As they gear up for a possible make-or-break primary in Pennsylvania a little more than a week from now, even the most ardent supporters of Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency this November, might wonder at times if the mesmerizing orator is more style than substance. But Obama's Secret Service detail was on to something in deciding on "Renegade" as its code name for the junior U.S. senator from Illinois.

Obama has repeatedly bucked progressive orthodoxy, on religion, war, race, free trade, and health care, risking support among his own party's core constituencies.

Though still best known for his 2002 objections to the looming war in Iraq, Obama is no peacenik. He might not have made his Iraq views known so early had he not attended an anti-war rally in Chicago, where the then-Illinois state senator was prompted to take the stage only after noticing people in the crowd wearing "War is Not An Option" buttons. "And I thought, I don't agree with that," Obama said in a 2004 New Yorker profile. "The Civil War was worth fighting. World War Two. So I got up and said that, among other things."

What he opposed, he said then, were "dumb wars" like Iraq.

Obama, 46, is also at odds with the realpolitik of the U.S. State Department in his determination to pursue Osama bin Laden and his confederates into a sovereign Pakistan, with or without Islamabad's assent. That diplomatic gaucherie met with ridicule from rival Hillary Clinton and de facto G.O.P. presidential nominee, John McCain. Yet within weeks of Obama's statement, U.S. armed forces began striking inside Pakistan, taking out one of al-Qaeda's top strategists.

During his 2004 bid to become only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, Obama, then scarcely known outside of Chicago, stepped into an Illinois union hall and declared, "There's nobody in this room who doesn't believe in free trade."

The AFL-CIO leaders, reliable both as Democratic organizers and as demonizers of free trade, looked at each other in disbelief. But, as Obama later told writer William Finnegan, "Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos. They don't want the borders closed. They just don't want their communities destroyed" by unrestrained outsourcing.

Risking the impression of being "too black" to be electorally viable on the national stage, Obama, in a 2005 Time essay on the continuing discrimination against blacks, wrote of his ostensible hero, "I cannot swallow the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator."

Risking the ire of African Americans, another bulwark of Democratic support, Obama said in a 2006 speech that blacks suffered from "our own long-held grudges and petty disputes, our frantic diversions and tribal allegiances."

From Martin Luther King, Jr.'s own Atlanta pulpit in January, Obama told the black congregants, "We must admit that none of our hands is entirely clean... We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity."

Crossing swords with another traditional Dem constituency, Obama complained to Jewish leaders in Cleveland in February, "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel. And that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel."

As the Iraq War debate got underway, Obama shed his lapel flag pin, which began to strike him as a cheap substitute for patriotism. During the critical early primaries this winter, Obama told an interviewer that Ronald Reagan, the Democrats' great Satan, left his party in better shape than Bill Clinton because Reagan understood the power of ideas, no matter how retrograde.

Noting that about three-quarters of Americans believe in angels, Obama in a 2006 speech faulted Democrats for their patronizing secularism. For decades Democrats have objected to displays of the 10 Commandments in government buildings and picked other pointless fights in which Dems come off as heathens. Obama was confirmed in his faith in the '80s, while employed by several Chicago churches as a community organizer helping jobless steelworkers fight for better living conditions.

In that 2006 speech, he said: "Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where and how it should not be practised, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another... others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends."

Obama admonishes parents to "get our kids to turn off the TV sets and put away the video games and hit the books – even if that means, for black children, that they might be accused of `acting white.'"

He regards Hillary Clinton's plan for universal health care as classic 1960s liberalism that dictates – or mandates – that every American sign up for it. Mindful of the "Harry and Louise" TV campaign that killed Clinton's first, early-'90s, try at health care reform, Obama's nearly identical plan lacks mandates and will not invite right-wing attacks of being another nanny-state effort to cram government policy down people's throats. Progressive economists vilify the Obama plan. But it won't be for them to take on a health care lobby skilled at creating false fears about patient choice of doctors.

