Democrats see Obama as face of 'reform and change'

For most members of Congress, the influence-peddling scandals that have forced one of their colleagues to resign and caught others up in a federal investigation represent a serious election-year problem.
But for one freshman, the scandals are a golden opportunity.
As the Senate begins debate Monday on a bill to curb the influence of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., will be serving as a lead spokesman for his party.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid tapped Obama to be the party's point man on congressional ethics reform in January, as the Democrat began his second year in Congress.
It's testimony to the symbolic appeal of the Senate's only black member, and to his political precociousness. "Our party stands for reform and change and he embodies that," says Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a fellow Chicagoan who heads the House Democratic campaign committee. Reid says, "Barack Obama has a unique ability to walk into a crowd and make people listen."
His party leaders' decision to thrust Obama into the limelight follows a year in which he struggled to avoid it. An overnight sensation after his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama won election to the Senate that year with 70% of the Illinois vote, the most overwhelming victory in the state's history.
During his first year as a U.S. senator, Obama focused on the home front, much as former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton did when she became a New York senator in 2000. He has held more than 42 town hall meetings in Illinois. Last year, he turned down all but two national television interviews. "He's not a grandstander," Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., says.
For Obama, 44, his new, higher-profile role brings risks as well as rewards. It has pushed into the political hot seat a lawmaker who hopes to build bridges across partisan lines.
Last month, Sen. John McCain accused Obama of "self-interested partisan posturing" when the Democrat criticized a Republican proposal to create a task force on lobbying reform. Though quickly smoothed over, the tiff made headlines in Chicago and dramatized the difficulties Obama faces as he tries to maintain his reputation as a political independent while serving as a party spokesman on a controversial issue in an election year.
Crossover appeal
Criticism of Obama is news because there has been so little of it. Since winning election to the Senate, his career has defied political gravity. Even political opponents such as Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman say they admire him.
Today, Obama ranks as one of his party's biggest draws. Spokesman Robert Gibbs says the senator, who receives about 300 speaking invitations a week, helped Democratic candidates raise more than $6.5 million last year. That's on top of $360,000 that Obama took in for his own re-election and more than $1.8 million for a fund that pays for his political activities.
Nor has his success been limited to the political realm: Obama's audio version of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, won a Grammy for best spoken word album.
Obama has demonstrated crossover appeal in several ways. A onetime community organizer in Chicago, he nevertheless attracts support from corporate leaders. He's a member of the Congressional Black Caucus who draws large crowds of white constituents. And he's a Democrat with Republican admirers such as Lugar.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is bullish on Obama's future: He invested $5,000 in the senator's political action committee last year. So is former Black Panther Bobby Rush, a Chicago congressman whom Obama once tried to unseat. "I'd give him an A+ for his first year," says Rush, a Democrat.
Mehlman, a former Harvard Law School classmate, has kind words for Obama. "He's a guy I like and would like to see do well," he says.
Obama's admirers see him capable of making the ultimate political breakthrough for African-Americans. "I hope he runs for president someday," Buffett says. "I'm 75. He's got to hurry if I'm going to be able to vote for him."
Last month in front of the Russell Senate Office Building, Obama posed for the umpteenth photo-op of his fledgling Senate career. He may be too young to appreciate the irony of the location. Obama was two months shy of his third birthday when Sen. Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat with deft parliamentary skills, saw his filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act collapse. Now, the stately marble columns of a building named after one of the Senate's last segregationists serve as a backdrop for the chamber's new, biracial star.
Seeking common ground
In some respects, Obama is an unlikely African-American hero: His mother was white, and he's not a descendant of slaves. His father was an exchange student from Kenya. Obama's parents met at the University of Hawaii and later divorced. His mother remarried and moved with her son and new husband to Indonesia, where young Barack attended both Catholic and Muslim schools before returning to Hawaii as a teenager. Both parents are now deceased.
In his memoir, first published in 1995 and reissued after his Democratic convention speech, Obama details his painful struggle to come to grips with his own identity.
It's a struggle, he has written, that led him to experiment with alcohol and drugs, to journey to Africa for a meeting with his half-siblings and finally to move to Chicago where he found a wife, a church and a home.
Last year, Obama made a point of reaching out beyond party lines. He called on the local Republican congressman, Ray LaHood, when he visited Peoria. "It was a front page story in the local paper," LaHood recalls.
He joined Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., in calling for "realistic" immigration reform to accommodate the estimated 11 million people living and working illegally in the USA — a debate the Senate will launch this month.
Obama co-sponsored with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a bill that's still pending to create a "chief financial officer" for the Hurricane Katrina cleanup.
Obama says he wants to keep the bipartisanship going on ethics, but he hasn't hesitated to take some partisan shots.
The senator accused new House Majority Leader John Boehner of "backpedaling on reform" after the Ohio Republican said he opposed proposals to eliminate lawmakers' ability to tack pet projects onto larger bills or to travel on the tab of private interest groups.
Although he says members of his party "are certainly not without sin," Obama rejects the suggestion that Democrats are as tainted by their ties to lobbyists as Republicans. "The notion that this is a bipartisan scandal is wrong," he says.
Overhauled ethics in Ill.
It's not the first time Obama has been involved in changing ethics rules. Emil Jones, the Democratic president of the Illinois state Senate, assigned Obama, a state senator from 1997 to 2004, to help write Illinois' first ethics overhaul in more than two decades. "There was a lot of opposition," Jones recalls. "In his own caucus, members were jumping all over him."
In the end, Obama prevailed, crafting a landmark bill that won the Illinois General Assembly's near-unanimous approval in 2003.
Obama's Republican partner on the measure, state Sen. Kirk Dillard, still keeps a picture of the Democrat on his office wall.
Though he is the Republican chairman of DuPage County, Dillard recently introduced Obama at a town hall meeting there. "I admire him both as a person and as a legislator," Dillard says.
A onetime smoker who says he's "on the wagon," the self-professed "skinny kid with a funny name" works out regularly to maintain his 6-foot-2, 180-pound frame and 32-inch waist. Obama flies home every weekend to be with his wife and two daughters, who live in Chicago, and spends most of his evenings writing. He has a $1.9 million contract to write three books — the first of which is due out this fall.
The book will be about his political philosophy, the senator says. Told that it sounds like the kind of book politicians write when they're about to launch a national campaign, Obama smiles.
"I'm always campaigning for the values I believe in," he says.