"Above the Fray"

GQ (Ryan Lizza):

On a cloudy morning in mid-June, with polls showing Barack Obama competitive with Hillary Clinton in key states and the question hanging over him of whether he can parlay his status as the potential savior of the Democratic Party—and depending on whom you talk to, perhaps even America—into actual votes, Obama is on his way to clinch the endorsement of a South Carolina mortician.

Later today, the senator will deliver a widely covered speech in Spartanburg and wow a rally in Greenville, but right now he and his nine-car motorcade are quietly slipping into the rural heart of the state for a private meeting, one not listed on his official schedule, with Anne Parks, a funeral director who also happens to be a state representative—and thus a local power broker worthy of a presidential candidate’s attention—who demanded the senator come pay his respects in return for her support.

Obama—black suit, white shirt, shimmering silver tie—climbs out of an SUV with tinted windows and walks into a small room with green cinder-block walls where Parks is holding court. Just a few years removed from the statehouse himself, he chats knowledgeably about the local budget, drops a “y’all” or two into his patter, as he often does in the South, and teases Parks about the home cooking she apparently promised. “I thought we at least might have some takeout,” he jokes. In return Parks, a large black woman, seems smitten as she purrs shyly in her sweet southern accent, “You gotta come back for that dinner.”

Still, there is just a hint of tension in the room when the mortician, clearly enjoying the temporary rush of power that South Carolina’s early primary slot has thrust upon her, complains to Obama that his staff forced her to keep away many locals who wanted to see the senator today. “You got me in trouble,” she says. “Everybody wants to see you! Everybody! ” Obama quickly diffuses the mini-controversy by expressing some mild irritation himself. “Why couldn’t they come see me?” he chides one of his local staffers. But before the aide can respond, Parks interjects with her own answer: “Because you’re coming back!”

She leads Obama into a hall where about forty of her closest friends are waiting. Most voters who meet Obama know little about him except that during the 2004 Democratic convention, at a particularly low moment for his party, he delivered one of the most uplifting speeches in memory. As Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told me, “There are a lot of people who believe that he was born on that stage in Boston.” The contrast between the image of Obama at the height of his rhetorical powers and the slight and professorial candidate they meet in person can be jarring for many people. Democrats who arrive with images of the 2004 speech dancing in their heads sometimes leave an Obama event puzzled by the dissonance. After watching a subdued performance at Obama’s first Iowa rally as a presidential candidate last February, a local schoolteacher named Kara Asmussen sounded completely deflated as she watched Obama leave the high school gymnasium. “I was so excited to hear the language of an orator,” she told me. “I’d like to see that great speech. I think being there for that inspiration would be nice.”

Several months later, as we were driving to a potluck dinner in Boone, Iowa, Obama brought up this exact phenomenon to me. “The first couple of months,” he said, “if I didn’t bring somebody to tears during a speech, people said, ‘You know what? The guy’s not as inspiring as we thought he was.’ ” Part of what he’s been trying to do, Obama explained, is to actually lower expectations, to turn Barack Obama, celebrity politician, into Barack Obama, serious and sober candidate for president.

Obama’s aides, too, often fret that his fame is diminishing him. They struggled for weeks before deciding to agree to let him grace the cover of this magazine. “Frankly, I could do with fewer cover stories generally,” David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist and adman told me during a recent visit to his Chicago office. “He’s an incredibly magnetic and also photogenic person, and so he lands on the covers of a lot of magazines. And that had its utility at one point, but it can get overdone. This is a really profound guy in many ways, and you don’t want him trivialized.”

The balancing act is not always easy. Just a few years ago, observing a major presidential candidate as he greeted supporters in one of the early primary states was a staple of campaign coverage. In the case of Obama, those days are over. He moves inside a cocoon of Secret Service agents, and his campaign rallies regularly attract thousands, making him seem as distant as a rock star at a stadium show. I’ve interviewed and traveled with Obama numerous times since early 2004, just after he won his improbable Senate-primary victory in Illinois, and I’ve experienced the same mix of conflicted reactions as voters like Kara Asmussen: genuine excitement about discovering a politician you actually admire, followed by skepticism and a realization that Obama, who earned his political education in Chicago’s tribal wards, is more of an old-fashioned pol than you think. Michael Kinsley once said of Bob Novak, “Underneath the asshole is a nice guy, but underneath the nice guy is another asshole.” One way to describe Obama is that underneath the inspirational leader who wants to change politics—and upon whom desperate Democrats, Independents, and not a few Republicans are projecting their hopes—is an ambitious, prickly, and occasionally ruthless politician. But underneath that guy is another one, an Obama who’s keenly aware that presidential politics is about timing, and that at this extremely low moment in American political life, there is a need for someone—and he firmly believes that someone is him—to lift up the nation in a way no politician has in nearly half a century.

