Worlds Apart

In August 2005 the two men traveled together to the former Soviet bloc, rummaging through leaky old stores of radioactive material. Obama, who prides himself on his coolness under pressure, watched admiringly as Lugar maintained his "gentle, imperturbable manner and an inscrutable smile … during the often interminable meetings we held with foreign officials," the candidate later wrote in "The Audacity of Hope." As another Obama aide described Lugar: "He was smart, reserved and had this sense of humor that would defuse things when people got worked up. He was determined without batting an eyelid or giving way on anything." Lugar has endorsed McCain, but some Obama aides suggest the Republican would be first on a shortlist for secretary of state in an Obama administration.

The Uses of Power
As a congressman in 1983, McCain defied a president he admired, Ronald Reagan, over the question of deploying U.S. Marines to Beirut. The mission, he said, simply wasn't clear enough. "What in the world are a few hundred Marines doing [there] but making themselves targets?" McCain's top aide, Mark Salter, later explained. For similar reasons, McCain was publicly leery of committing U.S. troops to a ground war in the desert after Saddam Hussein's tanks rolled into Kuwait in the summer of 1990.

He ultimately voted for the war, and its outcome altered his thinking on the exercise of American power. Desert Storm marked the beginning of the "smart bomb" era. Saddam's supposedly formidable million-man Army was routed in weeks. American soldiers were sent off to Kuwait and returned home as heroes. The sight was liberating for McCain, says a former senior McCain staffer who would discuss the candidate's reaction only on condition of anonymity. "He saw the country [had gotten] over a hump and was able to … move past the legacy of the Vietnam War," says the staffer. McCain had never doubted that "there were circumstances where aggression needed to be reversed." Now, though, he saw that the nation was more willing to agree—and to sacrifice.

That didn't transform McCain into an eager warmonger. He still resisted what he saw as muddled interventions in Somalia and, initially, Bosnia. But after the massacre of thousands of Muslim men in Srebrenica, he endorsed a bombing campaign there, and later harangued President Bill Clinton for not being active enough in halting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. By the late 1990s, McCain was among the signers of the Iraq Liberation Act, calling for the overthrow of Saddam.

For Obama, the gulf war was less transforming than an event that had occurred a year earlier—Nelson Mandela's release from prison after 27 years. His ecstatically received freedom marked the effective end of apartheid, the brutal policy of white rule in South Africa.

As a freshman student in the early 1980s at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama got his first taste of organized politics and foreign policy in the growing antiapartheid movement. The cause of the day was pushing colleges to give up their investments in South Africa, and Obama's first attempt at public speaking came at a divestment rally. As he later described it in "Dreams From My Father," he began speaking to a group of Frisbee-throwing kids one afternoon on campus, but few were listening when he began in a low voice, saying, "There's a struggle going on." Obama raised his deep baritone, and suddenly "the Frisbee players stopped … The crowd was quiet now, watching me. Somebody started to clap. 'Go on with it, Barack,' somebody shouted … I knew I had them, that the connection had been made."

More important, the success of the antiapartheid movement shaped Obama's views on how to tackle problems that don't lend themselves to military solutions. "Unique among people who have ever run for president, he was coming of age in the '80s, toward the close of the cold war," says speechwriter Ben Rhodes. "There you see the combination of bottom-up movements in Eastern Europe," like Poland's Solidarity organization. "Politically, he believes in bottom-up change with social movements. Economically, he believes in bottom-up growth and development. Similarly, in foreign policy, he believes security starts at the individual level."