New kid on the block

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A POINT OF VIEW By Tim Egan

Barack Obama is making a big impression in US politics

There's a new kid on the block in American politics. And Al Gore is returning for the second act.

They started waiting in the chill and the mist and the dark, three hours before the doors opened.

There were teenagers, and more than a few. Blacks and whites. A mix of old and young. Tickets had been sold out for weeks, and now touts were getting $70 for a $5 face value. Just the mere rumour of the approaching main event set off ripples of anticipation.

A woman squealed. Two men pushed forward. "He's here!"

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All of this, for a politician - Barack Obama. He is, in the strictly formal sense, merely a freshman Democratic Senator from the state of Illinois. But the fledgling idea that he may run for President, makes all these gatherings seem like they are part of something historic.

For if America is truly ready for a black President, Obama may be the one.

Just look at him work the crowd - the broad grin, those slightly off-centred ears, the Lincolnesque frame - and you see something else. Look at the faces of the people waiting to touch him.

Some are even teary-eyed. Barackomania, they call it - and the comparison to that other mania more than 40 years ago is apt, the time when people fainted after they got to touch a young John Kennedy.

Racial hybrid

It's not just that Barack Obama is the idealised image of New Century America that many want to project - that undefined racial hybrid, with the white mother from Kansas, the black father from Kenya. Tiger Woods in a suit.

But, as his star rises during one of the most polarising periods in American politics, the Senator from Tomorrow is forced to wear the cloak of many dreams.

A few miles away, at a packed ballroom in Seattle, another political star worked the crowd. But the reaction was almost sombre - reverential, in a way - for former Vice President Al Gore.

Next Tuesday, of course, is election day in the United States, when control of Congress will be up for grabs. But on the very next day - two years before the actual vote - the race for the presidency begins in earnest. It may well start with Obama, but it certainly will be shadowed in part by Al Gore - who has been increasingly coy on the subject of whether he will run for President again.

Over the last week, I saw Obama, the man who may be President, and Al Gore, the man who nearly was President. It was fascinating to see the way they carried themselves - one in ascendancy, the other in a kind of self-deprecating martyrdom. The crowds were the biggest of the year for these two men.

Al Gore was on the road, doing what he has done for most of the last year - showing his slide show about the threat of global warming. "An Inconvenient Truth," a film based on the Gore show, has been a modest hit, giving him a big second wind. I noticed a jump in his step, and he seemed much more assured of himself.

'Ozone man'

Gore, you remember, won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential race - garnering about half-a-million more votes than George Bush. But he lost in a Supreme Court decision based on a disputed count of ballots.

Afterward, he said it was over, he said he had no regrets. He grew a beard, gained some weight, wandered around Europe. He appeared on a comic show, Saturday Night Live, and now he does a very impressive impersonation of his former boss, Bill Clinton.

He was said to be a stiff. He was called "Ozone Man," by Republicans for his obsession with the environment. Who knew if he had a second act?

When I saw him last week, he looked puffy, about 20 pounds heavier than he was in his fighting trim when he lost to George W. Bush. His hair was fairly gray, and he seemed a bit world-weary. His deep-set blue eyes looked sleepy.

But he has learned to tell a joke, and he had the crowd on its feet several times.

He mentioned that he has just been in the airport in Los Angeles, eating fast food on a paper plate, when a woman starting circling him. She moved closer, looking him over once, twice, several double-takes. At last she said, "You know: you would look just like Al Gore if you dyed your hair black."

'Hubris alarm'

When he lowered his voice to a bare whisper, it was to talk about the threat of an overheated planet, which he considers one of if not the gravest threat to humankind.

Gore's authority on climate change has won him a new position. A few days after leaving Seattle on this global warming tour, Gore was asked by the Chancellor Gordon Brown to advise the British government on climate change. This came on the heels of that new report that said warming could drive the world economy into a downturn similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

After the speech, Gore was lathered with praise. One person said he would be to global warming what Gandhi was to nonviolent protest. Others told him to run for the Presidency again. Gone, for the moment, were the old criticisms of Gore the bore, the man with the missionary zeal.

He deflected all the compliments, saying "I have a battery-powered hubris alarm and it's just about to go off."

This was the new Al Gore - a man with a somewhat clouded past, who has found a future-looking issue.

Barack Obama is 45 years old - still a baby boomer, but without the 1960s-era cultural baggage. In his new book, now the number one book in the United States, The Audacity of Hope, he mentioned that he had tried several drugs as a young man - marijuana, and "maybe a little blow," a reference to cocaine. He put distance between himself and the Clintons, when he said, "When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point."

Goats to votes

Bill Clinton, whose wife is considered the Democratic front-runner for president even though she has yet to declare, had famously said that he never inhaled.

Obama has generated huge crowds. He was mobbed out West - in Denver, in Arizona, and Seattle. He seemed both disarmingly frank, as with the discussion on marijuana, and a bit of a policy wonk. He got standing ovations for lines that would barely generate a ripple from other politicians.

Part of this, in my view, has to do with where we are in American politics. Forty-two years ago in the midst of a dark winter, just months after the United States had lost a young president to an assassin's bullet, the Beatles electrified the States.

In a similar way, our politics seems dead now, so polarising to so many people, so that someone like Obama can come along and set off a frenzy by the combination of his life story and the way he presents it: he's the Harvard law School graduate whose father herded goats in Kenya as a boy.

And unlike Jesse Jackson, who tried mightily to become the first black President, Obama seems almost race-neutral. It's there - but as an example of who we want to be - not shame over who we were.

On the road, Obama said few things that would be considered profound or original. Like Gore, he showed that he gets the joke. When one interviewer asked him if he wanted to change the glass of water in front of him into wine, he said no thanks - "I'll just try to walk across it."

When he spoke to the crowd, it was not in sweeping, preacher-like oratorical tones. He was not reaching for those Martin Luther King heights.

But Obama has the zing of something new, and he is that magnet for all those hopes. In talking to people afterward, I was struck by how many people simply project onto him.

Unlike other Democrats, he is also not afraid to talk about religious faith - his or others. He argues that Democrats should not abandon evangelicals, and he calls himself, "a church-going man."

What got the most rousing response was when Obama offered something that Martin Luther King Jr, used to offer - that dream down the road.

"We've got to have hope," he said. "We've got to have a belief in things not seen. We've got to have a belief in better days ahead."

To Republican critics, it sounds trite. To cynics, it's ho-hum, nothing they haven't heard from a politician before: warmed-over clichés coming out of the mouth of a very attractive man. (Yes, Obama is also a cover boy - appearing on the front of several fashion magazines of late).

So, is the infatuation with Obama just a swoon in an autumn of dismal politics? Something to take our minds off the barrage of sleazy ads on television in the battle for Congress?

Perhaps. He may well turn out to be just another flavour of the month. But nobody who waited hours in the chill to hear him would say so. And, if this is just a tease that fades away, he has Al Gore to remind him that in politics, there is always a second act.

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