Watching him up close here with Anne Parks and her friends reminds me of something he told me the first time I interviewed him, three years ago, back when he was still an Illinois state senator. “I come from a varied background,” he said, without needing to remind me of his white Kansas-born mom, his black Kenyan dad, or his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia. “I feel that there is a piece of me in everybody.” As Obama circles the room, charming the local officials—who are mostly black, though there’s a smattering of whites—the various pieces of him flow out. An elderly white man tells the senator that he taught anthropology at a college in Georgia. “How about that,” Obama says. “Well, my mother was an anthropologist.” There are several black clergymen here, and when Obama encounters one of them, it’s as if they share a secret language, one Obama learned in the early ’80s, toiling as an idealistic college grad organizing churches on Chicago’s South Side. “Reverend, so nice to see you!” he exclaims to one pastor, vigorously shaking his hand. “Appreciate you! God bless you! Lift me up!”

The pastor nods his head and smiles at Obama’s biblical reference. But he’s interested in discussing more earthly matters. “With the faith-based initiative,” he asks, speaking of President Bush’s signature program, which has largely become a White House slush fund to reward religious allies, “can you kinda get us back in with the—” He pauses, trying to find the right words. “You know, it’s been very limited as far as churches are concerned.”

“Well, it depends on which church,” Obama replies. “There are some churches where it hasn’t been limited.”

“Right!” the reverend responds, lighting up and sensing that Obama understands where he’s going.

“One of the things that I’m going to do when I’m in there,” Obama says with the extreme politeness he turns on when saying something that won’t fully please his interlocutor, “is to look at this faith-based initiative and see how it’s worked and where the money is going. What you don’t want it to be used for is a way of advancing someone’s political agenda and rewarding friends and not rewarding enemies. Know what I mean?” The reverend tightens his lips, nods his head, and gives Obama a fairly unconvincing “mm-hmm.”

Obama revels in moments like these, when he has the chance to turn down an easy pander and tell a hard truth. He likes to remind people that he made a speech in Detroit criticizing the auto industry. More recently, he spoke before the National Education Association and endorsed merit pay, which is akin to addressing a sailors’ convention and advocating a ban on swearing. Here in Greenwood, a Mr. White wants to know what Obama is going to do to lower gas prices. “I don’t want to lie to you—there are not that many good short-term solutions,” he says, launching into wonky-professor mode as he discusses refinery capacity and petroleum blends. “But the truth is, the primary problem we’ve got is we consume too much gas,” he adds. “Any politician who comes in and says he’s going to be lowering gas prices right away is just not telling the truth.”

Politics is mostly a transactional business. At the end of the day, people like Anne Parks and the reverend and Mr. White all want something concrete. Sometimes Obama gives them exactly what they want. But at its core, his campaign is a rejection of strictly transactional politics. It has to be. Because the reality is that there are few truly substantive differences between the Democratic candidates. A remarkable degree of policy consensus has emerged: Get out of Iraq, achieve universal health care and energy independence, improve Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, and scrutinize trade deals. Even on the much hyped question of experience, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama are roughly equal, each having no more than a decade of legislative experience and no executive experience. Given the historic opportunity of an electorate desperate for change and disinclined to elect another Republican president, the Democratic contest is really about who will be the most transformational president. Obama’s case is that to change anything in America, we have to begin by changing our politics, and he offers the kind of campaign he’s running as evidence that he means it.

“We talk about it all the time,” Obama’s wife, Michelle, told me one day as we drove to Harlem for a campaign event. “That’s the test. Can we go through this process and tell the truth and be pretty open and talk about mistakes? Can we do all the things that we’re criticizing this administration for not doing—being so dogmatic and ideological, not being open to other people’s points of views and perspectives? Can we really build consensus around the things that pull us together?” Obama has promised that he won’t let the process chew him up and shred the reputation he has worked mightily to build. David Axelrod told me that last year, when Obama first began to think seriously about running for president, he issued a warning to his senior staffers: “I’m in this to win, I want to win, and I think we will win. But I’m also going to emerge intact. I’m going to be Barack Obama and not some parody.”