Progressive parties have a weakness for lost causes and for accentuating the negative. Obama, by contrast, is a self-described "hope mongerer," at times unduly optimistic about America's short-term prospects. He has also disappointed supporters for declining to expend political capital on unwinnable causes. "He is idealistic," Chicago poverty activist John Bouman told Obama biographer David Mendell. But "for Barack, it's not a constant flow of glorious defeats."

Better to accumulate a record of getting things done. In his last two years in the Illinois state senate, Obama secured passage of more than 280 bills. The inspiration for many of them, including bigger tax breaks for the working poor and expanded child-education programs, was a desire to correct a social imbalance tilted against the poor and people of colour.

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Obama has been conventional at times. He has been largely AWOL from the poverty and race issues arising from Hurricane Katrina, and from the continuing HIV/AIDS crisis. As the primary in layoff-devastated Ohio approached, free trader Obama and free trader Clinton pandered to Ohioans by scapegoating NAFTA for a crisis that both candidates know is rooted in cheap Chinese imports, not lax Mexican labour and environmental standards (lax though they are).

But there's a stubborn streak in Obama that overrides expediency at critical moments. It seemed that he might throw his former, long-time pastor, Jeremiah Wright, under the bus when a highly selective culling of Wright's more intemperate sermons flooded the Internet. As it happens, nothing Wright said matched Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1967 fulmination against the Vietnam War: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war," King said. "And we are criminals in that war. We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world..."

In the only historic speech so far in this campaign season, on March 18, Obama repudiated Wright's more inflammatory sermonizing but refused to "disown" him. Obama then opened the Pandora's box of racial grievances during an election cycle that everyone, especially Obama, was hoping would not be about race. While the continued anger of many African Americans and other minorities often is counterproductive, Obama allowed, "the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

Obama is one the most Trudeauesque politicians to appear on the world stage in decades. Charismatic yet aloof. Irreverent but pragmatic. Curious about the world. A book-smart and contemplative figure, probably the only candidate this year to quote Socrates on the campaign trail. And hugely confident in his outsized ambitions, which are disguised by a cool TV persona.

Trudeau was a quixotic figure. Obama is less so, but what he began saying of himself many years ago still applies: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

Yet Obama's track record confirms that it is social justice that drives him, and he remains at heart a community organizer. In this, Obama is guided by the legacy of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago social activist who gained renown as he helped meatpackers fight for safe working conditions. Alinsky later influenced the methodology of activists in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, and accumulated protégés such as Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers.

Obama adheres to the Alinsky method of listening at length to what people need before determining what practically can be done, "then taking them into action," as Obama told biographer Mendell. For Obama, Alinsky represents "a certain hard-headedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion." The Obama '08 campaign slogan, "Yes we can," was first used by Cesar Chavez.

Little has been heard yet from the foreign-policy brain trusts of the candidates. What has emerged from the Obama camp is the elevation of "dignity" as the starting point in relations between America and other nations.

"Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands (of foreign-policy thinking)," former Obama foreign-policy adviser Samantha Power told Spencer Ackerman in an American Prospect interview in last month. The American world view should be "about meeting people where they're at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That's the swamp that needs draining. If we're to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we're not (providing)."

Every campaign has its overworked word or phrase. With Obama's, it's "transformational." The transformation Obama seeks is to make permanent the grassroots movement he created. Ideally, Obama's would be something of a communal presidency, in which the chief executive is able to enact his agenda only with post-campaign grassroots pressure on Washington and state legislators.

Barack Obama "is going to demand that you shed your cynicism," Obama's wife, Michelle Obama, told a February Los Angeles rally. "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved and uninformed."

Presidents come and go, and Washington's establishment has a way of making even the boldest reformers look ordinary in short order. Worse, movements fade. Unless Obama lowers the expectations of his followers, the grassroots euphoria that may yet propel him to the White House will revert to cynicism during the inevitable, unhappy compromises – especially in Iraq – that will mar the early years of the next presidency.

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