Great Expectations

By 30 minutes and several days, Barack Obama is running late. He is supposed to be at his grandmother’s in Hawaii -- his wife and daughters already are there -- but the Senate is still voting on some fairly significant legislation. So here he is, stuck in Washington nine days before Christmas. Illinois’ junior senator just came from the Senate floor, where he and his fellow Democrats scored big by blocking a Republican drive to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act. He appears at once exhausted and energetic as he carefully places his finely tailored, charcoal-gray suit jacket on the back of a chair and centers his long, lean frame on the sofa beneath a large oil painting of an Illinois cornfield. Some of his heroes stare down at him from his office walls: Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Mahatma Gandhi to his left; Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Nelson Mandela across the room. A White Sox cap lies atop his desk, a symbol of triumph secured after years in the wilderness.

Obama closes his eyes and turns his youthful, angular face upward, as if he is contemplating all the world’s problems from a place deep inside himself. His head rests against the back of the gold couch; his left fingertips touch his forehead. His right leg, long and crooked at the knee, is stretched across a coffee table. He speaks softly and slowly, pausing frequently to choose just … the right … words.

The question on the table -- and the reason for the pause -- is the future of the Democratic Party. It’s not an easy question for anyone these days, and it’s not a question that is normally asked of a first-term senator with only one year’s experience. But Obama is not a normal first-termer -- not after the slew of national magazine profiles that ran before he was even elected (and while he was still a state senator), and definitely not after The Speech, his electric keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, which catapulted him from obscurity (people sometimes called him “Alabama”) to the national A-list. These days, people want to know what Obama thinks about everything, from baseball to foreign affairs.

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