style, Barack was a catch. He was good-looking, poised, and successful. He was
athletic, interesting, and kind. What more could anyone want? I sailed into the
bar, certain I was doing everyone a favor—him and all the ladies. Almost
immediately, he was corralled by an acquaintance of mine, a beautiful and high-
powered woman who worked in finance. She perked up instantly, I could see,
talking to Barack. Pleased with this development, I got myself a drink and moved
on toward others I knew in the crowd.
Twenty minutes later, I caught sight of Barack across the room, in the grips
of what looked to be an endless conversation with the woman, who was doing a
large portion of the talking. He shot me a look, implying that he’d like to be
rescued. But he was a grown man. I let him rescue himself.
“Do you know what she asked me?” he said the next day, turning up in my
office, still slightly incredulous. “She asked if I liked to go riding. She meant on
horseback.” He said they’d discussed their favorite movies, which also hadn’t
gone well.
Barack was cerebral, probably too cerebral for most people to put up with.
(This, in fact, would be my friend’s assessment of him when we next spoke.) He
wasn’t a happy-hour guy, and maybe I should have realized that earlier. My
world was filled with hopeful, hardworking people who were obsessed with their
own upward mobility. They had new cars and were buying their first condos and
liked to talk about it all over martinis after work. Barack was more content to
spend an evening alone, reading up on urban housing policy. As an organizer,
he’d spent weeks and months listening to poor people describe their challenges.
His insistence on hope and the potential for mobility, I was coming to see, came
from an entirely different and not easily accessible place.
There was a time, he told me, when he’d been looser, more wild. He’d
spent the first twenty years of his life going by the nickname Barry. As a teen, he
smoked pot in the lush volcanic foothills of Oahu. At Occidental, he rode the
waning energy of the 1970s, embracing Hendrix and the Stones. Somewhere
along the way, though, he’d stepped into the fullness of his birth name—Barack
Hussein Obama—and the complicated rubric of his identity. He was white and
black, African and American. He was modest and lived modestly, yet knew the
richness of his own mind and the world of privilege that would open up to him
as a result. He took it all seriously, I could tell. He could be lighthearted and
jokey, but he never strayed far from a larger sense of obligation. He was on some
sort of quest, though he didn’t yet know where it would lead. All I knew was