Reply #43: Here it is but the OP left out the rest...as usual. [View All]

[Breeze54]

Testing the Water, Obama Tests His Own Limits

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/washington/24obama.html?pagewanted=print

December 24, 2006

By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 —

On a winter afternoon two years ago, Senator Barack Obama took his oath of office and strolled across the Capitol grounds hand-in-hand with his wife and two daughters. At the time, a question from his 6-year-old sounded precocious. Now, it seems prescient.

“Are you going to try to be president?” Malia Obama asked her father, giggling as a television camera captured the moment. “Shouldn’t you be the vice president first?”

Her innocent musings go straight to a threshold issue Mr. Obama faces as he edges closer to entering the presidential race: his limited experience in national politics.

But they only hint at a complex matrix of questions swirling around his prospective candidacy: Is he simply a first-term liberal Democrat long on charisma who is enjoying a brief moment of fame? Is he, as some of his more enthusiastic fans seem to feel, the post-partisan, post-racial, post-baby boom embodiment of a new brand of politics? Does he have the drive and discipline to survive a wide-open presidential campaign?

Put more bluntly: Is he for real?

“He’s so incredibly skilled, but he’s also had a lot of luck,” said Abner Mikva, a White House chief counsel in the Clinton administration and a longtime friend of Mr. Obama’s. “Hopefully people don’t think the media just puffed him up and he’s a flash in the pan.”

Even his aides wonder if he can meet lofty expectations, which have elevated him beyond a politician’s normal realm, thanks to his celebrity, ambition and biography.


Snip-->

His roots are traced directly to Africa, where a two-week pilgrimage this summer helped burnish his credentials in the black community and provided a spark to his presidential ambition.

Mr. Obama has pointedly acknowledged that he benefits from his race, noting last year that a new white senator from Illinois would hardly have stirred comparable interest or intrigue. So Mr. Obama has embraced his role, but he has strived to be defined by more than color alone.

“It’s not always easy for a black politician to gauge the right tone to take — too angry? not angry enough?” he writes in his latest book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

But in the same chapter on race, he notes, “Whatever preconceived notions white Americans may continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able — if given the time — to look beyond race in making their judgments of people.”

more....