The new president of the Harvard Law Review was somewhat taken aback by the deluge of media coverage that followed hard on the heels of his election. The New York Times ran a “First Black” headline, which probably won’t be the last time that label is affixed to Barack Obama. The twenty-eight-year-old law student says he wasn’t going to run for the office until a black friend talked him into it. “There’s a door to kick down,” the friend argued, “and you’re in a position to kick it down.” The job does give him a great forum, but there’s a trade-off. “I like to read novels, listen to Miles Davis,” he says. “I don’t get to do that anymore. I don’t get dates anymore.” Still, he’s philosophical, even briskly cheerful, about his lost leisure. And that’s because Barack Obama has a game plan: he wants to tackle the quagmire of America’s inner cities. Federal money alone won’t do it, he argues. The deeper problem is that “those communities are unorganized. We need to get more people planning.” For preparation, Harvard Law School is a “perfect place to examine how the power structure works. It gives you a certain language.” When he’s fluent, he’ll be able to translate the language of the streets (“which I can speak”) into the language of the Establishment, and vice versa. The sense of mission derives in part from his experiences in the Third World. He saw brutal poverty while growing up in Singapore [Editor’s note: We should have saidIndonesia*.]* with his mother, an anthropologist, and his half-brothers and -sisters in Kenya still live hand to mouth at times. Obama says that his late father’s experience in the Kenyan government left him a broken and bitter man, and he responds warily to the assumption that he himself will run for office. “If I go into politics it should grow out of work I’ve done on the local level, not because I’m some media creation.” Though, as media creations go, he’d be a pretty good one.

Elise O’Shaughnessy is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.