*****

One day this spring, Obama’s pollsters were crunching numbers, and they discovered something odd. For as long as Obama has been in national politics, his approval ratings have been stratospheric. His whole campaign strategy rests on translating that enthusiasm into actual votes, turning those who are temporarily enthralled by Obama’s celebrity into real supporters. The history of presidential primaries is littered with candidates who captivated voters early in the process only to be abandoned for the more cautious alternative come Election Day. Neither John McCain nor Bill Bradley could convert their momentary star power into victories over the establishment candidacies of George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, and perhaps most famously, Howard Dean was abandoned by voters for the seemingly reliable John Kerry at the last moment, in 2004.

Now Obama’s pollsters were finding alarming evidence that their candidate was vulnerable to the same phenomenon. When they compared the percentage of Democrats who said they strongly approved of Obama with the percentage who said they would vote for him, they found that the latter number was significantly lower than the former. Inside the campaign, aides dubbed this “the Gap.” It was a sobering, hard number that quantified the difference between vague enthusiasm and actual votes. For Hillary Clinton, the gap is much smaller. The majority of voters who strongly approve of her also say they will vote for her.

In fact, Hillary was collecting about two-thirds of Democrats who liked her, while Obama was collecting less than half. The numbers suggested that the calculus for Hillary voters was much simpler: Democrats who liked her knew all they needed to know about her. But for Obama voters, there were questions. Was he tough enough? Did he have enough experience? Could he actually win in the general election?

How, then, to close the Gap? In the press, an idea was starting to gel that Obama was all style and no substance. John Edwards was defining his campaign by its big ideas (universal health insurance, withdrawal from Iraq, a new war against poverty), and Hillary was defining hers by her mastery of policy and, as she repeatedly says, how she is “ready” to be president. Obama’s stump speeches, however, highlighted a vague message of hope. At the February meeting of the Democratic National Committee, a venue that attracted all of the presidential candidates and most of the Washington, D.C., press corps, Obama gave a speech in which he said, “There are those who don’t believe in talking about hope. They say, ‘Well, we want specifics, we want details, and we want white papers. We want plans.’ We’ve had a lot of plans, Democrats. What we’ve had is a shortage of hope.” Afterwards, the press criticized the speech as yet more feel-good ambiguity. Obama, rather than having a knee-jerk response to the negative reaction and changing his tack, instead later added to his regular stump speech a mocking reference to reporters who dismiss him as nothing more than a “hopemonger.”

What the press didn’t know is that Obama’s resistance to becoming a candidate of white papers had a strategic logic. As his pollsters had clearly divined, if the campaign hinged on who had the best health care plan or who better understood the minutiae of tax policy, then Obama was toast. That was the contest Hillary was hoping to have. To close the Gap, Obama’s senior strategists decided he had to make the campaign a more high-minded argument about political reform. “He’s got a legislative record, both in Illinois and in Washington, in health care, energy, education, foreign policy,” Plouffe told me. “But the truth is, our campaign will not be defined by that.” When Obama ran his first TV advertisements in Iowa, they didn’t even mention that he was a United States senator.

*****

One of the riddles of the Obama campaign is, to what extent does a candidate who preaches a gospel of changing politics need to run a revolutionarily different kind of campaign? The question has gnawed at Obama since he entered the race. At his very first press conference as a candidate, a reporter asked Obama why he was employing a team of opposition researchers—aides who spend their days and nights digging up dirt on other candidates and often leaking that info, “anonymously,” to the media.

Obama was in a feisty, even peevish, mood that day, and at one point he went off on a lengthy, barbed tangent to push back against the idea that he is all style and no substance. “The fact of the matter is, I have the most specific plan in terms of how to get out of Iraq of any candidate,” he lectured us. “I have delivered speeches over the course of the two years, before I started running for president, on every major issue out there, whether it’s education, health care, or energy. I’ve written two books that have sold close to a million copies each that probably give people more insight into how I think and how I feel about the issues facing America than any candidate in the field, and probably any candidate who’s run for office in recent memory. The problem is not that the information is not out there. The problem is that that’s not what you guys have been reporting on. You’ve been reporting on how I look in a swimsuit.”

After a high school reporter asked Obama an earnest question about education, Obama turned to me and some other journalists and quipped, “Take some notes, guys. That’s how you do it.”

