000, when as the junior senator of Illinois, Obama looked over the edge of an old ferry boat docked in Lake Michigan, off downtown Chicago, and wondered if his political career had just sunk into the drink in his adopted city.
That night, only a handful of people wanted to know him. Only key aides in his failed bid for Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives turned up for his wake on the lake. Dan Shomon, an ally, wondered if somebody was going to bring out a coffin, such was the depression hanging over the Obama camp. He was 38 years old, and suddenly he was having doubts about his own ability to bring about change. The campaign in that Democratic primary was extraordinarily bruising. Obama picked a fight with the wrong guy, the veteran Bobby Rush, himself a black man. Rush buried him, cast all sorts of suspicion on his character, painted him as the candidate of middle-class white liberals. The third black man in the race, Donne Trotter, had little time for Obama either. "Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in a black face in our community," he said at the time.
Obama was routed. Humiliated. "It's impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don't quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word 'loser' is flashing through people's minds," he wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope.
All around Obama, people wanted him to get out of politics, everyone including the next First Lady. "My hope was that, okay, enough of this, now let's explore these other avenues for having impact and making a little money so that we could start saving for our future and building up the college fund for our girls," she says.
Some people claim they knew all along that he was different; special in some way. Laurence Tribe taught Obama constitutional law at Harvard. "I've known senators and presidents. I've never known anyone with what seems to me more raw political talent," he says. After Harvard, Obama declined big-money offers from large firms, and joined Miner, Barnhall & Galland, a civil rights group in Chicago. "There aren't many blindingly talented people," says George Galland Jnr. "And most of them are a pain in the ass. Barack is the whole package."
But to most of America the awakening would come years later, beginning in Boston on July 27, 2004, and a speech about hope and change he gave to the Democratic convention. His vision of the future and his aura stunned the audience. From that night on, Obama was heading for the White House.
Soon he became a phenomenon. Joe Klein, the celebrated author of the political novel Primary Colors, recounts a scene from a rally in 2006. "A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the senator's sleeve. 'Oh my God! Oh my God! I just touched a future president'. She is literally shaking with delight."
Klein went on a road-trip and encountered all sorts of people. Bill Gluba, a real estate salesman in Iowa, compared Obama to Bobby Kennedy campaigning for the White House in 1968. "I was just a teenaged kid," says Gluba, "but I'll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it – until this guy."
As one Democrat loyalist says, "You wait your whole life preparing for Bobby Kennedy to walk in the door. And then one day, he walks in the door."
By 2006, the Obama team realised that something magical was happening around them. One of the eureka moments came at a focus group meeting in Chicago, when a 70-year-old was told Obama's life story – the hard-working mother from Kansas, the Kenyan Muslim dad (a goat-herder-cum-economist), the heroic grandmother who was such an influence, the young man who came up the hard way – and immediately clasped her hand to her chest and said, "Be still, my heart. Be still, my heart." She hadn't even seen a picture or video of Obama, didn't know what he looked like. "All we'd done," says the aide, "was tell her the story."
The story is enough for many people. The story and the man and the times we live in. Nine out of ten Americans think their country is heading in the wrong direction. The nation is on its knees in so many ways, run down by the disastrous presidency of George Bush. What do they know about his successor's ability to turn things round? Not a lot.
So much is unproven. Everything is taken on trust, which is remarkable. People want to believe him. It's a faith thing. Obama has been asking Americans to take a leap with him, and they have. They see in him what they want to see, they flock to him because of what they hope he could be. Obama is not emotional in public but he inspires all kinds of adoration. Even when announcing the death of his beloved grandmother last week, he was in control. Of course, there was great warmth in his words, but there was great strength too. You looked at him and saw a human being, but above all, a man, a leader.
His oratory is genius. The tone of it is pitch-perfect. On the campaign trail, press and public alike have compared him to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Jesus, such is his ability to move people. It shows the hysteria his presence creates. What resonates most is his optimism. People want a piece of that. They want a piece of him and the promise he holds. "Normally the sight of prospective voters muttering platitudes about hope and change would make any reporter erupt with derisive laughter," wrote Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. "But at Obama events one hears outbursts of optimism so desperate and artless that I can't help but check my cynical instinct. Grown men and women look at you with puppy-dog eyes and all but beg you not to sh*t on their dreams. It's odd to say, but it's actually moving."
When Obama went to Harvard he said he wanted to learn all about "power's currency". He did just that. Shortly after he was elected to the US Senate, in 2004, he lived for a few days a week in a one-bedroom apartment near Capitol Hill. On his first morning in Washington, he realised he had forgotten to buy a shower curtain. Telling the story against himself, he cut a hopeless figure crouching in the tub to avoid flooding the floor.
The next time he takes up residence in Washington, shower curtains should not be a problem.
Natural-born leaderWHETHER he's in his uniform of dark, two-button suit and white dress shirt or splashing among the surf showing off his well-defined pecs, the adjective that best sums up Barack Obama's style is smooth.
That's not just a description of his appearance, but his personality too. Laid-back and personable, he has been nicknamed No Drama Obama by his staff, who say they rarely hear him raise his voice.
His slick, easy-going style has its roots in an upbringing that saw him raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, and his surf capital birthplace of Honolulu can be credited with his devotion to fitness – the 47-year-old Illinois senator didn't miss a morning gym session, even during the campaign's busiest moments.
As well as being the first black president, Obama also has strong links with Africa, particularly Kenya. His father, Barack Obama Senior, was born in the country, which has declared a national holiday in the wake of his election as the first black US president.
With Kenyan, Indonesian, African American, English and possibly Cherokee heritage, the Obamas will be the first multi-racial First Family.
Obama's father left his mother two years after his son was born, and the president elect met him only once before his death in a car accident in 1982. Rather than experiencing the absence of his father as a void in his life, Obama has instead focused on the strong women in his family, his single-minded mother Ann Dunham and grandmother Madelyn Dunham.
Meanwhile, his wife Michelle's revelation that, as part of the division of labour in their house, Obama does the grocery shopping, won't have done him any harm with female voters. "It was women, then, who provided the ballast in my life."
As the father of two young children, Obama has had to juggle politics and pleasure, and while serving in the Senate he made it a priority to try to travel home to see his wife and daughters every weekend. "If I ever thought this was ruining my family, I wouldn't do it," he has said, and one of his first acts on winning the election was to tell his kids that a new puppy would be joining them in the White House.
Promises and challengesAS HE addressed his throngs of supporters, Barack Obama left little doubt that he was aware of what lies ahead. The challenges, he said, included "two wars, a planet in peril (and) the worst financial crisis in a century". In the coming days, he will put together a team in a bid to make good on his promises.
Key to his campaign has been an exit strategy for two wars. He will, he says, attempt to stabilise Iraq, avoid all-out civil war and ultimately extinguish the insurgence and bring the troops home. For Afghanistan, he has outlined plans to send in more troops and finish the fight with al-Qaeda. In the months to come, he must face the reality of these strategies head on, as well as dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Closer to home, he wants to introduce new rules for healthcare, which include affording a wider percentage of people access to medical insurance. Energy is also high on the agenda, including plans to wean America off its dependency on oil – Obama has voiced hopes that 25% of America's energy will come from renewable sources by 2025.
Sociopolitically, it is also imperative for the new president to try to unite the parties.
Stabilising the economic downturn will be Obama's biggest challenge, with plans for tax breaks for lower-income families and more relief for the middle classes on the list of priorities, with Obama promising tax cuts to 95% of Americans. All this is a daunting task for a man staring in the face of mounting budget deficits, which are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
