"If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power," Barack Obama mused not long ago aboard his campaign plane, "as long as we are also making prudent strategic decisions, handling emergencies, crises and opportunities in the world in an intelligent and sober way ..."

He stopped. He wanted to make sure he got this just right, and he had got a little caught up in rebutting the claim, which Hillary Clinton has artfully advanced, that he is not prepared to handle emergencies.

"I think," he said, in that deep and measured voice of his, "that if you can tell people, 'We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better sense of what's going on in our lives and in our country. And they'd be right."

Perhaps they would. Obama's supporters believe that his life story and the angle of vision it affords him hold out the possibility of curing the harm they would say we have done to ourselves through our indifference to the views of others and through the insularity of a president who seems so incurious about the world. There is thus an emblematic force to Obama's candidacy.

A President Obama, says Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor who popularized the term "soft power" to describe the capacity to gain support through attraction rather than force, "would do more for America's soft power around the world than anything else we could do."

But at a meeting of national-security experts in August, Nye played out a harrowing crisis situation involving Iran and concluded afterward that "much though I'm attracted to the freshness of Obama's life story, I would come out on the experience side of it", that is, on Clinton's side.

This is Obama's problem in a nutshell. Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world. Perhaps Obama's inability so far to make a dent in Clinton's 20-point (or more) lead in the polls proves that many believe he's on the wrong side of that balance.

The United States has had only one foreign policy and one national-security strategy since the transforming events of Sept. 11, 2001 and this set of doctrines has been shaped by the very distinctive worldview of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the men and women around them. The great project of the foreign-policy world in the last few years has been to think through a "post-post-9/11 strategy," in the words of the Princeton Project on National Security, a study that brought together many of the foreign-policy thinkers of both parties.

Such a strategy, the experts concluded, must, like "a Swiss Army knife," offer different tools for different situations; must pay close attention to "how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions"; must recognize that other nations may legitimately care more about their neighbors or their access to resources than about terrorism; and must be "grounded in hope, not fear."

A post-post-9/11 strategy must harness the forces of globalization while honestly addressing the growing "perception of unfairness" around the world; must actively promote, not just democracy, but "a world of liberty under law"; and must renew multilateral instruments like the United Nations.

In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama."

Drill down into one of Washington's foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you're bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton. But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama.

The deep sense of hopefulness that Obama inspires in his supporters has much to do with a life trajectory unique in the history of major presidential candidates. Obama has always been acutely conscious about the relationship between his personal arc and that of his country. In "Dreams From My Father," published in 1995, before he ran for anything, Obama offered a vivid account of his knockabout childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as of a journey he made as an adult to Kenya, the homeland of his absent father.

One recurrent theme of the book is how very little the world, at least the world in which most people live, responds to our wishes or our ideals. In America, Obama writes, power was muted; in a place like Indonesia, it was "undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory."

In 1981, Obama arrived at Columbia University, where he majored in international relations. He wrote his senior thesis on the North-South debate on trade then raging as part of the demand for a "new international economic order." But he says that he was never much of a lefty. Obama offers himself as the representative of a new generation, free of the dogmas that still burden the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the foreign-policy figures whom he finds "most compelling," he says, are the archrealists who shaped policy during the Cold War, including the secretaries of state George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson and the diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan. Obama said that he also admired the worldly pragmatists who served the first George Bush, including Brent Scowcroft, the national-security adviser: "The whole Bush team, I think, was not entirely aware of the opportunities of this new world, but they had a very clear-eyed assessment."

If a single sentiment stands at the heart of Obama's worldview, it's that, as he said in a speech earlier this year, "the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people." What's good for others is good for us; there's no contradiction between idealism and realism.

Bush's post-Sept. 11 recognition that our own security depends on the well-being of people on the other side of the globe led him to propound the so-called Freedom Agenda and to promote democracy in the Middle East. Obama accuses the Bush administration of an ethnocentric fixation on elections and classic political rights. Instead, he argues: "We have to be focused on what are the aspirations of the people in those countries. Once those aspirations are met, it opens up space for the kind of democratic regimes that we want."

Obama argues that we must give emerging powers like India, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa "a stake in upholding the international order" and is an unabashed fan of multilateral institutions. At an event in New Hampshire this summer, I heard him say, "I want to go before the United Nations and say, 'America's back!"'

