An Exclusive Interview With Barack Obama (page 2 of 4)

Struggles of His Own

Today Obama stands before the electorate, poised to break all campaign fund-raising records. He has exhilarated African American voters, galvanized young people, and transfigured himself into the politician with perhaps the greatest crossover appeal in U.S. political history. He enters the summer conventions leading Republican nominee John McCain nationally, as well as in key battleground states, and stands seemingly on the threshold of history.

However, he is not, despite his momentum, a perfect candidate.

Contrary to a pernicious e-mailing campaign during the primaries, Obama has never been a Muslim. But the black liberation theology of his Chicago-based Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, caused no end of grief to Obama and the campaign, and he quit his church earlier this year.

Also, although disciplined and cool, Obama occasionally embarks on flights of rhetorical fancy. He suggested that some white voters "cling" to guns, religion, and racism because of a stagnant economy, an assertion that led to accusations of elitism. Once, he asserted that more young African Americans are "languishing" in prison than attending college. This is wrong by a factor of five.

Some of this can be chalked up to inexperience; some of it reflects the polemic style of modern campaigning in which candidates exhibit little compunction about taking liberties with their opponents' reputations while burnishing their own.

In 2005, shortly after assuming his duties as a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama compared himself to Lincoln. "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat -- in all this he reminded me … of my own struggles," Obama said.

This was a bit much for conservatives, and yet Lincoln is where conversations about Obama often wind up -- with good reason. His candidacy offers Americans a chance to reap the ultimate fruit of the Great Emancipator's actions during the Civil War.

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns invoked Lincoln's candidacy while explaining his preference for Obama: "If you were a pundit in the 1850s, you would be certain that the country needed an old pro. What the country actually needed was a relatively -- or so it seemed -- inexperienced, young wiry figure from Illinois."

Even some of those close to John McCain express such feelings.

Mark McKinnon, a Texas Democrat turned George W. Bush advisor, helped McCain get the Republican nomination. But he told McCain at the outset of the campaign that Obama was the one Democrat he would not work against. "Barack Obama is a walking, talking hope machine," said McKinnon. "People see him as a reflection about what is good and great about America. He's like a mirror of what people think we ought to be."

In his brief tenure in the Senate, Obama has compiled a liberal voting record -- even for a Democrat -- and has yet to break with his party on any significant issue. But it is also undeniable that he appeals rhetorically to the impulses that unite Americans, to what Abraham Lincoln himself termed "the better angels of our nature."

Lincoln spoke those words at his first inaugural while warning the nation of the deep cost to be paid if we stopped listening to one another and took up arms. Americans today are not nearly at the point of civil war, but we are not civil with one another either. This is what Obama says he'd like to change, and it is a powerful call.

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