Obama's three challenges

AFTER THE GREAT squandering of the Bush years, Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency should feel like a shoo-in, but even his diehard supporters are nervous. Polls are trending his way, yet he can't shake an air of vulnerability. No matter how objective conditions of the political realm worsen, from Wall Street to Pakistan, Democrats are as anguished about Obama's prospects as about the economy or the various wars. What is going on here?

Pundits focus on race as the pivotal issue, boiling Obama's problem down to unspoken national ambivalence about an African-American president. That's a factor, for sure, but it's one of three. Psychosocial storms are swirling around the issues of race, gender, and class - three storms that have become one great hurricane, with Obama uniquely exposed, as if the lashed helmsman of a boat in danger of going under. Race, gender, and class define American identity, but Obama, just by being who he is, directly challenges the core assumptions that undergird each category.

Race. Obama defines himself, and is perceived, as black. Biologically speaking, he could just as readily be labeled white. More accurately, he could be regarded as a person of mixed race, as he is perceived in Europe. Obviously, the peculiarly American construct of race goes back to slave-holding culture, when African women were routinely raped by their white masters, and when the offspring of such coerced intercourse were born into slave status. Categorization by "black blood" (the "one drop" rule) was one of many structures of slavery that survived abolition. It is as artificial as it is rigid, a pillar of public imagination that Americans (not just racists) have broadly declined to reckon with. Obama, whose genetic tie to slavery goes through his white mother, represents an implicit, and not altogether welcome, invitation to accomplish just such reckoning.

Gender. Obama's gender problem goes deeper than currents flowing from women drawn to Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin. Pundits observe that Obama cannot risk displaying anger for fear of sparking unease attached to stereotypes of the angry black male. But here the issue is at least as much one of masculinity as race. Obama is temperamentally detached. His visceral reactions are filtered through calm reason. He is a graceful athlete, but carries himself more like a dancer than a fullback. He eschews the informality, and ethos, of blue jeans. Some see in all of this an explanation for his failure to connect with "Joe six pack," but Obama's style raises questions not about his failure, but the culture's. Gangster themes define American manhood, from HBO to hip-hop to "hard power" foreign policy. The gentle Obama is out of step with all of this.

Class. Obama, as a member of the "success elite," would seem to embody the hope that a large majority of Americans have for themselves and their children. Yet his superb education and financial security, both earned by his own effort, with the support of his single mother and his working wife, have proven to be political liabilities. Obama's life story has been one of crossing the very boundaries that define social class. That categories of class seem to apply to him no more usefully than categories of race has enabled his political rivals to smear him as an outsider. His very distinction is taken as evidence that he must regard himself as better than others, which suggests that the American dream of achievement, corrupted by envy, is collapsing into willed mediocrity. Obama is an affront to that collapse.

John McCain neither faces these challenges, nor offers them. Embodying the one-dimensional verve of the gladiator, he reinforces American notions of manliness. A man of the establishment, scion to military aristocracy, and spouse of great wealth, McCain is social stratification come alive. As a white man, he is the racial norm. Race, that is, does not even enter the mind as a note of his identity - not his mind, or the voter's. On gender, class, and race McCain is deeply of the status quo.

Barack Obama, in himself, invites America to a new depth of meaning, in each of these three dimensions. That is why his candidacy is thrilling - and so unnerving.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.