The Fire this Time

Behind the bright flash of flame is something deeper and more lasting.

By Errol T. Louis
Photography by David Katz

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Barack Obama is a man on fire. the 45-year-old senator from illinois has only been in office two years, but he holds the hottest hand in American politics—and he’s playing to win. Polls consistently rank Obama second only to Hillary Clinton as the favorite among Democrats to run for president in 2008—ahead of the last two Democratic candidates, John Kerry and Al Gore. He burst on the national scene in 2004 by delivering an electrifying keynote address called “The Audacity of Hope” to the Democratic National Convention—and followed it up this year with a book by the same title that instantly shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, with 182,000 copies sold in the first two weeks and 860,000 copies in circulation within a month.

Earlier this year, Obama even won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word for his reading of the audio edition of his first book, a personal memoir called Dreams From My Father that was also a no.1 Times bestseller. The senator beat out media pros including Garrison Keillor, Sean Penn and George Carlin to grab the award.

You get the picture. Everything the man touches turns to gold— with the possible exception of a golf club, it seems. Two years after winning a long-shot race in Illinois, Obama has become part of the national culture. Time magazine put him on its cover, and he is a fixture on national television, popping up on Oprah, holding forth on American foreign policy on cnn—and telling adoring crowds that he won’t rule out seeking the Oval Office in 2008.

Behind the bright flash of flame is something deeper and more lasting. Obama represents the coming of age—and the rising power and influence—of a post-civil-rights generation of Black leaders. Born outside the confines of racial segregation and schooled alongside the nation’s elites, the new leaders have the talent, confidence and credentials to break into places their predecessors could only dream about. The new crowd was too young to participate in the Civil Rights Movement, but they are more than ready to reap its rewards.

Obama is the only African-American man in the 100-member Senate, and only the third to ever be elected to that body. He represents many things to many people, but for young and rising Black professionals he stands for the idea that all the long hours at the office, all the hard work, all the frantic networking, and career setbacks and personal frustrations have not been in vain. The idea that greatness, whether personal or collective, is not only possible, but inevitable. And maybe just around the corner.