Barack Obama: more stuff about the man who will one day be one of our best presidents (we need one after the last lot)

1. Hoosier Daddy
What rising Democratic star Barack Obama can learn from an old lion of the GOP.
By Christina Larson

Many Americans aspire to be president, but only the fewest have a presidential-grade mentor. For those in the market for a guru, however, the Senate has a particularly good track record. In the 1940s, Congressman Gerald Ford learned about Washington and foreign policy from “my hometown hero” Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg. In the 1950s, freshman senator Lyndon Johnson became a “professional son” to Georgia senator Richard Russell. In the 1960s, Senate intern Bill Clinton learned from a figure he'd “admired all my life,” Arkansas Democrat William Fulbright.

Unlike these past relationships, however, the most dynamic duo in Washington today crosses party lines. Old-school realist Richard Lugar, the five-term Republican senator from Indiana, has embraced new-school realist and rising star Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois. The relationship is admiring. “I very much feel like the novice and pupil,” Obama has said of Lugar. And it's warm. Lugar praises Obama's “strong voice and creativity” and calls him “my good friend.” In short, the two agree on much and seem to genuinely like each other. Rather unusual in hyper-partisan Washington, these days.

Like most friendships inside the Beltway, this one involves some mix of affection and career advancement. But it is also built, rather charmingly, on shared wonkish interests. By most accounts, Obama and Lugar's working relationship began with nukes. On the campaign trail in 2004, Obama spoke passionately about the dangers of loose nukes and the legacy of the Nunn-Lugar nonproliferation program, a framework created by a 1991 law to provide the former Soviet republics assistance in securing and deactivating nuclear weapons. Lugar took note, as “nonproliferation” is about as common a campaign sound-bite for aspiring senators as “exchange-rate policy” or “export-import bank oversight.” Soon after Obama won the election, the two men exchanged phone calls. Lugar, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested that the younger senator aim for a seat on the committee; Obama did, successfully.

The two men grew closer in August of 2005, when Obama joined Lugar on a tour of Russia and Eastern Europe to inspect weapons facilities, a trip that Lugar makes annually. For the younger senator, it was a chance to see first-hand the situation that had long unsettled the older statesman. In Kiev, they visited a pathogen laboratory, an unsecured nondescript downtown building, where the senators were shown a storage unit resembling a mini-refrigerator that contained vast rows of test tubes. Some tubes held anthrax; others, the plague. As Obama has recounted the story, “At this point I turned around and said 'Hey, where's Lugar? Doesn't he want to see this?'“ But the older senator was standing in the back of the room, nonchalantly. “Been there, done that,” Lugar said.

The two men were also detained for several hours in the Russian town of Perm, when local border officials suddenly demanded to search the senators' plane. After some angry phone calls from Washington, the plane was released, but, Lugar noted, “it makes you wonder who really is running the country.”

Most important, though, may have been the timing of the senators' visit to Ukraine and Azerbaijan. Russia had chosen that moment to escalate a dispute with Ukraine over national gas by cutting off the pipeline that supplies Russian gas to Ukraine and Germany, threatening the economy of much of Western Europe. Meanwhile Azerbaijan's economy was set to go on steroids with the completion of its own gas pipeline to the West. The trip focused Obama's attention on the tight link between energy resources and national security -- a longtime concern of Lugar's.

Something else unfamiliar happened on the trip -- or at least something that rarely happens in the United States: Lugar overshadowed Obama. In Russia, where Lugar has been a regular visitor for the past 15 years, the senior senator from Indiana received generous media coverage and attention from political leaders, while the junior senator from Illinois sometimes went unrecognized. “If anybody has ever accompanied Senator Lugar on a trip,” Obama would later joke to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, “you know that he is a rock star wherever he goes.”

After returning to Washington, Lugar and Obama co-sponsored legislation to update the Nunn-Lugar program. The resulting law, which expands the nonproliferation program for nuclear arms to conventional weapons and WMDs, is called the Lugar-Obama Act, a name that “virtually rolls off the tongue,” in the approving words of Scripps-Howard columnist Martin Schram. This March, Lugar and Obama introduced the American Fuels Act of 2006, an ambitious bill that would drive investment in biomass ethanol. And, in late July, the two senators were among the co-sponsors of a bill to raise automobile fuel-efficiency standards.

