The great non-white hope

Fast-rising Illinois legislator Barack Obama touts `mutual obligation' at Vegas rally

By Newt Briggs

Barack Obama is still only a state senator from Illinois, yet rational people are already speculating that he will be the first African-American president of the United States. It's a wild, irresponsible prediction--something akin to suggesting that the Chicago Cubs will someday win another World Series--but there's something about Obama that makes people want to believe in a way that they haven't since King or Kennedy or even Clinton (although he repaid that faith with a soiled dress).

Perhaps it's the fact that, despite his middling political stature, Obama was tapped to give the keynote address on the second night of the Democratic National Convention--a speech that was lauded everywhere from the left-leaning New Republic to the ultra-conservative Washington Times. Or maybe it's because Obama has such an enormous lead over Alan Keyes, his opponent for Peter Fitzgerald's vacated U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, that he can afford to travel to Las Vegas to stump for John Kerry at a morning rally at the West Las Vegas Library. No doubt it has a lot to do with the fact that when Obama wins the seat in November, he will be only the third African-American to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction.

"It's nice to know that there's an alternative to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan," said Sandee Brown, an African-American resident of North Las Vegas who attended the rally with a friend. As an afterthought, she added, "He is black, right?"

Yes. Well, kind of. As Obama said in his DNC address, his father was born and raised in a small, Luo-speaking village in Kenya. While studying in the United States, the elder Obama met and married the white daughter of a Kansas farmer and oil driller. The unlikely pair sired Barack, who spent his youth in Hawaii and Indonesia--most of it in poverty. After attending college at Columbia University, Obama took a job as a community organizer on Chicago's economically disadvantaged South Side. Three years later, he left the post to attend Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He was subsequently recruited by a number of high-powered law firms, but he chose to represent victims of housing and employment discrimination for a small public-interest firm. In 1996, he won the first of three appointments to the Illinois state Senate.

It would be an impressive resume for anyone, but it's particularly noteworthy considering that Obama just turned 43 in August. This impression of youth is augmented by Obama's boyish face and wiry frame, but he plays politics like a seasoned pro. When he entered the West Las Vegas Library on Friday morning, he genuflected in front of Sen. Harry Reid before he, the aspiring legislator, shook hands with the established statesman.

Obama was similarly lithe when he spoke to the press. Asked to respond to Clark County Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald's claim that the Democratic Party is the "last plantation in America," he called the Republican rhetoric "tired" and characterized them as a group that "refuses to let the facts get in the way of their ideology."

"The American people are a non-ideological people," he said. "That's true in Illinois. That's true in Nevada. These are people that want common-sense solutions to their problems, and the Democratic Party delivers exactly that--a mainstream, practical, non-ideological approach to problem solving."

But Obama was at his best in front of the standing-room-only crowd that filled the library's outdoor amphitheatre. Introduced by Reid as "someone who is going to make America different than it is today," Obama riffed on his name ("Alabama," "Yo Mama"), shared stories from his travels around the country and harped on government's "mutual obligation" to its citizens.

"That's what got me into politics, and that's what this election is all about. Those values are not respected or honored by the current occupant in the White House. They have a different idea about their role. They have a different idea about their purpose. They think their job is to protect the powerful from the powerless, which is why they have the drug companies write the drug bills and the energy companies write the energy bills and the millionaires write the tax code."

"We're not doing that anymore," shouted one of the onlookers in the peanut gallery.

"That's right," said Obama without missing a beat. "We're not doing it anymore. We've got a different idea."

Afterward, 62-year-old retiree Jerry Rosenberg took a cautiously optimistic approach to Obama's vision. "I don't know if he's for real, but I like what he's saying. It's been a long time since I've done anything but curse out politicians."