HE HAS been in the Senate for less than two years, a junior senator from Illinois who has virtually no national political record and whose seven years in the Illinois state legislature were unremarkable.

Yet when Barack Obama admitted on a Sunday talk show that he was considering a run for president in 2008, the news led virtually every television news bulletin, and in Washington there was talk of little else.

He did not announce he would run, but only that he no longer ruled out running. "Given the responses I've been getting over the last several months, I have thought about the possibility, but I have not thought about it with the seriousness and depth that I think is required," he said.