Illinois Senate candidate and Democratic national convention keynote speaker Barack Obama sent his supporters, the Barack Brigade, an update around 1 p.m. Monday announcing that they'd get to preview his Tuesday-night floor speech at 4 this afternoon on his blog. "Please be sure to post your thoughts, because I can't be your voice if I don't hear what you think," he urged his supporters.
For many politicians, that would be an idle request designed to make people feel included with little effort. For Obama, who said at the Blogger Breakfast here in Boston on Monday, July 26, that he reads all these comments, it's part of a longstanding respect for and fascination with the power of individuals' stories. "People's stories are sacred," he told me in late June in Illinois. It's a sentiment you can find in his 1995 book as well. And it's what makes Obama, at his core, a politician whose power stems from his capacity for empathy, rather than his capacity for manipulation or browbeating. Over and over again, people in Illinois will say that it is his listening skills that won them over. While all politicians like to say they are listeners, few of them actually are.
Obama is, though, and that's why I've come to think that he's a better one-on-one politician than even John Edwards, whose warmth and people skills are justly hailed. While Edwards knows how to light up a crowd -- perhaps as a side effect of the packed halls he speaks to, you can literally feel the heat in the room increase as he talks; at the end of an Edwards performance, it can feel like everyone listening to him has been knit together into some kind of unified organism by his words -- Obama is much more cerebral. He doesn't talk down to people, and while he can use the full range of casual Americanisms and down-home phrases, he also can be quite the hyperarticulate attorney, speaking in full paragraphs with not a clause out of place. (Perhaps telegraphing expertise is an essential part of Obama's public persona in a way that it's not for Edwards, whose vast wealth increases the importance of telegraphing a more rural, modest background.) But Obama, in person, one on one, has a way of treating people as individuals so that they feel not only listened to but uniquely understood. This is part of what has made Obama soar over the past few months from unknown Senate candidate to high-profile Democratic star.
But I also wonder how it will translate on the stage on Tuesday evening. Perhaps he's wondering, too. And so he's casting it open to the people who have supported him, listening to and telling their stories as a way of telling his own.
“I don't think the gravity of it hit him until he got here,” says one of Obama's senior aides. “But is he nervous? If he is, I can't tell.”
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