As for the opposition researchers, he didn’t make any apologies, explaining that they were hired for the benign purposes of responding to attacks on his record and understanding where his opponents stood on the issues. “I don’t think there is anything wrong with that at all,” he emphasized. “What I think you will be able to measure over the course of the campaign is how well I stick to my guns in not making ad hominem attacks toward other candidates, in acknowledging where they’ve done good work. If I disagree with them, I disagree on the basis of issues, not suggest that they have untoward motives. I think that’s the distinction I would make.”

Back in South Carolina, though, that careful line Obama drew has just been completely erased. Inside the SUV, as they travel from Anne Parks’s gathering to the next stop on Obama’s schedule, communications director Robert Gibbs is briefing Obama on one of his first major political crises, one that is emblematic of the vise he finds himself trapped in as a candidate running on a pledge to change politics while trying to defeat an opponent who makes no such guarantee. His oppo staff, a team of eight or so, led by the former head of the Democratic National Committee’s research department, prepared a memo outlining the Clintons’ ties to allegedly shady Indian and Indian-American donors and businesses. The campaign shared the memo with reporters, demanding it not be sourced back to the Obama team, a fairly routine request when practicing the dark art of oppo research. What they didn’t count on was that a copy of the memo would make its way into the hands of Clinton’s top aides, who, in a bit of ingenious political jujitsu, gave the memo to a New York Times reporter, assuring that the takeaway for most in the press would not be the substance of the document but that Saint Obama was dishing dirt on Hillary. They were right.

There was some legitimate criticism of the Clintons buried in the document, but the memo was sloppy in the extreme. It lumped Clinton’s support of India—an important strategic ally—with support of outsourcing to India. And some of the rhetoric was offensive. “The Clintons have reaped significant financial rewards from their relationship with the Indian community, both in their personal finances and Hillary’s campaign fund-raising,” the document stated, as if any money from Indians was somehow tainted. The headline referenced “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab).”

An Obama aide later told me the boss was furious about what was dubbed the Punjab memo, with Gibbs bearing the brunt of Obama’s anger as they traveled in South Carolina. The message was that, whomever they had worked for in the past (there are many Kerry veterans on Obama’s team), on this campaign, they were not to do anything to damage the Obama brand. “If we go out headhunting, if we go out and become a gratuitous, blood-sucking, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety politician,” Axelrod told me, “then we’ll have taken what is best about him and we’ll have destroyed it.”

The next day, I asked Obama about the Punjab memo during a drive through the cornfields of Iowa, in between a couple of campaign stops. He spoke slowly and was clearly wrestling with the tricky balance between decrying attack politics and winning an election. “Without going into details, I was not happy with this most recent episode,” he told me. “The document didn’t describe my views, so even if it hadn’t been leaked I wouldn’t have been happy with it. And I think our campaign understands that.”

It was getting near the end of a long day of interviews, stump speeches, and hours spent standing around in the sun answering detailed questions from Iowa caucus-goers, the most entitled voters in America. Obama seemed exhausted even before our conversation began. As he climbed into the car and looked at my recorder and open notebook, he made it clear he’d rather be anywhere else. “Because I haven’t been doing enough talking,” he said. “I think the opportunity to spend some more time talking is really outstanding.” Slowly, though, he became more engaged as he explained the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t box his campaign was in. “My general view is that we should be very aggressive and have no qualms about being aggressive when it comes to counterpunching,” he said between bites of trail mix. “I am more skeptical about our efforts to initiate a fight that is more political than it is substantive.” This is what might be called the Obama doctrine: Don’t start a fight, but respond with overwhelming force when attacked. Early in the campaign, when Australian prime minister John Howard took a gratuitous swipe at Obama’s antiwar position, the senator came back much more viciously. “We have close to 140,000 troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed 1,400,” he told reporters. “So if he’s ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he call up another 20,000 Australians and send them to Iraq. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.” During the second Democratic debate, Obama never took a shot at Hillary or Edwards, to the chagrin of some of his supporters, but when Edwards criticized Obama’s recent voting record on Iraq, Obama returned fire. “You’re about four-and-a-half years late on leadership on this issue,” he said, referring to Edwards’s pro-war record.

But it’s not clear that the counterpunch will be enough this time, and Obama seems to know it. “Finding that balance is hard,” he told me, “because one of the criticisms in the national press of me is, ‘Well, he may not be mean and tough enough for the rough-and-tumble of a presidential race.’ Well, it turns out we’ve had some sharp elbows once in a while. But then people are shocked, and they say, ‘Look, the guy’s not who we thought he was!’ ” With that, he threw his hands up in the air.

