The Editor’s Desk

What politicians call themselves reflects how they think, and how they would like to be thought of. FDR used FDR, partly because it echoed his great ancestor TR and partly because, I suspect, it sounded imperial. LBJ echoed his hero FDR, whose New Deal Lyndon Johnson believed he was completing with the Great Society. Jimmy Carter resisted James, underscoring the populist image he wanted to cultivate. Ronald Reagan was always Ronald Reagan, a dashing action hero: he even dropped his middle name, Wilson, in his presidential inaugurals. Never clutter up the credits.

It is interesting, then, that Barack Obama was not always Barack Obama. For a long time he was Barry Obama, which made us wonder about the milieu in which he moved from his nickname to the formal Barack, the name with which he came of age and has now risen to become the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at the relatively young age of 46.

So when did Barry become Barack? In 1980–81, a period in which he was a student at Occidental College in California and was heading to New York, where he would finish college at Columbia. "It was when I made a conscious decision: I want to grow up," Obama told us last week. In our cover, reported by Richard Wolffe, Jessica Ramirez, Eve Conant, Sarah Kliff, Andrew Murr and Miyoko Ohtake and written by Jeffrey Bartholet, we reconstruct Obama's journey from one name to the other, and explore what light that journey sheds on his character. Allison Samuels, Ellis Cose and Jonathan Alter also contribute essays.

In electing presidents we are also choosing stories, and Obama's personal narrative is a crucial element of his campaign. We should not allow the politics of the primary season to muddle that truth. Senator Clinton has very effectively cast Senator Obama as all story and no substance, which he is not, any more than she is all past and no future, which is Senator Obama's caricature of her. But the Obama story is important, because character is important, and character can be understood only in the context of biography.

His Kenyan father had changed the name he went by, too—but from Barack to Barry. The elder Obama made the switch when he came to the United States as a student in 1959, reflecting the immigrant's instinct to fit in, to assimilate. That his son would make the reverse journey in order to fit into the world in which he found himself suggests how much America has changed, and is still changing.

"The identity quest, which began before he became Barack and continued after, put him on a trajectory into a black America he had never really known as a child in Hawaii and abroad," Jeff writes. "In the end, he would come to see and accept that he was in an almost unique position as an American—someone who had been part of both the white and the black American 'families,' able to view the secret doubts and fears and dreams of both, and to understand them. He could be part of a black world where his pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., expressed paranoid fantasies about white conspiracies to spread drugs or HIV, because he understood in his gut the history of racism that stoked those fears. He could, for a time, shrug off Wright's more incendiary views, in part because he knew that whites, in their private worlds, often expressed or shrugged off bigotry themselves, partly because of fears that might seem irrational to African-Americans."

His story is one that crosses at least two worlds, and he will have to keep telling that story—clearly and honestly, in the way he addressed race in Philadelphia— if he wants to lead the world.

© 2008