In 1981, Obama arrived at Columbia University, where he majored in international relations. He wrote his senior thesis on the North-South debate on trade then raging as part of the demand for a “new international economic order.” But he says that he was never much of a lefty. Obama offers himself as the representative of a new generation, free of the dogmas that still burden the Democratic Party. “The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam,” he said to me on the campaign plane, “which means that either you’re a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you’re a Tom Hayden Democrat and you’re suspicious of any military action. And that’s just not my framework.”

Image Credit... Christian Witkin

Indeed, for all his soaring idealism, Obama seems to have absorbed Lolo’s teachings about the world’s refractoriness. The foreign-policy figures whom he finds “most compelling,” he says, are the archrealists who shaped policy during the cold war, including the secretaries of state George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson and the diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan. “What impresses me is not just the specifics of what they did,” he said, “but the approach they took to solve the problem, which is, if we have assets or tools to deal with foreign policy, we know that the most costly is the military tool, particularly in a nuclear era, so we want to apply all the other tools that are less costly.” Obama said that he also admired the worldly pragmatists who served the first George Bush, including Brent Scowcroft, the national-security adviser: “The whole Bush team, I think, was not entirely aware of the opportunities of this new world, but they had a very clear-eyed assessment.” He has sought out the former secretary of state Colin Powell for counsel, and spoken with Scowcroft as well.

Obama was sitting across from me in one of the leather bucket seats of the walnut-trimmed corporate jet the campaign had just leased. He has a look as cool and unruffled as his velvety tenor. He was tieless, as always, and his white shirt billowed around his trim frame; not even the tiniest crease marred his pale khaki linen pants. Because Obama has a loose and jokey manner — fist-bumps, male hugs — you do not immediately notice the inner gyroscope that keeps everything at a level. Even in public, he rarely changes the volume, speed or pitch of his voice. He does not hurry; he lopes. He seems to have a gift for husbanding his energy. He had woken early that morning in Manchester to play a game of pickup basketball against kids from Southern New Hampshire University. (The Obamas lost, 11-10.) The plane was heading to Des Moines; Obama had four campaign events scheduled for later that day. He was yawning, and he had pushed his salmon aside, half-eaten; but he spoke for about an hour before taking a nap.

You feel, with Obama, that life experience, temperament and opinion are all of a piece. He is, on the one hand, an idealist and optimist who recoils from the zero-sum formula. If a single sentiment stands at the heart of his worldview, it’s that, as he said in a speech earlier this year, “the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people.” What’s good for others is good for us; there’s no contradiction between idealism and realism. This may strike some as naïve; and yet Obama shies away from the exclamatory rhetoric and grandiose formulations that have become George Bush’s stock in trade. Bush’s post-9/11 recognition that our own security depends on the well-being of people on the other side of the globe led him to propound the so-called Freedom Agenda and to promote democracy in the Middle East. Obama, though a more eager democracy promoter than his realist heroes were, is also far more tempered than Bush. He accuses the Bush administration of an ethnocentric fixation on elections and classic political rights. Instead, he argues: “We have to be focused on what are the aspirations of the people in those countries. Once those aspirations are met, it opens up space for the kind of democratic regimes that we want.”

Obama speaks with special passion about the need to change America’s image in the world — and not only by proving that it can elect a 46-year-old black man with roots in the Muslim world. He returns again and again to the question of what America means to the rest of the world. In one of his speeches, he observed that United States senators typically see “the desperate faces” of Darfur or Baghdad from the height of a helicopter. “And it makes you stop and wonder,” he added, “when those faces look up at an American helicopter, do they feel hope, or do they feel hate?” Obama would like to restore the era when people in capitals all over the world could go to the local American cultural center to read books and magazines, the way he could in Jakarta — though now he would add English lessons and vocational training, and “stories of America’s Muslims and the strength they add to our country.” He argues that we must give emerging powers like India, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa “a stake in upholding the international order.” Obama is an unabashed fan of multilateral institutions. At an event in New Hampshire this summer, I heard him say, “I want to go before the United Nations and say, ‘America’s back!’ ” This is a bit too multilateral even for some of his advisers, who take a more skeptical view of the U.N. than he does. But for Obama, our willingness to be constrained by rules that govern others may take precedence over the rules themselves.

By the time he announced his candidacy earlier this year, Obama was already a media phenomenon thanks to his star turn at the 2004 Democratic convention and the publication of his second book, “The Audacity of Hope.” He moved in a bright nimbus of expectation; but he had arrived so recently on the national stage that the idea of a President Obama seemed almost impertinent. And Americans were all too familiar with the dangers of callow presidents. This spring, Obama tried to prove his readiness for office by laying out his foreign-policy views in a series of speeches and the obligatory essay in Foreign Affairs. He was obviously far more knowledgeable about the world, and far more nuanced in his understanding, than George Bush was in 2000. But was this junior senator with the boyish mien seasoned enough for the Oval Office? This was the threshold he had to cross. And Hillary Clinton wasted no time in planting the seeds of doubt.