Part of the way the campaign deals with this bind is to separate the above-the-fray candidate from the dirty work of his operatives. Obama may be a once-in-a-generation politician, but his campaign is staffed with fairly conventional Democratic talent. This has bothered some of his old supporters. To vastly simplify Chicago politics, there is the machine, represented by the Daley family, and there are the reformers who have long challenged the machine. Obama’s political roots are with the reformers. As a community organizer, he regularly clashed with City Hall and local elected officials, and he taught poor South Side residents how to aggressively challenge their representatives. But when Obama crossed over to electoral politics, maintaining those antimachine credentials became more difficult. One of his oldest Chicago friends, Judson Miner, whose law firm Obama worked at for nearly ten years, told me his biggest disappointment was that Obama hired as his top strategist David Axelrod, a longtime Chicago consultant who got his start as a political strategist for the second Mayor Daley, a man Miner has spent much of his career working against. But even Miner seemed to understand this decision, even if he didn’t approve of it. “You don’t get to be where Barack is,” he told me with a sigh, “by being Mr. Goodie every day. Sometimes you do have to compromise your values.”

Sometimes you do. Obama knows Hillary is not going to collapse of her own accord. To close the Gap, you have to yank her down a little. A week before the Punjab-memo scandal broke, I visited Gibbs in his glass-enclosed office at the Obama campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago. Behind him, a window looked out over the skyline. In front of him, a window framed a series of cubicles housing his opposition researchers. I couldn’t help but notice some of what he had scrawled on a whiteboard hanging on his wall:

HC Bio→NY Post

HC Travel (AP?)

Tax Returns (Balz?)

Darfur investments (HF)

JE 527

HC is, of course, Hillary Clinton, and JE is John Edwards. Balz refers to Dan Balz, the lead political reporter at The Washington Post. These were obviously notes about stories the campaign was pushing or anticipating, so I asked Gibbs if his understanding was that, despite the campaign’s rhetoric, Hillary had to be actively taken down. Gibbs looked at me and smiled. “We’re not running the race thinking we’re the horse in second,” he said, “and that ultimately the horse in first is just going to stop running.”

*****

Obama leans against a railing backstage at a church gymnasium in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he is about to deliver a speech on fatherhood. His local political director, Anton Gunn, an enormous man with a bald head and a Motorola Bluetooth device sticking out of his ear, gives him a quick rundown of the local demographics. “This is a heavy Republican area in the general election,” says Gunn. Obama nods. “So the Democrats don’t get a lot of attention, huh?” he says.

A staffer whispers in Obama’s ear— “The stairs are stage right” —and a documentary filmmaker circles him with her camera. Secret Servicemen take up positions in front of the stage, and a slightly overeager state trooper stands at attention close by. No matter how much chaos buzzes around him, Obama has a way of projecting total calm at moments like these. It’s a few minutes before showtime, and though his staffers are getting increasingly agitated, Obama stands patiently chatting with a local high school student who’s asked about his tenure as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

“The Law Review is basically a professional journal, so lawyers talk about cases or issues in the law,” Obama explains, raising and lowering his voice as waves of anticipatory cheers wash in from the crowd. “At some point, if you’ve got insomnia, then that’s what you do, pick up a Law Review. It’s not beach reading. It’s not John Grisham. It’s some pretty obscure stuff.”

Obama’s aides have told me the speech he’s about to give here is important, because it will further define him as an idiosyncratic Democrat. A few days ago, I was in Chicago and encountered Obama’s 26-year-old head speechwriter at his desk in the campaign’s headquarters anguishing over a first draft. But when I ask Obama if he’s excited about the speech, he says, “You know, I don’t get too excited about speeches. I think it makes the points we want to make. It sort of weaves in some stuff I’ve already talked about in other venues. The difference—and the reason that this is written up and on the prompter—is we’re adding some policy. If this was a church kind of situation, I’d be doing it a little more impromptu.”

I ask him if he gets nervous just before a big speech, and Obama looks at me like I’m crazy. He smiles and shakes his head, just as the emcee is making his final introduction. “That’s the good thing about the convention speech,” he says, his voice rising as he walks toward the stage, and looks back over his shoulder at me to finish his thought. “I figure, you know, once you’ve got 15 million people or so watching you make a speech, every other venue is going to be—” The final words are drowned out by the crowd.

