Hope or hype?

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. By Barack Obama. Crown, 384 pp., $25.00.

THE OBAMA PHENOMENON is hurtling past the best analogies that we have for it. Three years ago Barack Obama shot onto the national political scene with a sensational speech at the Democratic National Convention. Two years ago he joined the U.S. Senate as its only African-American member. A year ago he was still admonishing admirers to give him time to accomplish something before talking up an Obama presidency. Today he is running for president because he has generated too much excitement to wait for another political season.

In some respects, the echoes of Robert Kennedy in 1968 are strong. No candidate has stirred such an intense reaction on the campaign trail since Kennedy, who might have won the White House had he not been assassinated. Like Obama, Kennedy ran against a controversial war and tapped the repressed hope and idealism of millions in a presidential campaign that he had not expected to wage. But Bobby Kennedy was already a totem of national memory and feeling when he ran for president. Most Americans remembered him as a U.S. attorney general, many regarded him as the successor to the tragically interrupted JFK presidency, some hoped that he stood for something even better, and every American knew him as the brother of a martyred president.

In other respects, the Obama phenomenon is an echo of the political enthusiasm for Colin Powell that peaked in 1995. Powell might have won the presidency had his wife not declared that he would have to campaign as a divorce; Alma Powell feared the part of white America that would not stand for a black president. Colin Powell's memoir, My American Journey, sold nearly 3 million copies while he was contemplating a run for the presidency. Obama is a beneficiary of the fact that many Americans got used to imagining a black president more than a decade ago. But Powell, like Kennedy, received an extensive public grooming before he seemed presidential. Americans did not need to read his memoir to learn that he had been President Reagan's national security adviser and had served as chair of the joint chiefs of staff during George H. W. Bush's presidency. By the end of the Bush 41 administration Powell was the most admired figure in the nation (something that has become hard to remember after his fateful role in the administration of Bush 43).

Obama is acutely aware that he rocketed into national politics with a swiftness and apparent ease that outstrips these analogies. His campaign book, The Audacity of Hope, is charmingly candid on the matter of swiftness and only slightly defensive on the matter of ease. He points out, echoing the protests of his 2004 campaign staff, that he wasn't just lucky; he worked hard to get elected and had an appealing message. On the other hand, he can't deny his "almost spooky good fortune."

Instead of getting hammered with negative ads like other candidates, Obama found himself in a seven-way Democratic primary campaign that produced not a single negative ad. In the final weeks before the primary, his prime opponent flamed out in a divorce scandal. A few weeks later the same thing happened to his Republican opponent. Then John Kerry handed him a convention keynote slot. Next, the Illinois Republicans inexplicably selected Alan Keyes, an eccentric ideologue from Maryland, to run against him. Shortly after his election Obama deadpanned to the Gridiron Club, "I'm so overexposed I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse. I figure there is nowhere to go from here but down, so tonight I'm announcing my retirement from the United States Senate." The following month, bathed in hyperbolic media coverage that treated him as the savior of politics, Obama moved into his Senate office, where a reporter asked him to assess his place in history; Obama noted that he had yet to cast a vote.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama stakes out a pragmatic middle ground and deflates the impression that he has no flaws. Poking fun at himself repeatedly, Obama admits to experiencing political "restlessness," enjoying private jets, preferring Dijon mustard, being grumpy in the morning, and fretting that he might have had chicken crumbs on his face when he met Laura Bush. He confesses that for years he taxed the patience and support of his wife, Michelle, as he pursued political success. He admits that in the summer of 2003 he doubted that he had been right to oppose the invasion of Iraq. He acknowledges that his speaking style "can be rambling, hesitant, and overly verbose." But Obama's endearing lightheartedness about himself is another virtue, and as he continues to draw enormous crowds, the media hyperbole begins to seem not so exaggerated.

Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope before he knew it would be a presidential campaign book, which may account for its chief defect as one. Because Obama shot into political prominence so quickly and because his background is more complicated and exotic than that of most U.S. politicians, his campaign book needed to lay out the gist of his life story in an early chapter. That doesn't happen. If you don't know the story from his previous book, Dreams from My Father (1995), or some other source, you will have a difficult time piecing it together from the asides scattered throughout the new book.