The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Obama cites a verse from I Chronicles. The passage is from a prayer of King David's at the end of his life: "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers." Obama stops his quotation there, but the verse goes on: "our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding." Both the section Obama quoted and the one he did not speak to the same theme: life is transitory, incomplete—and incompletable.

The two men, then, have more in common than either might cheerfully acknowledge 17 weeks from Election Day. McCain's faith—in country, in his fellow prisoners, in himself—endured the dungeons of Hanoi, ultimately shaping a man with a wry, tragic sensibility. Some things work out, some things do not: the duty of the honorable man is to fight in the cause of the right, and perhaps the forces of light will edge out the forces of darkness.

Obama is just as pragmatic, and there is more tragedy in his view of the world than one might think. His rhetoric of hope is so powerful that the candidate's understanding of leadership as a fallible thing can go unnoticed.

The unsentimental passage from I Chronicles ("our days on the earth are as a shadow") "does speak to a certain sensibility that is part of my makeup, and that traces itself back to the circumstances of my birth and the absence of a father," Obama told me. "Growing up oftentimes means that imperfection and weakness and evil are all part of the human condition as much as joy and happiness and good are." The Obama narrative, like the McCain one, is grounded in the recognition that politics and life will never be perfect, but they can be better. "It's not pessimism," Obama said. "One of the things I am always trying to reject is a false choice between blind optimism and despair and cynicism. What I at least am always after is a hardheaded realism that does not extinguish hope."

Both nominees hear distant drumbeats. "I have a lot of role models and a lot of heroes, and I need them because I have been a flawed servant of my country," McCain told me. I asked him which presidents he bore in mind as inspirational figures. "On the obvious plus side, Lincoln, TR and Reagan are people who are in many respects my role models," McCain said. And who, I asked, do you think of and say, "I don't want to be him"? McCain replied: "One I was thinking about very recently because of this anti-free-trade, protectionism sentiment that understandably is being bred by our severe economic problems is Herbert Hoover. In 1930, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and there were other actions that the administration and Congress took that sent us from a recession into a deep depression. And my study of history is that Herbert Hoover was at least acquiescent, if not very active, in taking all the wrong steps, which again not only didn't help the situation but exacerbated conditions which led to the most severe depression in the history of this nation."

Obama shares McCain's love of Lincoln. "When I think about presidents, I start with Lincoln, and not just because I'm from Illinois," Obama said. "I think he embodies those qualities that are the very best in America: upward mobility, an embrace of the future and an ability to stand fast on principle while acknowledging the other side of the debate." Washington's leaving office after two terms impresses Obama, too: "Our first president was someone who could step outside his own ambitions."

And the examples he wants to avoid? "You know, I have to admit that I don't spend a lot of time reading about failed presidents," he said, then went on: "There is a long list of presidents who did not rise to the times—Hoover, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson. Many of them are people who did not see, for example, the fault lines of slavery, or the dangers of depression."

McCain just finished a 1904 book of Theodore Roosevelt's about hunting, and is now reading Philip Bobbitt's "Terror and Consent." Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," is a hero of McCain's. "He's everything I always wanted to be, and has always been larger than life," McCain says. "I reread it all the time, and cry when he says, 'Maria, we won't be going to Madrid'."