a revelation sparked his bid for the white house. but was it for real?
By Alan taylor

LIKE St Paul, Barack Obama had an epiphany. The man who would be America's first black president was nine years old when he had what he has described as "an ambush attack". At the time he was living in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather. Browsing in a library through some old copies of Life magazine he played a game with himself, trying to guess what a story was about from its accompanying photograph. One, however, perplexed him. It showed an older man wearing dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. Obama was stumped: there seemed nothing to it. He turned the page and found another photograph, which was a close-up of the man's hands.

"They had a strange, unnatural pallor," Obama later recalled, "as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man's crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue." He read on, assuming the man must be an albino or the victim of radiation. He was neither. It transpired that his condition was self-inflicted. He, like thousands of other black men and women, had paid to receive a chemical treatment to lighten the colour of his skin, in the vain pursuit of happiness as a white person.

"I felt my face and neck get hot," wrote Obama in Dreams Of My Father, his autobiography. "My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place."

For Obama, at such an impressionable, vulnerable and confused age, the effect of this picture and the story it told was defining. Until then, he had grown up free from self-doubt. Though his white mother had warned him about bigots, he now realised that out there was "a hidden enemy", of whom he had hitherto been unaware and who could get to him without anyone's knowledge. Life returned to normal but something fundamental had changed. Obama's view of the world and of himself was transformed. Watching television he began to notice how a black man never got the girl and how, in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue, none of the models shared his skin colour. Even Santa Claus was a white man. "I still trusted my mother's love," wrote Obama, "but I now faced the prospect that her account of the world ... was somehow incomplete."

It is an affecting, powerful anecdote and one which helps to explain who Barack Obama is and what drives him. But is it true? It is not, at least according to the Chicago Tribune, which took Obama's book, tested its veracity and found it wanting. Historians at Life magazine told the newspaper's reporters that they could find no story in its archives to corroborate the presidential contender's testimony. When this was put to Obama he suggested that he may have got the name of the magazine wrong. "It might have been an Ebony article or it might have been ... who knows where it was," he said. Likewise, it emerged that other stories Obama had told were embellished or downplayed. Some made him look better; others were over-egged. For instance, he was not the angry young black man, as he portrayed himself, insisted a boyhood friend. Rather, "his biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment".

Were Obama an ordinary, inconspicuous human being, none of this would much matter. Memory is selective, unreliable, personalised, all of which Obama understands more acutely than most. Some people, he concedes, have trouble taking him at face value. Others find his "Obambi-ish" persona hard to swallow. "I don't fault people their suspicions," is his response. "I learned long ago to distrust my childhood and the stories that shaped it." In writing about his life, in carving his history and his ideas in the granite of print, he knew he had taken a risk, that certain passages would be "inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research". But for a politician whose pitch for the presidency is meant to be underpinned by honesty, fairness, straight talk and independent judgement, the doubts over the authenticity of Obama's epiphany have given his opponent, the grizzled Vietnam vet John McCain, the ammunition he needs to prick the young pretender's self-inflated balloon. As yet, however, it shows no sign of sinking. As the polls currently show, Obama is in the ascendancy.

From the first time he impinged on America's consciousness, Obama has always made much of his personal narrative. Who he is, where he comes from, what his antecedents are, how he was brought up, his formation: this is how he relates to those he needs to back his tenancy of the White House. Just four years ago, his name meant little. In March 2004, he won a bruising campaign to become the Democrats' choice to fill the Illinois Senate seat. That marked him out as a rising star in his party. But other than political anoraks and the residents of his home state, few had a clue who he was. That all changed one July night in Boston when John Kerry invited him to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. Rarely has an opportunity been so fervently grasped.

"Tonight," opened Obama, his voice as creamy as Harry Belafonte's, "is a particular honour for me because - let's face it - my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely." He was referring not only to his relative obscurity but to his mixed race background, as the offspring of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. He talked about his family, his heritage, America, its divisions and its common purpose. "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that, in no other country on Earth, is my story even possible."

"There are patriots," he continued, "who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq ... In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?"

Instantly Obama was on the radar. Not only - as he well appreciated - was he speaking to his fellow Democrats but also, because his entire speech was broadcast live, to all Americans. Though "the skinny kid with the funny name" (as he described himself) was not yet a senator, badges calling for him to go for the presidency in 2008 became must-haves. David Letterman, hosting The Late Show, caught the mood of the moment, listing 10 ways to mispronounce his name. He went on to win a landslide victory in Illinois, ousting the incumbent Republicans with 70% of the vote to become the first male African-American to sit in the Senate. Among those eager to give him advice when he arrived in Washington was George Bush.

"You've got a bright future," he told him. "Very bright. But I've been in this town awhile and let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention, like you've been getting, people start gunnin' for ya. And it won't necessarily just be coming from my side. From yours too. Everybody'll be waiting for you to slip, you know what I mean? So watch yourself." How often, one wonders, did Obama hear those words thrumming in his head as he wrestled with the boa constrictor challenge of Hillary Rodham Clinton?

