He's Comfortable in His Skin -- Now It's Our Turn

The junior senator from Illinois insists that he has no immediate designs on the White House. But even if Obama, 43, runs as an octogenarian -- and even though he has been diplomatically dismantling racial and political boundaries since he became, in 1990, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review -- his candidacy would make this country squirm and shudder and maybe even come unglued.

Obama, after all, is no Tiger Woods, cobbling together a treacly amalgam to represent each strain of his heritage. Never mind his biracial DNA. He considers himself a black man. His gene pool may be free from the taint of slavery, but his experience as an American is not.

Obama's father was a black economics student from Kenya who returned to Africa when his son was young. His mother was a white anthropologist from Kansas. She raised her son in Indonesia for four years, then sent him at age 10 to live with her parents, who now lived in Hawaii. It was his white mother who cloaked the child in blackness, insisting, he says, that "to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear."

Obama recounted his family's story in "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," first published 10 years ago, before he began his political career. The publisher reissued the autobiography last summer, during Obama's Senate race. The book reveals a man who is intellectually intense, emotionally honest and racially aware -- qualities certain to strain the affections of a nation that prefers its leaders simple and self-righteous, no soul-searching allowed.

By chronicling the journey of a confused young man struggling to find "a workable meaning for his life as a black American," the autobiography hands future political opponents ammunition: As a teenager, Obama smoked marijuana and tried cocaine. With his father gone, he relied for guidance on a handful of black acquaintances -- the streetwise son of a former Los Angeles cop, an elderly poker buddy of his grandfather -- and behaved as "a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood."

"I engaged in self-destructive behavior," Obama admits today. "Sometimes I lashed out at white people and sometimes I lashed out at black people."