Things are not so cool and collected with Gibbs. As Obama gives a tough-love speech to the largely black audience, scolding men “who need to realize that responsibility does not end at conception,” Gibbs is urgently tapping away on his BlackBerry, trying to stamp out the Punjab-memo story. Clinton clearly won this round. Gibbs is furious that after accepting a document on an off-the-record basis, The New York Times then outed the Obama campaign as its author, using what to Gibbs is the dishonest argument that the memo had essentially become public and therefore fair game once the Clinton team started passing it around.

Before we leave the church, Obama sits down for an interview with the editor and publisher of a local alternative paper, and the conversation turns toward the subject of movement building, something Obama has studied and thought about for decades, first as a college kid obsessed with the civil rights crusade, then as a community organizer and leader of a voter-registration drive, and most recently as a candidate. He’s even written an article on the subject in an academic journal. He tells the reporter about the huge crowds he has attracted this year: 20,000 people in Austin, 20,000 in Atlanta, 12,000 in Oakland. “People are hungry for change,” he says, “and that wind at the back of any organization like this obviously is very helpful.”

But Obama also offers a cautionary note. He leans back in his chair and crosses his legs. “Movement without organization,” he says, “without policy, without plans, will dissipate. Howard Dean, one could argue, back in 2004 helped to engineer a movement, a movement in opposition to the war. But there wasn’t a structure there and a set of policies and plans that would then lead to governance.”

He leans forward and becomes more animated as he speaks. “One of the dangers of movements is that they always want to be completely pure and have everything their way. But politics is about governing and making compromises. And so sometimes folks who come into politics with a movement mentality can be disappointed.”

As I listen, I realize I have never witnessed a politician so genuinely trying to fuse idealism and pragmatism. The theme runs through almost everything he says. “But the flip side of it is,” he explains, hinting at what divides him and Hillary, “if it’s all tactics and all politics, and there’s not the idealism, if it’s not touched by that sense of movement, then you actually never bring about change. Then it’s just pure transactions between powerful interests in Washington.”

After the interview, we head to Greenville for a rally in a shopping mall that has been converted into a college and career center. Obama stands outside talking to some of his staffers. He sees me approach and suddenly a memory seems to be triggered. “You know, it’s like Ryan Lizza,” he says, gesturing at me and smiling widely. “Did I tell you the story of when I was sitting there doodling—I’m just drawing a bunch of different faces. And I guess that one face I drew was a long face. So he just assumed it was me.” It’s true, I once noted that the attention Obama was receiving seemed to be going to his head. As evidence, I reported that during an interview he doodled a picture of himself. This is the second time in three years Obama has brought up Doodlegate. At the Democratic convention, he approached me at a press breakfast and gently admonished me for the anecdote, then took out a pen and drew two doodles on a newspaper, one with a narrow face that I instantly recognized from our interview. “You see a picture of a guy with a long chin and big ears and automatically assume it’s me?” he asked. It was a light-hearted rebuke but also a reminder of Obama’s reputation for being a little thin-skinned. To prove once and for all the old doodle was not a self-portrait, Obama asks to show me his latest doodle. I hand him my notebook, and he draws the profile of a face with a big nose. Definitely not him. Though I can’t help notice it does look a little like Bill Clinton.

*****

It’s mid-June in Iowa, and Obama is standing under a blazing-hot sun, sweating through his white shirt. There is no relief in sight, as the line of Iowans waiting to ask him a question here at a park in working-class Webster City keeps growing, and Obama has promised to shake every hand. A chubby high school kid approaches wearing a camouflage hat that says Bill Anderson Custom Knives, and an agent gives him the once-over. “I’m a hunter and a competitive shooter,” he says. “I wanna know your policy on firearms.”

Obama answers carefully, surely understanding he is navigating some of the most treacherous ideological terrain for Democrats. “I believe that the Second Amendment means something,” he says. “I believe that hunters and sportsmen should have the right to engage in those activities.” Few politicians are better than Obama at speaking about the most polarizing issues, but this encounter also underscores that while Obama truly believes in the consensus-building approach to politics, on some issues there is no consensus to be built. “I do believe in some commonsense gun-control laws,” he says, despite the disagreement registering on the kid’s face. “Stronger background checks, making sure you don’t have small purchases going to unscrupulous gun dealers, loading up a van full of handguns and then dumping them in neighborhoods in inner cities. I think that we should be able to find a balance where you’re able to do what you do and also not have random shootings all the time.”