Barack Obama - whose name, for the record, is pronounced "ba-RACK oh-BAHM-uh" - was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1961. Come November, he will be 47, four years older than JFK, America's youngest ever president. Barack means "blessed" in Swahili, the language of Obama's father, who was also called Barack. He was born on the shores of Lake Victoria, a member of a nomadic tribe.

Obama senior migrated to Kenya and was selected by the government to study econometrics at the University of Hawaii. There, in 1959, he met an 18-year-old American girl, Stanley Ann Durham, known, understandably, as Ann, whom he married a year later. When their son was two, the Obamas separated and were later divorced. Thereafter, Obama saw his father just once, when he was 10. When he was six, his mother remarried and the family moved to Indonesia, where his stepfather was from and where his sister, Maya, was born. But as his mother's second marriage began to unravel Obama was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. He was a black boy living in a white middle-class household and attending a prestigious school where he was one of the few blacks.

The absence of his father undoubtedly increased Obama's sense of unconnectedness, isolation and difference. Though his mother and his grandparents loved him unconditionally and were unreconstructed liberals with many black friends, throughout Dreams Of My Father a picture emerges of a boy desperately trying to come to grips with who he is and what his rightful place is. It made him angry and frustrated. As a teenager he rebelled. He drank and took drugs. No-one need ever ask him if he inhaled. Often he felt he was being patronised or made a fool of.

"The feeling that something wasn't quite right stayed with me," he recalled, "a warning that sounded whenever a white girl mentioned in the middle of a conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder; or whenever a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball; or when the school principal told me I was cool. I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments set me on edge?"

After his father died, he visited Kenya for the first time, and met his extended family. On several levels, it was the trip of a lifetime, a voyage around his father's terrain, a place where people knew of him and those to whom he was related. In Kenya, family was everywhere, half brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins.

"There," said the novelist, Scott Turow, a friend and supporter of Obama, "he managed to fully embrace a heritage and family he'd never fully known and come to terms with his father, whom he'd long regarded as an august foreign prince, but now realised was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities."

Inch by inch, Obama was beginning to plot a role, a route, for himself. He was well-versed in the black mythology of America. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes were all on his bookshelf. But it was Malcolm X and his travails with the Nation of Islam which appear to have resonated most. Like him, Obama is keen to stress the possibility of a harmonious existence between America's black and white populations. Like him too, Obama is an accomplished orator. But whereas Malcolm X was frequently extreme and inflammatory, Obama is a pacifier, a mediator, always eager to steer a middle course or find common ground, even with perceived enemies. If that upsets people, including fellow Democrats, then so be it.

But, when all is said and done, he is a Democrat. To those who ask what he stands for, what he represents, he says: "I am angry about policies that consistently favour the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific enquiry and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody's religious beliefs - including my own - on non-believers. Furthermore, I am a prisoner of my own biography; I can't help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatised, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives."

All of which sounds fine and dandy as far as it goes. But what kind of a president Obama would make remains a mystery. The best that can be said, perhaps, is that he will be different. There are no precedents, let alone presidents, which offer help. It's easier to say what he is not than what he is: he is no Clinton or Kennedy, no Bush or Reagan. He supports gay rights and is in favour of the death penalty. He did not support the war in Iraq but how can he pull out American troops without leaving behind a holy mess? The economy he will inherit is in freefall but, given he has never seen anything more complex than a household budget, what confidence can there be in his ability to fix it?

As Clinton demonstrated in vain during the battle for the Democratic nomination, and as McCain will surely seek to exploit in the next few months, it is Obama's lack of experience that could prove his Achilles' heel. As his CV shows, he has not run anything of any significance, either in politics or in business. Having studied political science at Columbia University he was employed briefly as a research analyst for a financial consulting company, after which he worked on a campaign to promote recycling in New York. Eventually, he found a job in Chicago working on community projects, which is how he met the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama has embraced as a mentor and whom he has since distanced himself from after he said that America had brought terrorism on itself.

In 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School, becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. It was while working as a summer associate in a Chicago firm that he met his wife, Michelle, who acted as his supervisor. They married in 1992 and have two daughters. He wooed her by taking her to Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing and buying her a cone at Baskin-Robbins. At a reception, he told the movie director: "I owe you a lot." Michelle, he disclosed, had allowed him to place his hand on her knee.

According to a recent profile in the New Yorker, Michelle, who recently appeared on Oprah talking about tights and other pressing matters, "seems like an iconoclast precisely because she's normal". Her husband, meanwhile, has been doing his damnedest to follow her lead, after all hell broke loose when he said that people who have been long-term unemployed get bitter or cling to guns or religion or show "antipathy toward people who aren't like them".

Irked by the backlash and by accusations of elitism, he has come to realise that in an America that can elect tongue-tied presidents and terminators as governors, relating to ordinary, conservative Joes of whatever colour is the key to winning votes.

By all means preach hope, as he does with messianic fervour, but if Barack Obama is to become the 44th President of the most powerful nation on the planet he must demonstrate what that means in practice. He has five tumultuous, spine-tingling months to prove that he can.