The American Spectator

Political Hay

p>Back in the early civil rights days when people were beginning to explore race relationships, there was one story you heard over and over again. It went like this: br> /p>

I went to a suburban high school in (you name it). We had one black boy in our class. No one ever spoke to him and he never spoke to anyone. But in our senior year we elected him class president.

br> A similar phenomenon now seems to be boosting the stock of Barack Obama.

The kids in those suburban high schools, of course, were trying to bridge what seemed like an unbridgeable racial divide. It was a nice gesture. (In another version of the story, the black kid was voted "most congenial" or "most popular.") But it seems a pretty slender reed upon which to base a Presidential campaign.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama is the candidate of the hour. A smart, well-spoken Harvard Law School graduate, he gave a rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic convention even while he was running his first campaign for Senate. On the basis of this slim resume, Time just featured him on the cover as "our next President."

How has Obama earned such an accolade? Well, he is a former Chicago community organizer with a lawyer wife and two attractive children. His father was a Kenyan Muslim and college professor who left when he was two years old. His mother was a poor Midwesterner who married at 18 but completed her education and became an anthropologist. She later married an Indonesian and moved to Jakarta, where Barack spent four delightful years "chasing chickens and dodging water buffalo." As a teenager, he returned to Hawaii, where his grandparents took over his upbringing. In short, in his younger years Obama probably saw more of the world than many Americans experience in a lifetime.

p>He also appreciates and understands the story of his country. As he writes in The Audacity of Hope : br> /p>

When I find myself in such [bad] moods, I like to take a run along the Mall....Most of the time I stop at the Washington Monument, but sometimes I push on [to] the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. . .

And in that place, I think about America and those who built it. This nation's founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculation to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent. And those like Lincoln and [Martin Luther] King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children... brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.

It is that process I wish to be a part of.

My heart is filled with love for this country.

br> It is that sort of haunting reflection that has rocketed Obama into prominence.

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