"It's truly one of those yard-sale finds," said Bush, an environmental lawyer.
The painter gave the portrait to Lindberg, who tried to donate it directly to Obama's national campaign, Bush said. But she never got a response to her queries. When Lindberg learned that Ojai was mounting its own campaign push, she stepped forward with the donation. As soon as McCluer saw it, she had to have it, her husband said. McCluer offered $2,000, but the campaign office organizers were unsure whether they should part with it.
Then McCluer, 45, tried a bit more persuasion.
McCluer used to work for a wind-turbine manufacturer in Carpinteria, and she had taken a job as a manager with a U.S. Department of Energy wind and hydropower technologies program. If Obama won the election, McCluer said, she would hang it in a corridor at the Energy Department's Washington office.
That clinched the deal.
"Our fantasy is that we put this in her office in D.C., and Barack will come walking down the hall one day and see it and give us some answers," said Heffner, 53, a retired carpenter.
For now, the portrait remains in the rural Ojai home where the couple has lived for two years. McCluer, who started her job in September, flies home to California whenever she can, Heffner said.
She plans to hang the painting in her Energy Department office as soon as she gets the OK from her superiors.
"It has to go through some channels before it can be hung on the wall," he said. "We're working on it."
Paintings of Obama for sale abound on the Internet. There's an original oil for $5,400 on EBay and plenty of cheaper models for $99.99. But the portrait in McCluer and Heffner's possession could be truly rare -- a fine-art rendition of the future president before he was famous.
Obama was raised in Hawaii and attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years in the early 1980s. Bush speculated that the artist and future politician could have bumped paths in either of those locales. It seems unlikely that Adams painted the portrait from a photograph, he said.
"Why would he have painted it unless he knew Barack Obama?" Bush said.
Little information is publicly available on Adams, the artist. Eric Merrell, an archivist with the California Art Club, confirmed that Adams was a member of the prestigious group, serving as a vice president in 1967.
He lived in Los Angeles at the time, and mounted exhibitions for the art club with the help of his wife. A newsletter put out by the organization noted that Adams' wife died in 1969, the last reference Merrell could find to the artist.
"I haven't come across anyone who knew him," the archivist said. "It's a mystery."
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catherine.saillant@latimes.com
