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Is Obama Sort of Like Us?

The headline over the Associated Press story on the first day of the Democrat convention sums up Obama's current political dilemma: "Obama's 'sort of like us.'"

In Eau Claire, Wis., Obama laid out the theme for the convention in a late-summer barbecue for supporters:

"I think what you'll conclude is, 'He's sort of like us.' He comes from a middle-class background. He went to school on scholarships. He had to pay off student loans. He and his wife had to worry about child care. They had to figure out how to start a college fund for their kids."

Michelle Obama later amplified this theme in her great "I love my husband and I'm a normal Chicago black girl who lives the American dream" speech on Monday night.

As The New York Times put it: "Worried that Mr. Obama's far-flung upbringing and his lack of deep roots leave some voters unsure and untrusting, the campaign is essentially substituting Mrs. Obama's family background for his own." Obama, the nation's self-designated newspaper of record reports, "has few family members who can serve as surrogates."

OK, Obama's sort of like us -- the great "us" of American politics, I mean -- but not really.

Most of us are not Harvard lawyers married to Harvard lawyers. We are not friendly with a former '60s Weatherman. Many of us these days have fragmented families, but not so fragmented that a European magazine can dig up a half-brother we've never met living in a hut in Kenya.

Obama -- let's face it -- is not typical of anything in American life, except America's continual ability to surprise us with the unexpected. And that is the secret of his sudden, phenomenal rise to the top.

The appeal of the whole Obama campaign is that he never was really one of us. He was the messiah, the great postracial hope, the one who can rise above petty partisan infighting to deliver -- oh, health care maybe, world peace perhaps? Something good, something we can admire, above all something new, something different.

Obama was the stranger who appeared mysteriously to clean up the town before riding off into the sunset. He's not like us. He's better than we are. He's what we aspire to become.

And that is also, of course, the secret of his undoing.

At his best, which is also his worst, Obama is a phenomenally strange inspiring figure. He is lean and cool, fluid and loose, and above the fray. He can summon at will 200,000 screaming Germans to attest to his fitness to be president of the United States. He can talk fluently about himself in the third person.

Watch the Saddleback Forum interview over again. Obama looks occasionally across the desk at his friend Rick Warren, but mostly he holds his head tilted, and his eyes slide downward. He speaks -- even in this intimate forum -- in strangely rolling, majestic sentences: "Whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity is above my pay grade."

Do people like us ever talk like that?

If Obama is not the messiah, not the one -- if he's a regular joe like you and me -- then he's just a politician wearing a mask and trying to fool us by making us believe something that deep down just isn't so. He's lecturing us instead of leading us.

Because let's face it: People like you and me do not run for president. The men and women who do are either better than we are -- or much, much worse.

Which is Obama? On that question, the American people are still making up their minds.

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