Obama is on his way to raising more money from a larger pool of donors than any presidential candidate in history. He will out-raise Hillary by an astounding $10 million for the quarter. He can parachute into almost any city in America and attract a crowd of thousands. But his poll numbers, both nationally and in the early primary states, still aren’t budging, and the whispers about Obama being the next Howard Dean are growing louder.

Pollsters are beginning to talk about Obama’s “beer problem.” Survey after survey shows that he appeals to the college-educated, “wine sipping” Democrats but isn’t reaching less educated “beer drinkers.” His aides explain away the polls, insisting that voters with more education are just paying closer attention to the campaign, and so therefore these numbers are actually good news—the more voters tune in, the more they will move to Obama. According to this theory, Hillary’s support among working-class Democrats is just a result of her famous name.

So today is not so much about hope and movement-building as it is about the realities of Iowa politics. Obama’s message up until this point has been purposefully vague. Like a giant fishing net, the plan was to scoop up as many supporters as possible with a widely appealing but general call for reform. After trawling for a while, his pollsters have inspected the haul and are sending Obama back to do some more targeted angling. Today he’s casting for two species: those troublesome downscale Democrats here in Webster City and old people later on in Story City. Both groups are unimpressed with Obama, according to the polls, but are essential to his efforts to close the Gap.

A few weeks prior, I was with Obama during a swing through New Hampshire, where he rented a Sunseeker RV, loaded up his wife and two little girls, and “vacationed” in the state’s scenic North Country, all the while being trailed by a busload of photographers and reporters, numerous staff vehicles, and half a dozen Secret Service agents. Despite the phoniness of the trip, there was one candid moment that ever so slightly suggests the distance Obama may need to come in winning over the beer drinkers. We stopped at a picturesque redbrick general store—“America’s oldest”—to photograph Obama and his family as they bought sandwiches and fudge and played with a puppy. As Obama stood at the counter paying, he looked quizzically at a display of trailer-hitch covers dressed in the guise of moose and turkeys. Turning to the phalanx of cameramen and reporters, Obama bravely wondered, “Who knows what a hitch ball is? This is a hitch-ball cover. We don’t know what a hitch ball is. Anybody know?” A cameraman politely explained that it’s the silver thing on the back of a truck used to tow a trailer. “Oh, I see,” Obama said, looking as if he was doing a mental calculation about whether this was one of those moments the press would use to make it seem like he’s out of touch. It wasn’t exactly President George H. W. Bush marveling over a checkout scanner, but still.

Here in Webster City, Obama is now in an argument about Iraq. “It just feels like we’re leaving them high and dry,” a man says to him. “How could we ever have anybody in the world trust us again?” Obama tries to explain his position that the occupation is inflaming the Middle East. “If you look at what’s happening right now,” he says, “the situation in Iraq is metastasizing, so that you’re starting to get Al Qaeda in Lebanon, you’re starting to get the same kinds of disruptions in the Palestinian territories—”

“Terrorist groups,” the man says, “I just see them all—they’re all one.”

Obama tries a different approach. “I guess what I’m saying,” he says, revealing just the slightest hint of impatience, “is we’re spending $275 million a day. It’s not sustainable for us to be able to do this, have thousands of U.S. troops maimed or killed over the next five or ten years.”

The Iowan is not impressed. “Americans spend as much on Christmas decorations as we do on the war!” he tells Obama.

“That’s not true,” Obama says, realizing the conversation has hit a point of diminishing returns. “I appreciate your opinion, and obviously I’m concerned about it, but I respectfully disagree on this.” Next.

The one-on-ones go on like this for more than half an hour. People are anxious. They have bread-and-butter concerns. A woman holding a small baby tells Obama about her husband fighting in Iraq. “He’s in my thoughts and prayers,” Obama offers, “and I’m looking forward to him getting back and seeing this good-looking guy.” More than one person tells of being laid off at the local Electrolux plant, which last year announced it would be making more washers and dryers in Ciudad Juárez and fewer in Webster City. “My biggest issue is jobs going to Mexico,” a woman who is waiting to hear whether she will lose her job at the plant tells Obama. Sometimes he gives a hug or places his hand on a shoulder and offers a word of encouragement. He is always warm and friendly, but he will probably never be a Bill Clinton-like empathizer-in-chief. “I’ve talked to four or five folks in the same situation,” he tells the woman a little clinically, “and we’ve just gotta make sure that at minimum, we aren’t offering tax breaks to those companies that are moving overseas, and we’ve got to build new manufacturing here in the region so that people have more options instead of just one company.”

