Barack Obama with his step-father Lolo Soetoro, his sister Maya Soetoro and his mother Ann Dunham in an undated family snapshot.Reuters
It is Aug. 28, 2008, and Barack Obama is in a hotel room rehearsing the acceptance speech he will deliver that evening to the Democratic National Convention. It is about the future, but first a nod to the past. Obama will recall that it is 45 years to the day since "a young preacher from Georgia" led his celebrated March on Washington. For Obama, who is black, it is an unlikely, if unconscious, moment.
When he gets to "45 years ago," his voice catches. He falters. His eyes well with tears. He leaves the room. "This is really hitting me," he tells his speechwriter. "I haven't really thought about this before really deeply. It just hit me. I guess this is a pretty big deal."
Until then, we learn, he had not stepped outside himself to consider himself. He had accepted his success, as always, with a preternatural calm. No wonder they called him "No-drama Obama."
In the narrative of his storied life, this was the only time he seemed overcome by it. He was recognizing, with humility, a staggering ascent that had rocketed him from obscurity to the presidency in one feverish political season.
How unlikely was the rise of Barack Obama? In 2000, he had been an unknown state senator who could barely get in to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. In 2004, he was the party's keynote speaker. In 2008, he was its presidential nominee.
This is the story David Remnick ably tells in The Bridge. It is a compelling account of the lean, light-skinned son of a mixed marriage and his search for identity against a life of dislocation, dispossession, longing, loneliness and reflection, what Remnick calls Obama's "fitful interior struggle."
The story isn't new; Obama has told it in his lyrical memoir, Dreams from My Father. But Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, a former foreign correspondent and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, offers a deeper, more comprehensive study through the prism of race - at once shaded, textured, pointed and sympathetic.
This is no exposé. It isn't Game Change, the salty narrative of the 2008 campaign, or The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White's groundbreaking chronicle of the rise of JFK.
Nothing salacious here. Obama's college girlfriends are unnamed and his courtship with Michelle, his wife, isn't central. He did try drugs as a student, yes, but there was little drinking or womanizing. He preferred to read, listen to music and play basketball.
Eschewing the standard fare of contemporary political biography, Remnick focuses on fundamental questions: How did Barack Hussein Obama become himself? How did he become emblematic of America, as he said, representing "the variousness of American life"?
To begin, there was a lofty intelligence, a huge curiosity, a gift for language, an ingratiating manner. There was the warmth of grandparents who raised him in the absence of his irresponsible, philandering father, who eventually abandoned his family, and his naive, nomadic mother.
There was growing up in Hawaii, a multiracial society, and in Indonesia, an Islamic society. Here, Obama, far from the raw black urban experience, was at ease with others of different hue, particularly whites. There was a first-class education at leading institutions, including Columbia University and Harvard Law School.
Most of all, there was the advantage of coming of age after the civil-rights movement. Obama is a member of "the Joshua Generation," those black Americans who followed the Freedom Riders. As a beneficiary, this put Obama beyond the politics of resentment; in fact, it put him beyond race, allowing him to portray himself less as a black politician than as a politician who is black.
Forget his lack of national political experience. Forget that he had been in the U.S. Senate just two years when he announced his candidacy for president in 2007. His strategy was personality. He would be a bridge between generations - between races, between ideologies, between past and future.
There was also luck. The luck of weak opponents when he ran for the State Senate in 1996, luck when he was invited to speak to a rally on Iraq in 2002 (establishing useful anti-war credentials in 2008), luck when the Illinois Republicans imploded when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, luck to run for president against an old, temperamental warrior, yoked to an unpopular president, at the very moment the economy was collapsing.
Luck, though, doesn't explain it all. Obama has gifts, particularly ambition, intuition and self-confidence. He has an instinct for conciliation, which is why he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review; a social conscience that made him refuse prestigious, lucrative jobs to work as a community organizer in Chicago; a capacity to learn, which is how he chose mentors such as Laurence Tribe at Harvard.
Obama never escapes Remnick's steady gaze. While offering diverting excursions into race in America, the nature of slavery, the history of black memoirists and the intricacies of ward politics in Chicago, the author assiduously mines his sources (he did scores of interviews, including with Obama). Too often, though, Remnick allows them to go on too long, to take control of the narrative. It makes this book longer and denser than necessary. Then again, less skilled biographers are still clearing their throats at 600 pages.
As we know, the story, like the life, is unfinished; Obama is only beginning his presidency. But having won the prize, he has already crossed that metaphorical bridge, a strange and wondrous journey of its own.
Andrew Cohen, an author and president of the Historica-Dominion Institute, is The Globe and Mail's former correspondent in Washington. He is at work on a book on the Kennedys.