The great black hope: what's riding on Barack Obama?

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin
• Position: Cover Story - Biography

Cory Booker was feeling good. The one time Newark, N.J., mayoral candidate had just given a widely lauded speech at a youth vote event at the Democratic convention in Boston. The party's kingmakers and talent scouts, who had taken an interest in the career of this young, handsome African-American Rhodes scholar during his campaign two years ago were thrilled to see him, and eager to game out with him how Booker might win his next run. "Operatives, glad-handers, and hacks," Booker recalled happily. When he talked to men and particularly women, they had a glimmer of awe in their eyes, as if a conversation with Booker might be a remembered event, something they'd someday recount for their kids. He could feel his head swelling, but it was okay to let your head swell sometimes, for a moment or two. And now here were two more excited white women, mouths open, and ready to gush. Booker leaned back and smiled his big, easy smile, and one of the women stuck out her hand ... "I just wanted to congratulate you on your speech," she said. "It was so stirring--Mr. Obama."

"My head," Booker told me recently, compressing his hands to mimic a vice, "returned to its present size." Beyond sharing light skin, Barack Obama and Cory Booker look nothing alike. Obama, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Illinois, is rail-thin, with short, Brillo-like hair; his precise features and scrawny neck make him look like a bobblehead doll. Booker, who was an all-Pac Ten tight-end, is thick and broad-shouldered, with a clean-shaven head. Obama is reserved, rhetorically smooth and on message; Booker comes across as more eager, less experienced, and a little rougher around the edges. But the women's confusion wasn't just another embarrassing example of whites being unable to tell one black guy from another, or the more forgivable mistake arising from the fact that on that night, everyone at the convention was dying to meet Obama, the keynote speaker. For despite their physical differences, Booker and Obama share something fundamental: They are black Benjamin Wallace-Wells is an editor of The Washington Monthly. people whom white Americans can actually picture being president.

Booker has been told he might someday be the first black president since he was in grade school. He was raised in Harrington Park, N.J., the kind of well off suburb where high-achieving, Ivy-hound students were the norm, and where it wasn't uncommon for teachers to wonder if a particular student at time top of his class might someday be president. Most years they wondered if they might have the first Jewish president or the first woman president on their hands; Cory's year, it was the first black president. Booker went to Stanford, then to Oxford; while there, he ran the L'Chaim Society, the Jewish students' organization, just because he was interested. (This fact still features prominently in his campaign literature.) After Oxford, Booker went to Yale Law, but rather than live ill New Haven, chose to commute each day from a run-down housing project in Newark, a mostly-black, heap-of-junk port city in which Booker had never lived. "It's hard to not feel some responsibility towards the community," Booker told me, "like my generation should move things forward."

After winning a seat on the Newark City Council, and then a second term, Booker decided to run for mayor. Like many New Jersey politicians, Booker began to work the standard New York fundraising circuit. New York was wowed. "Cory was the easiest person I've ever had to raise money for," remembers R. Boykin Curry IV, a veteran Manhattan money manager and a Democrat, but the kind of centrist Democrat who thinks Bill Clinton sold out to the left. A friend had invited him to a Booker event at a local bar; he met the politician, and his knees began to buckle. "He is talking about school choice, about taking this city that's in absolutely abysmal shape and restoring it to its glory, and he's talking about models of urban renewal from Indianapolis to what Giuliani did--he absolutely got it, he got the way cities have to move into the modern world," Curry told me. "There's a black politician speaking to you, and you can't get out of your mind that he's as charismatic and clever as Clinton, and at once you're jealous you're not him and you think, my God, I've got to do everything I can to get this guy elected." A fever was building. Time profiled Booker; "CBS Evening News" did, too. Though Booker was still only a councilman in America's 63rd largest city, Democratic fundraisers and operatives were also talking about a future White House bid; The New York Times said he was "regularly referred to as someone who will end up the first black President of the United States."

Then Booker lost. His opponent, incumbent Newark mayor Sharpe James told newspapers and television during the campaign that he didn't believe Booker was black enough to be mayor of Newark, and the incumbent's campaign was accused of spreading rumors that Booker was Jewish. (Flyers appeared in Newark's wards depicting the Rhodes scholar with a stretched, Semitic nose). A veteran machine pol, James also worked his base to the bone, cornering the union endorsements and playing up his generous patronage in a city, where government is the biggest employer. He effectively portrayed Booker as too brainy, too earnest, and too babe-in-the-woods to play political hardball in a place like Newark--a figment of some white guy's dream, not a guy you could count on when the bus drivers threatened to strike. Booker lost by 3,000 votes, out of 53,000 cast. The...