By the time he announced his candidacy earlier this year, Obama was already a media phenomenon thanks to his star turn at the 2004 Democratic convention and the publication of his second book, "The Audacity of Hope." This spring, Obama tried to prove his readiness for office by laying out his foreign-policy views in a series of speeches and the obligatory essay in Foreign Affairs. But was this junior senator with the boyish mien seasoned enough for the Oval Office? This was the threshold he had to cross. And Hillary Clinton wasted no time in planting the seeds of doubt.

In the CNN/YouTube debate in July, Obama was asked, "Would you be willing to meet ... during the first year of your administration ... with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?"

Obama replied, "I would," and added that it was a "disgrace" that the Bush administration had refused on principle to do so. This was pretty standard Democratic rhetoric; but Clinton shot back, "Well, I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year." She would "pursue a very vigorous diplomacy" but would never allow herself to be "used for propaganda purposes" by rogue leaders.

The next day, sensing an opening, Clinton lashed into Obama's offer as "irresponsible and frankly naive." Obama, in turn, accused his opponent of advocating a "Bush-Cheney Lite" brand of diplomacy and insisted that our standing had fallen "because people think that the United States wants to dictate across the world instead of cooperate across the world."

The post-debate spin was that Clinton won the battle, but a CNN focus group concluded that the dust-up was Obama's best moment. "It accentuated a difference between the two of them that I'm not sure either of them fully appreciated beforehand," said Samantha Power, the author and Harvard professor, who is one of Obama's chief advisers. "It was orienting and galvanizing." The debate was "orienting" because it exposed the very different orientations of the two: one toward tough-mindedness and resolve, the other toward transparency and dialogue; the one toward the peril that we face, the other toward opportunities we must explore. How you felt about the debate had to do with how you felt about the world.


A CBS News poll in August found that while far more Democrats believed that Obama would find "new ways of solving the country's problems" than would Clinton, she received a commanding advantage -- 59 percent approval versus Obama's 29 percent -- on the question of having the "right experience to be president." Three-quarters of Democrats said they believed Clinton could win the presidency. Obama languished at 54 percent; and 37 percent mentioned his inexperience as the chief problem.

Those are startling numbers, considering that the overwhelming majority of Democrats now think that Clinton was wrong and Obama right on Iraq, the great foreign crisis of our generation. Obama has ridden this distinction as hard as he can. But perhaps anger over Iraq is less salient politically than fear about terrorism.

Obama says he believes that while a small core of jihadists must be confronted with superior force, the Islamic world generally is susceptible to the instruments of soft power. He has pledged to convene a forum in the Middle East with regional heads of state soon after he is elected. Hillary Clinton, who has expressed qualified support for the Bush administration's confrontational policies on Iran, has positioned herself carefully to Obama's right on the subject.

Is Obama, then, too soft for this hard moment? Is the whole issue of "experience" really a proxy for tough-mindedness? When I told Obama that Joseph Nye thought he was soft-power incarnate but nevertheless leaned toward Clinton, he nodded, and then coolly shot back: "It is interesting to me that this conversation does not come up with any of the other candidates. It does not come up with respect to John Edwards. On the Republican side, the degree to which Rudy Giuliani was validated almost as a wartime president was fascinating to me."

"Hillary gets a unique pass on this issue," he went on, "not by virtue of her service in the Senate but by virtue of the idea that through osmosis she gets it from Bill. And they've been actively pushing that story."

Obama leaned back to nap, and I went across the aisle. I was telling Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, my theory that Americans might be looking for a president whose protection they can huddle under when Obama opened an eye. He wanted to know what kind of experience Clinton supposedly had that he didn't, what kind of crisis she was supposedly better suited to than he, why "toughness" had become a stand-in for experience, and how Clinton could get credit for it when she failed to stand up to Bush on the Iraq vote.

Obama concedes that he has a problem. "We have not fully made our case yet," he admits. "I think the American people know in their gut that we need significant change, and I think they'd like to believe what I'm saying is possible." But they need, says this former law-school professor, "a permission structure." They need to know that they'll be safe with Barack Obama.

Source: NYTS