By Jared Roscoe

Enter Barack Obama. He's politics' Tiger Woods--a real hyphen. The son of a black father from Nigeria (African-) and a white mother (-American). He's so much of a hyphen--so much of an American--that people have asked if he's white enough or black enough to capture a particular segment of the vote. These, of course, are the concerns of a previous politics. His transformative message is not unique, as it hews closely to other recent post-partisan leaders, such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Republican candidate for President, Senator John McCain, claims a similar political lineage, a claim that is bolstered by his work on fairer immigration policies, his willingness to buck his party on campaign finance reform, and his participation in the Group of 14. But that was the McCain of the 2000 elections. He's already run to the right in an attempt to bring in traditional Republicans and he's now positioning himself as a traditional Republican--not the same moderate that tried to capture the nomination in 2000. The scope of Senator Obama's project is so grand that he must be considered something different. Obama speaks to a country that is sick of Newspeak, framing, and sniping. His campaign has the unfortunate task of trying to win in an environment that favors sound-bite politics and rhetorical trickery. Yet he's now the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. He doesn't have the troubled, complicated political history that is the Clinton legacy. Obama can credibly claim to be the heir to the throne of post-partisanship with the hyphen as his scepter.

Obama's power as a communicator is undeniable. It's difficult to talk about his appeal without sounding like I'm reading mimeographs of his campaign talking points. At the 2004 National Democratic Convention in Boston, I watched him deliver the convention's keynote address. Even among those in attendance, few had heard much about this young Democratic candidate for Senator in the state of Illinois. After his speech, however, everyone remembered his name. That evening at lavish convention parties, we discussed his future presidential bid which we knew would one day come. We suffered through many mediocre speeches at the convention; Senator John Kerry's was among them-we groaned as soon as we saw him salute and say, "John Kerry, reporting for duty." After Kerry's speech, not a few of us were wondering if Obama could just run for President instead of Senator that year.

The empathetic appeal of Bill Clinton was squandered in the toughly fought primary months of early 2008, and voters were turned off by what they perceived as his and Hillary's pure pragmatic ambition. What happened to the Bill of the '90s, they wondered. And they punished Hillary Clinton for it. Obama now holds the reflexive empathy title that Bill Clinton used to brandish so convincingly--even for most of this decade while Democrats waited for a new national leader to emerge. After eight years in the wilderness in national elections, we have a leader now.

The difference between the junior senator from New York and the junior senator from Illinois--and the reason why Barack Obama should be the Democratic nominee--can be seen in their unfavorability ratings. Senator Clinton has very high unfavorability ratings, which have hovered around the mid-40s since the beginning of her campaign. There's a large number of Americans that quite simply would never vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. Obama's unfavorability ratings have never gone higher than mid-20s, and those came in the heat of a primary competition. Obama can clearly win votes from rural America, moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats who were left out of the process before Howard Dean's visionary 50-state strategy.

Too often, the unfavorability gap is brought up in the context of electability. But this misses the broader point. Obama wants to end the separation between Democrats and Republicans that has been exacerbated by talking heads, newspapers, and party representatives themselves. It certainly hasn't been helped by the internet, which instead of bringing people together for political discourse, has separated them into guerilla armies. This divide has been exploited further by the 50+1 strategy, in which you try to get the bare minimum of votes required to win an election while ignoring if not alienating the other voters. To bring people together as the grammar of political strategy and empathy suggests, one needs to abandon the 50+1 strategy and convince all Americans of one's qualifications. Obama's strength in Republican states attests to his capacity to move beyond this old strategy and embrace the politics of the hyphen. Nowhere is expansive notion of the United States more evident than in his stump speech and, most recently, in his inspiring address on contemporary race relations.

The fact that he is called a "rock star" should not be too surprising in an age in which the public would rather watch American Idol than the 19th Democratic debate of the primary season. He energizes the citizenry like no other politician. For the first time in my lifetime, people are excited about politics. Many are volunteering for a campaign for the first time, knocking on doors, making phone calls. This is the bread and butter of campaigns. It is also the meat of civic engagement. Whitman, our prophet of the hyphen, would approve. People are leaving their computers to meet strangers and talk politics, sharing their concerns about our nation with each other. It is harder to feel contempt for a fellow citizen's views when you are in front of him. His views cannot be as easily dismissed when you look him in the eye.

We've been in the business of cheating ourselves and others for at least ten years. We've thought that the Democrat or Republican across the street doesn't actually have the same goals as us--securing America, providing jobs, increasing access to health care. We've surrounded ourselves with straw-man scarecrows that we've received from Rush Limbaugh, Air America, or Lou Dobbs. Obama promises us the hyphen. Maybe your neighbor isn't a naïve, bleeding-heart liberal. Maybe your neighbor isn't a knee-jerk, rubber-stamp Republican. Maybe your neighbor is Michael Allegany, who grew up in Pittsburgh and doesn't have health insurance. He doesn't think a whole lot about politics and doesn't have strong opinions about any of the candidates, but he does want to make sure we take care of our troops. He wants everyone in the world to have the same freedom he's had, but increasingly doesn't think the Iraq war was the best way to achieve this. He spends most of his time working two jobs, trying to provide for his family. He's voted Republican, but he might not this time. Obama wants to talk to him. The hyphen wants you to talk to him.

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