Others are angry about the immigration bill before Congress. Or paying for college. As he listens to their concerns and gently corrects them, or offers a contrasting view, it’s apparent that one of the biggest challenges for Obama in winning over voters like these is that there isn’t an ounce of populism in him. He is in many ways an antipopulist—measured and rational rather than fiery and demagogic. He never rails against big corporations or fat-cat lobbyists or George W. Bush, even though his stump speech is filled with critiques of all three. Most recent reform candidates have been populist reformers, and both John Edwards and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton are hitting populist notes in Iowa. But Obama seems to willfully resist the temptation to change his cerebral, sometimes off-putting style.

The attention gets more custom-tailored as the day goes on. The next stop is a seniors’ center. There is nothing less inspiring than watching a Democratic candidate campaign on the perennial issue of prescription drugs. But a third of Iowa caucus-goers are over the age of 65, and so Obama, candidate of Generation Y, stands in front of several dozen elderly Democrats, some in wheelchairs, and explains in excruciating detail his plan to reduce their drug costs. Trailing Obama across numerous states for a couple of months, I have never seen him give such a detailed policy talk, not about Iraq or education or energy. He holds up a chart and points to a list of figures highlighting the cost differentials between getting drugs from the program run by the Veterans Affairs department (cheap) versus getting them from the convoluted system Bush enacted under Medicare (expensive). “Our campaign recently did an investigation,” he says, getting deep into the weeds, “and we found out that Iowans on Medicare pay 71 percent more than veterans who get their prescriptions through the VA. In fact, the annual cost of two of the drugs we surveyed was up to $1,500 more than under the VA.” I am either witnessing the total trivialization of the only inspiring politician in America or just another shrewd political play by someone whose granular understanding of electoral politics is constantly underestimated. Or maybe both.

In his SUV after the event, we talk about what the process of running for president has done to him. Like many first-time presidential candidates, he is in awe of the giant fun-house media mirror from which everything he does is reflected. “The part of it that you have to acclimate yourself to,” he says, “is the complete loss of privacy and the nonstop spotlight that’s on you at every moment.” During his Senate campaign, Obama was briefly followed around by a Republican operative wielding a video camera who even followed him to the bathroom at the Illinois statehouse. But that was nothing. “There’s no U.S. Senate campaign that operates like this,” he says, sounding amazed at the intensity of a presidential campaign. “I think I’ve been surprised at the degree to which small things get magnified in ways that strike me as pretty silly. A great example was when, during a rally in Richmond, I’d been talking about Iraq, and then I shifted and talked about the National Guard. I meant to say that ten people had been killed in Kansas. And I had a slip of the tongue and said 10,000 people.” He smiles and shakes his head, still shocked at the reaction. “And the way suddenly there were AP stories that went out everywhere—people saying people have died in the tornado, I’m a city slicker, don’t know tornadoes, despite the fact that in Springfield we used to have to go down to the basement in the middle of the night when I was staying at hotels during tornado watches. The notion that I was tired and that’s why I made the mistake—you know, just misspoke in a pretty innocuous way… That’s an interesting example to me of something that you don’t undergo unless you’re running for president.

“The danger,” he goes on, “is that you start becoming so risk-averse that you become canned and scripted, and I’m resisting that, which means there’s still gonna be some times when I want to push the boundaries a little bit, try to make a point, and it will give Gibbs heartburn.”

It always comes back to this, Obama struggling not to let the campaign change who he is. He has a way of reflecting on his own campaign as an outside observer. “We’ll joke,” his wife told me, “when we’re sitting at home watching TV, on the rare quiet night, and something will come on the news, and it’s about Barack Obama. We’ll say, ‘Hmm, there goes that Barack Obama again. Sounds really pretty interesting.’ I think there’s an out-of-body kind of aspect to it.” It’s clear watching Obama on the trail that he knows how absurd running for president is and what it might do to him. “Personally, for me,” Obama says, “I think the story of my campaign is the ongoing struggle to maintain my voice and my compass in a process that in a lot of ways is slightly ridiculous.” No doubt, that’s the question for him personally.