Of course, friendships across the Senate aisle aren't so unusual. (Ted Kennedy once composed a serenade for his teetotalling buddy Orrin Hatch: “Wherever I go/ I know Orrin goes/ no fits, no fights, no feuds, no egos/ amigos/ together.”) But bipartisanship is uncommon in mentor relationships. One might expect Obama, for example, to sidle up to someone like John Kerry, or five-term Michigan Democrat Carl Levin. And Lugar might be expected to take a young Republican whippersnapper under his wing, both in the name of party loyalty and of molding Republicans of the future.

Still, if Obama wants to see any legislation with his name on it pass, then having a Republican teammate makes more sense. Unlike many Democrats in Congress, Lugar has the ability to get a few things done. And, if Lugar is looking to secure his legacy by passing on his moderate, substantive foreign-policy vision to someone who's open-minded, sensible, respectful, and destined for leadership, Obama's not a bad choice. To put it differently, what current Republican freshman would fit the bill?

Indeed, in a political atmosphere where conservatism increasingly appears to be leaving the realm of reason altogether, moderate Republican holdouts like Lugar begin to have more in common with characters across the aisle. While the GOP, led by the White House, has spent most of the decade trying to dismiss global warming as a liberal hoax, Lugar has since the late 1990s been calling for action on the problem and refers to the impasse over the issue as one that “sometimes leaves the science and becomes almost theological.”

One reason Lugar can afford to speak his mind is that, at 74 years old, any ambitions for higher office are now behind him. In 1996, Lugar made a bid for the GOP presidential nomination that didn't go far, and he hasn't run since. Still, the past comes up once in a while. Recently, a Russian newspaper announcing Lugar's visit ran a picture from the 1996 campaign. According to The Chicago Tribune, the campaign photo prompted someone to ask Lugar if he would consider running for president again. The old lion shook his head and passed the torch. “That's for Barack,” he said.

(Christina Larson is the managing editor of The Washington Monthly.)


2. Walking the World Stage
What makes Barack Obama, a man with a meager public record, light the fires of hope from here to the far corners of Africa?
By Ellis Cose (from Newsweek)

It is not too early to pronounce Barack Obama a political phenomenon unlike any previously seen on the American scene. He proved that last week in Kenya, where he was received in a manner more befitting a messiah than a junior senator bearing nothing more than opinions and good cheer. Obama began his two-week African odyssey in South Africa and ended it in Chad, but Kenya (the only country in which his wife and two young daughters accompanied him) was at its literal and emotional center. For it was in Kenya (in a village called Kogelo, Alego, in a district called Siaya), where paternal roots run unbreakably deep, that his father was born. The Luo tribesmen there claim Obama as one of their own; and as his motorcade passed through Kisumu en route to his ancestral village, thousands lined the path.

They wore Obama T shirts and Obama caps, and waved Obama flags. Many climbed trees to catch a glimpse. Others sang songs in his honor. "He's our brother. He's our son," said one man in the throng, and a multitude nodded in agreement. It was much the same in Nairobi the day before, where, during his visit to the memorial park erected at the site of the 1998 Qaeda bombing that destroyed the American Embassy, a rapturous crowd chanted, "Come to us, Obama."

Throughout it all Obama walked an exquisitely fine line. He graciously accepted the homage due a person of immense power while simultaneously making it clear that he essentially has none. As Kenyan adulation poured forth, he admitted—indeed, insisted—that his loyalties lay back home: "I'm the senator from Illinois, not the senator from Kogelo."

The delirium evoked memories of Bill Clinton's 12-day African visit in 1998. But while Clinton came offering apologies—for slavery, for genocide in Rwanda, for America's support of a motley crew of despots—Obama came armed with tough love. "I want to be a truth teller," he told me during a lengthy conversation in Nairobi. And he played that role to the hilt. In South Africa, he scoffed at Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang's home remedies for AIDS. He blasted Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, whose schemes have made a violent mess of his country. And he hit the government in Khartoum for the genocide in Sudan. But his most unrelenting critique was of Kenya. He took the government to task for violating freedom of the press, lectured its citizens on the folly of tribalism and slammed government corruption in a nationally televised speech: "While corruption is a problem we all share, here in Kenya it is a crisis."

Prominent visitors have criticized Kenyan corruption before. But hearing the message from Obama was different. For he was seen not only as a fellow Kenyan standing up to power, but also as a Luo standing up to a Kikuyo—the dominant ethnic group to which President Mwai Kibaki belongs and against which Luo resentment runs deep. And worse, in the government's eyes, at least, he was seen as siding with the opposition—in particular with Raila Odinga, a powerful kingmaker and Luo whose Orange Democratic Movement has been a painful thorn in Kibaki's side. "It is very clear that the senator has been used as a puppet to perpetuate opposition politics," sniffed Kibaki spokesperson Alfred Mutua.

