A Man at Home in the World

He was just a college kid, vagabonding around the world. But Barack Obama says the weeks he spent traveling through Pakistan in 1981 shaped the views that he still holds today—and that he would bring into the White House. Obama remembers most vividly the desperation and hopelessness—"essentially a feudal life"—he witnessed in the countryside surrounding Karachi, a city that is today a hotbed of jihadist activity. At the tender age of 20, Obama suggested, he was already beginning to understand more about what ailed Muslim societies—what generated terrorism and fratricidal conflicts—than George W. Bush or John McCain do today. "Both as a consequence of living in Indonesia and traveling in Pakistan, having friends in college who were Muslim, I was very clear about the history of Shia-Sunni antagonism"—which is one reason why, as an Illinois state senator 21 years later, he opposed the war in Iraq, Obama told NEWSWEEK last week. "This notion that somehow we were going to be able to create a functioning democracy and reconcile century-old conflicts, I always thought was a bunch of happy talk from this administration."

Obama's taken a lot of hits over his alleged foreign-policy inexperience—most notoriously from fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, who suggested in a TV ad last month that he was the wrong man to answer the phone at 3 a.m. during a crisis. But last week Obama signaled that he'd had enough of these attacks. Not only did he not lack experience, Obama cockily told a fund-raising crowd in San Francisco, but "foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain."

If Obama wins the nomination and faces McCain, this will be a critical test of his candidacy: can he change the terms of the debate so that the traditional measures of foreign-policy experience don't apply? Because the kind of experience he talks about so confidently is not what one typically associates with a presidential résumé. It's not Ike leading the Allied Armies into Europe; it's not JFK saving his shipmates aboard PT-109; it's not George H.W. Bush running the CIA and serving as veep for eight years. (Or, for that matter, John McCain flying combat missions and getting shot down in Vietnam.) Nor was Obama alluding to his mastery of the Moscow Treaty on nukes or the subtleties of Mideast peace talks—though many of his Senate colleagues are impressed with his growing expertise in those areas.

Instead, it is the kind of bottom-up experience that comes from growing up in the muddy lanes of Jakarta, in a plain concrete house at No. 16 Haji Ramli Street. There Obama played hide-and-seek in the local mosque, dueled with bamboo sticks and learned dirty words in Indonesian. Friends and teachers recall his being picked on for his height and dark skin, but say that even amid an alien culture he was a leader and a peacemaker in the schoolyard. He always wanted the job of organizing the other kids into a line before class, says Fermina Katarina Sinaga Suhanda, his third-grade teacher, who had to urge him to take turns. "He always wants to be No. 1, to be at the front. Psychologically, he wants to be in charge," she says.

It's a long way from homeroom monitor to commander in chief, of course. But it was in Jakarta that Obama came to appreciate both the powerlessness of his native companions and the status that came from having a white American mother, Ann, who worked for the U.S. Embassy. "He was at an age when you first begin to see what's going on," says Ben Rhodes, one of his speechwriters. "And what he saw was that America had something other people wanted. Here he is in a majority Muslim country, in a poor neighborhood. And … he has this tie to America that affords him an immediate opportunity that no one else has." Both Obama's Kenyan father—who abandoned the family—and his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, were eager to penetrate that Western world. They never fully succeeded, and Obama knew it.

That experience, aides say, turned Obama into both someone who identifies with those less fortunate abroad—and a true-blue patriot. "He understands he's gotten where he is based on the fact that we have a system that opens up opportunity to smart and talented people," says retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak, a top Obama adviser. McPeak, Rhodes and others claim that Obama's upbringing gives him deeper insight into how to win the "hearts and minds" so crucial to success in Iraq, and in the global struggle against Islamic extremism. "Obama's experience living abroad gives him a sense of that grass-roots life, which is so important in shaping why a terrorist is a terrorist," says Tony Lake, Bill Clinton's former national-security adviser, who now is a top Obama adviser.