When you look at this photo,what do you see?Black man. Healer .Novice. Radical .The Future. All of the above

If Barack Obama had not chosen a life in politics,he might have made a fine pshchotherapist.He is a master at taking what you've told him and feeding it right back.What I hear you saying is...Open his book the Audacity of Hope to almost any page and listen.On immigration,for example,Obama first mirrors the faces of this new America he has met in the ethnic stew pot of Chicago,in the Indian markets along Devon Avenue,in the sparkling new mosque in the southwestern suburbs,in an Armenian wedding and A Filopino ball.Then he pivots to give voice to the anxieties of many blacks and as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration,adding.Not all of these fears are irrational.He admits that he knows the frustration of needing an interpreter to speak to one's auto mechanic and in the next breath cherishes the innocent dreams of an immigrant child.


In other words,he hears America singing-and griping,fretting,seething conniving,hoping,despairing.He can deliver a pitch-perfect expression of the racial anger of many American blacks-as he did in his much discussed speech on race relations earlier this year-and,just as smoothly,unpack the racial irritations gnawing at many whites.To what extent does he share any of those emotions?The doctor never exactly says.Consciously or unconsciously,Obama has been honing this technique for years.During his time at Harvard Law School in the 1980s,the student body was deeply divided.In one heated debate,Obama so adroitly summarized the various positions without tipping his own hand that by the end of the meeting,as Professor Charles Ogletree told one newspaper,everyone was nodding,Oh,he agrees with me.


He has been called a window into the American psyche.Or you might say he's mirror-what you see depends on who you are and where you stand.Obama puts it this way.I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.But those metaphors all suggest that he is some sort of passive instrument,when in fact his elusive quality is an active part of his personality.It's how you square the fact that Obama once wrote the most intimate memoir ever published by a future nominee yet still manages to avoid definition.At his core,this is a deeply reserved and emotionally reticent man.Consider this anecdote from Dream from my father,as a young man in New York City,he lived next door to an elderly recluse who seemed to share my disposition.When he happend to meet his neighbor returing from his store,Obama would offer to carry the old man's groceries.Together,the two of them would slowly climb the stairs.never speaking,and at the top,the man would nod silently before shuffling inside and closing the latch...I thought him a kindred spirit,Obama concludes.