WHAT MAKES A PRESIDENT?

David Maraniss's reflections on Obama's rise to power mostly limn themes and moments you've heard before. Indeed, Oba'ams victory, so uncertain a year ago, occasionally feels quietly inevitable now. Of course this was the path that American history followed. Of course the first African-American presidential nominee would give his acceptance speech 45 years to the day that Martin Luther King Jr. told the world of his dream. How could it have been otherwise? But it could have been otherwise, and very easily:

He might not have been elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996 if Alice Palmer, the incumbent from his South Side district, had not been sidetracked by an unsuccessful bid for a congressional seat and had not failed to round up the required number of signatures when she petitioned to get back in the race. That was good fortune; Obama deciding to challenge her petitions was competitive will. He probably would not have been elected to the U.S. Senate eight years later if not for the collapses of two formidable opponents: first the demise in the primary campaign of Democrat Blair Hull when it was revealed that he had beaten his former wife, then the implosion of Republican Jack Ryan after unsealed divorce records detailed his fondness for sex clubs. That was all luck. Obama deciding to run in the first place, after losing a congressional primary in 2000 and feeling the increasing impatience of his wife, Michelle, who would grant his political obsession only one last chance -- that was burning will.It was luck for Obama to be chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention at a time when he was virtually unknown outside his home state. It was outsize confidence that led him to boast to friends as he walked to Boston's Fleet Center that pivotal day, as recounted by Chicago writer David Mendell, that he was as cool and self-assured as LeBron James and would nail the speech just like the NBA star would nail a game-winning shot. He was lucky that Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign was overconfident and believed the primary contest would be over by February last year, but it was skill and will for Obama and his team to prepare for the long slog and organize in caucus states that the formidable Clinton ignored. That same cycle of luck and would be repeated over and over until the historic Election Day in November.

Luck and will and talent. Add the accomplishments of those who walked before us, as Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly would remind us to do, and you have a pretty good working definition of the ingredients that merge to create success.