Some Like It Cool

Seven months ago, as he drove me the lengthy route from Vero Beach to the airport in West Miami Beach: past abandoned citrus groves and overgrown, half-built housing developments, past billboards flogging vacation homes at a third or a quarter of their original prices—my driver, a heavyset white Vietnam vet originally from Buffalo, N.Y., with back trouble, two impressively successful grown sons and an adolescent stepdaughter, explained why he hoped Barack Obama would be the Democratic candidate, and why he would vote for the man if he were: "I don't care if he's black, white, orange or any other color," he said. "He's got two eyes, a nose and a mouth like anybody else. He's smart. He talks well. And the guy is classy. I want to be a part of that."

Classy, cool, hip, glamorous, even sexy—all these words have been used to describe the presumptive Democratic nominee. He has excited the young, the disenfranchised, the traditionally cynical and apathetic: even I, for the first time in my life, had given money to a campaign—his. Outside Obama events you can buy T shirts bearing his likeness, strangely cartooned, looking vaguely like Malcolm X or Che Guevara memorabilia; you can pick up buttons with slogans like HOT CHICKS DIG OBAMA. I saw a young girl in rural Missouri, upon shaking his hand, scream and hop up and down as if he were John, Paul, George or Ringo: she then called up friends on her cell phone, gazing at her own hand as if it were a mystical relic. He's repeatedly been compared to JFK, to George Clooney, to Sidney Poitier and, sarcastically, by his opponent, to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears; he's been both hailed and condemned as a celebrity. We've opened every magazine and newspaper to find him profiled, analyzed, taxonomized again, and again, and again, to the point where the American people are tired of the hype. We've been apprised of the likes and dislikes of his wife, and of the routines of his children. He has stolen—some would say, hogged—the limelight for months.

And yet we're still not satiated. Or perhaps, more accurately, we're not satisfied: for all we've seen, and read, and been told, both by and about him, there are some things we're still trying to figure out.

When I told people I'd be following the Obama campaign for a week, their envy was palpable, their curiosity intense—this in spite of, or perhaps because of, all the hype. Even my friend whose disappointment over Hillary is such that she has said she will not vote at all—even she got excited. McCain's campaign can mock Obama's celebrity—can make it, indeed, their principal complaint—precisely because he has become a celebrity, in a way simply impossible for John McCain.

But the truth of the matter is that seen up close, the attraction of Barack Obama as a candidate has less to do with the cut of his suits or the fact that he's championed by hip rock singers than with an almost geeky earnestness, a decency and sobriety that he projects when speaking to a crowd. A large part of his mystique lies in his insistence on his message, and on the complexity of that message; and in his old-fashioned, almost stern will to cut the flim-flam and, in a way so retro it's almost novel, to actually address the issues. When I got home, friends rang and just said "So?" The first unspoken question was "Did you meet him?" and the second, "What was he like?" To which I said, "Well, it was like this …"

It was far, let me tell you, from a week of unmitigated glamour. First of all, joining up with the Obama campaign was rather like finding an unannounced rave party in the dead of night without a map. On the morning of the day on which I was supposed to hook up with them, I knew only at what hotel in Washington, D.C., they'd been the night before. Nobody from the campaign had responded to my volley of e-mails. I'd managed, almost by chance, to register to join the traveling press for the week; but in order to meet them, I had to find them. Eventually, after badgering a dozen people, I was given a cell-phone number. I called, and Katie Lillie—a charming, efficient and dedicated staffer known as a "wrangler," who deals with the press—revealed the secrets, such as they were, of joining the group.

I bestirred myself, at her instruction, to the "file room" down a corridor off the vast lobby of the Washington, D.C., Omni Shoreham Hotel. The room, mid afternoon, had a morguelike hush, as two young men and a young woman tapped away diligently on their laptops hooked up to power strips at the linen-covered tables, jugs of ice water sweating beside them. Over the course of the next two hours, journalists trickled in, bringing with them a summer-camp jollity, warm greetings for comrades not seen for some time, the exchange of near-whispered jokes. By the time we piled on to the bus to the airport, I'd been introduced to at least a few of the crowd. Over the course of my days with them, the press—most of them not yet 30 years old—were unfailingly friendly, helpful, generous, even, to this stranger in their midst.