WASHINGTON — When President Obama takes the podium in Cairo this week for his much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world, he'll stand before them as an American leader born of an African Muslim father and raised partly in Indonesia, as well as a politician who cut his political teeth in an Illinois political culture that has a sizable Muslim population.
And he will talk, aides say, about those roots he shares with the Muslim world.
It is a politics of biography rapidly becoming synonymous with the Obama presidency. The message he hopes to deliver to Muslims, outlined by advisors ahead of the president's departure Wednesday for the Middle East, will draw on the same storytelling instincts Obama has employed with great success at home.
Now, as Obama attempts to forge new relations with a Muslim community that is at best suspicious of American motives, he relies on a diplomacy of personality that rests on the hunch that the best way to make friends for his country is by winning them over himself.
"The fact is that the president himself experienced Islam on three continents before he's been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world," said Denis McDonough, Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. The president sees a fundamental need, McDonough said, to change "how we engage our allies."
So when Obama arrives in the region Wednesday, advisors say, he won't be carrying detailed policy proposals, but rather an appeal focusing on common experience and mutual respect.
"I want to use the occasion to deliver a broader message about how the United States can change for the better its relationship with the Muslim world," Obama said last week as he prepared for his trip. "That will require, I think, a recognition on both the part of the United States as well as many majority-Muslim countries about each other, a better sense of understanding and the possibilities of achieving common ground."
Common ground has been elusive in recent years. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, images from the scandals at Abu Ghraib prison and the Bush administration's inability to stop the slide in Israeli-Palestinian relations all sowed distrust in the region.
But new Gallup polls in 11 Arab countries show that opinions of U.S. leadership, while still generally low, have risen in Egypt and seven other countries since Obama took office.
