Some Like It Cool

Next to Daniels stands a young white mother holding her 15-month-old son, Tarrien. A beautiful child with a coffee complexion, a pouting mouth and an alert gaze, he eyes Obama skeptically from the safety of his mother's arms, looking the candidate up and down, up and down. In watching Tarrien watch Obama, there is emotion in knowing that the small boy may never fathom the historic nature of the moment, in which he has encountered the first presidential candidate in America's history to look like himself.

The Ozarks are not, traditionally, a Blue spot on the map. And yet there's a sense, as Obama regains his bus, that the Bell Restaurant may have charted a tiny Blue blip. The patrons of the Bell seem above all struck by the seriousness with which they have been treated—"Him talking to me helps"—by the candidate's willingness to discuss substantive issues in plain language, by the dignity and calm he retains in a potentially circuslike moment.

In this sense, Michelle Stile, the founder of the grass-roots organization Orlando 4 Obama, isn't wrong when she insists that "Obama reminds us of what's good about America. The core decency is huge." Rather like the African-American preachers from whom he clearly learned so much while working as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, Obama embodies, and proposes, a vision of America that would afford the nation greater self-respect. It is, in Christian outreach—or in Muslim outreach, for that matter; consider the self-discipline of Malcolm X—a time-honored trajectory, a tale of restraint and continence. He stands before the crowd in Rolla, Mo., and insists, "I'm not somebody who's just going to tell you what you want to hear. I'm going to tell you what you need to hear. Because the situation is too serious." He stands up in St. Petersburg, Fla., and announces, "We've got to do some long-term work as well. It's not going to be easy and it's not going to happen overnight." In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he declares, "Most Americans know in their gut that we've got to change."

This reassuring promise of tough love is familiar from religious movements, but also from contemporary reality television, from programs like "The Biggest Loser": it is a template of conversion in which, with the right help, America and Americans can restore ourselves, through hard work and self-denial, to glory. It is ultimately an austere, even old-fashioned approach (this from the man whose children don't get birthday presents, after all), and it is not unjudgmental. In terms of policies, Obama's promise is that we can get out of debt; we can wean ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil; we can provide health care for the underserved; we can restore our image abroad.

And then, embodied in the man and his demeanor, reside the intangibles that bespeak the promise of other kinds of change: the unspoken implication that we, too, could be slender and physically fit, if only we would eat right and exercise, as Obama does. (Thank goodness for his former life as a closet smoker: as he well knows, nobody wants his candidates entirely without vices.) That we, too, could build loving marriages, in which two strong and fulfilled individuals work together to raise intelligent, lively, polite children. That we could make our society more civil, treating one another once again with dignity and politeness, even in disagreement; that we could command respect; that as a nation, we could once again stand tall as we did almost 50 years ago under JFK. When you see him in person, he's charismatic in his promise that we could, if we would just let him help us, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.

In truth, in his simple dark suits and white shirts, through which the outlines of his undershirts are barely but decidedly visible, with his sleeves rolled up and his hair close-cropped along his skull, Obama himself looks as though he stepped out of a '60's news clip, or out of a documentary about Mormon missionaries, except that he looks, as has been so often noted, a little different. Even though one young woman in Springfield, Mo., rapturously gushed "He's a rock star!" in fact he exudes, in person, an almost nerdy earnestness, and even reticence, an allure that is a far cry from the vapid celebrity John McCain's advertisers would wish to pin upon him.

For anyone to offer Americans a practicable alternative to the long, dark years of fear and shame that we have latterly endured ought to be enough to swing the election. If, for Obama, it still hangs in the balance, it's because his appeal is precisely, in Weber's terms, charismatic. That charisma creates his authority, an authority that does not exist without him; and authority is what he needs to win votes, rather than just attention. The trouble is, in our celebrity-obsessed culture, the charisma is what we focus on.