Across the Divide

The conservatives knew he wasn't one of them, says former classmate Bradford Berenson (who later served in George W. Bush's White House). "What really set him apart from the people who had roughly the same views he did is that he did not demonize the people on the other side of the dispute," says Berenson. "He was not the sort to accuse people of being racist for having different views of affirmative action." Obama rewarded the conservatives by appointing several to the masthead of the law review, which angered some of his more-liberal supporters.

One summer during law school, Obama worked in a Chicago firm where he found a soulmate who would help him navigate his difficult course. Michelle Obama's family comes from the South Side of Chicago, where her father was a city worker and her mother still lives in the humble house where Michelle was born. Like her husband, Michelle is an Ivy Leaguer (in her case, Princeton and Harvard), but she proudly calls herself a product of Chicago's public schools. Some people assume that Obama needed her entree into African-American society to break into Illinois politics. But that's not correct: by the time he met Michelle, Obama had already worked as a community organizer with black churches on the South Side for several years.

When the two first met at the law firm, Michelle was his reluctant mentor for the summer. She remembers rave reports that circulated around the office before she joined him for lunch the first time. "Yeah, he's probably a black guy who can talk straight," she recalls saying to herself. "This is a black guy who's biracial who grew up in Hawaii? He's got to be weird." Afterward, she realized she may have misjudged Obama. But it was only later that summer, when he took her to a church basement on the South Side, that she fell for him. He gave an inspiring speech about "the world as it is, and the world as it should be." Three years later, they married.

Michelle had to work through her early misperceptions about him; now, she says, the nation needs to do the same. "Barack poses this interesting dilemma because we are still a country that puts people in boxes," she tells NEWSWEEK. "Barack kind of shakes up those notions because his life has crossed so many different paths. He grew up in Hawaii but he was indeed a community organizer. He became very entrenched and rooted in the black community on the South Side. He is very much a black man, but he's very much the son of his mother, who was very much a white woman, and he grew up with white grandparents."

Obama's years in Chicago didn't help much in his first run for Congress. After four years in the Illinois state Senate, Obama challenged Rep. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther who had once called on black men to arm themselves for self-defense. Another of his rivals in the 2000 race was Illinois state Sen. Donne Trotter, who hails from one of Chicago's oldest and largest black families. Both Rush and Trotter questioned Obama's racial bona fides, and his ability to represent poor black voters. But for Obama, the Rush race was more of a lesson in overconfidence than in racial identity. "Were there moments during the campaign where the suggestion was that the Harvard-educated, Hyde Park law professor wasn't keeping it real? Yes. Did that have any significant influence on the outcome of that race? No," he says.

Rush supports Obama's run for the White House today, but still rails against a "bourgeois elite" in the country that would "rather have a Harvard-trained, smooth-talking, forever-smiling, nonthreatening African-American" than someone like himself. Yet Rush also recognizes that Obama has a rare ability to work comfortably in different worlds. "You know, Moses could not have been effective had he not been raised as the son of Pharaoh's daughter," he tells NEWSWEEK. "Moses had a relationship inside the palace, he knew the ways and wherefores of the palace ... So therefore he was accepted ... Barack has that capacity to move in and out of privilege and power."