That a man who had been to Kenya only two times previously — and had never been elsewhere on the continent—should stir up such a commotion is astounding; but, then, so has been everything else about Obama's political career. Obama himself seems bemused by the turns of events that have people comparing him with JFK: "I think about the fact that two years before I announced for the U.S. Senate, I got whipped by Bobby Rush in a congressional race." At the time he was dispirited and "flat broke," having suspended his law practice to run for office; his wife was none too happy with his choices. Friends suggested a trip to the 2000 Democratic National Convention as a way of cheering himself up. When he arrived at Los Angeles airport and tried to rent a car, the credit-card company initially refused to approve it. With no official status and no floor pass, he was relegated to the fringes of the convention. Recognizing he was serving "no useful purpose," he came home. "I think about that ... four years later," he said. "I'm not that much smarter. Maybe a little wiser; but not that much smarter ... This stuff is pretty fleeting, ultimately."

Whether it is fleeting in his case remains to be seen, but he is comforted by the fact that the attention has not turned his head. "It's nice ... nice precisely because it happened so fast and because I worked in almost total obscurity for most of my adult life ... [but] I don't find that [celebrity] aspect of my work deeply satisfying." Nonetheless, and despite his formulaic denial of interest in running for president, Obama acknowledges the notion has crossed his mind: "I would be lying if I said I never think about these things. In politics, you want to have impact." And no job has more impact, he didn't have to say, than the presidency of the United States. "At times," said Obama, "I listen to how the debate is being framed and I say, 'That's not right; we can do better than that'."

Why has a man with such a meager public record emerged as this mega-celebrity? The answer lies partly in the kind of society we have become—one that feeds on celebrity like locusts on crops and creates stars out of nothing but bright lights and hype. But also, in this new America, multicultural fluency and ethnic fluidity suddenly have become colossal virtues. Mike Flannery, a Chicago TV political newsman, calls Obama "perfectly bicultural." But he is more than that. With his Kenyan father and Kansas mother, his Hawaiian/Indonesian childhood and Midwestern adulthood, his community-organizer background and Harvard law degree, he is the perfect mirror for a country that craves to see itself as beyond race, beyond boundaries, beyond the ugly parts of its past; he is a candidate with whom virtually anyone can identify. "I have a lot of different pieces of a lot of different people in me," he acknowledged, which leads many people to see him as a unifying figure. "I don't mind that. It is maybe a simplification in terms of who I am," but there is something "hopeful in that that is healthy."

Obama placed himself among a new generation of black politicians with no ceiling on their aspirations: "I feel confident that if you put me in a room with anybody—black, white, Hispanic, Republican, Democrat—give me half an hour and I will walk out with the votes of most of the folks ... I don't feel constrained by race, geography or background in terms of making a connection with people ... When people told me I couldn't win a Senate race in Illinois, I didn't believe them. I didn't believe them because of the groundwork that has been laid by the previous generation."

His political heroes are Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln: "They didn't just practice politics. They changed how people thought about themselves and each other ... They dug really deep into the culture and wrestled with it." But they were also "good politicians."

To the extent that being a good politician means attracting attention and money, Obama has already proved his bona fides. His PAC, the Hope Fund, has pulled in roughly $4 million, and his staff credits him with raising some $6 million for the party and other candidates. Meanwhile his sheen grows ever brighter. He has a new book—"The Audacity of Hope"—due out in October and is already set to appear on "Oprah." He has taken on Chicago politicians and African presidents—without getting his graceful hands the least bit dirty. He has had a good bit of luck, including opponents who melted down. He has also benefited from being underestimated. "He didn't see me coming," said Obama, referring to his main Senate primary rival. As Chicago newsman Charles Thomas notes, that has been true of virtually every political opponent he has faced.

They sure as hell see him now—and will not make the mistake of selling him short again, or of leaving his record unexploited. Obama has generally voted with his Democratic colleagues—for withdrawal from Iraq but not for a deadline, against confirmation of the two most recent Supreme Court nominees, for stem-cell research, against a flag-burning amendment—avoiding positions that seem particularly risky. But eventually, if he is to justify the aura of greatness, he will have to compile a record that makes him stand out—one that will also make him more vulnerable to attack.

"If we had only three more people like him, [Kenya] could come together," said Millicent Obaso, the CARE International adviser who conceived a small program, funded by Obama, to help grandmothers care for children orphaned by AIDS. The question that time will ultimately answer is whether there is even one person like him, or whether, in the way media-saturated cultures are wont to do, we have created a figure out of dreams and need that says more about us than about him.