Obama exhibits calm in the swirl of history

When he gained election to the Springfield statehouse, Mr. Obama taught himself poker; politics happened around card tables. Then he took up golf. He hit one shank after another. “He was no Tiger Woods,” said State Senator Terry Link, an older white Democrat. Eventually Mr. Obama learned to drive and putt — and found a new place to conduct politics.

All of which sounds disarming, but there is a glint of steel. With his eyes on the State Senate in 1996, Mr. Obama told a former mentor that he would not stand down and let her reclaim her seat. And he used technicalities to bump rivals off the ballot until he ran unopposed. His operatives slapped down attempts to rerun primaries in Michigan and Florida; a recent party compromise on counting delegates from those states worked to his advantage.

An old Chicago hand notes that Mr. Obama seems to have read his Niccolò Machiavelli.

An 11-year path
Once, months ago, Mr. Obama preferred novels, meaty chews by John le Carré, E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth that transported him far from the cacophonous here and now.

“Fiction kind of took me out of myself and what we were doing every day,” he noted as he sat in his campaign plane, waiting to fly to another rally at a far-too-early hour.

And lately?

He motions at the platoons of Secret Service agents and staff members taking their seats. “I’m lucky if I get through a chapter of anything,” he says. “I have come to realize the secret to sleeping on the road is to get very, very, tired.”

He returns to Chicago and his Hyde Park home as a celebrity. Neighbors cross the street to shake his hand and point from afar. Mr. Obama rolls his eyes.

“Look, I don’t want to sound too noble: The first time you’re on the cover of Time magazine and the crowds are cheering, that’s not bad, right?” he says on the airplane. “But one thing I’ve learned about myself is that the surface glitter, the vanity element of this campaign, becomes less satisfying as I go along.”

That sounds too easy. He does not evince Bill Clinton’s animal need to work a rope line until every sweaty hand is shaken. But he has taken just 11 years to run the course from state senator to the first black presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, and holds thousands spellbound, and that suggests an ambition that runs swift and powerful. As a banker who plays basketball with Mr. Obama notes, he starts off quietly but he is known for talking a little smack if his shots are falling in.

It is not easy to sort out. The Obamas’ friends are black and white, upper-middle class to wealthy, University of Chicago law professors and historians and lawyers and foundation types. When the news media calls, they put the shovel only so deep in the ground of revelation.

‘It’s like I’m just the excuse’
You return to that question again: You really don’t read profiles of yourself?

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Mr. Obama was sitting on his campaign plane a few months ago as it began the rumble down yet another runway to yet another campaign stop. He shakes his head but it sounds hard to believe; this introspective candidate ignores all those words? A reporter reads aloud from the novelist Darryl Pinckney’s essay in The New York Review of Books. Mr. Obama, the novelist writes, “comes across as someone who stored away for future consideration practically everything that was ever said to him, and who had a talent for watchfulness, part of the extraordinary armor he developed at an early age.”

Mr. Obama nods. That’s intriguing. But he prefers his own riff, which not incidentally trains the eye not on him but on his crowds. “I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me."

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

This article, Calm in the Swirl of History, first appeared in The New York Times.

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