Obama highlights his personal journeys

He puts spin on biggest weakness

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois appeared at a presidential campaign rally in a packed fieldhouse on the campus of Pinkerton Academy in Derry, N.H., yesterday. (Jim Davis/Globe Staff)

EXETER, N.H. - As Hillary Clinton challenges whether Barack Obama, having spent barely three years in the Senate, is ready to handle a potential foreign-policy crisis, Obama is treating his international roots as a credential above all.

The Illinois Democrat boasts of authority "rooted in an understanding of how the world sees America that I gained from living, traveling, and having family beyond our shores," as he put it in Des Moines two weeks ago.

By traditional measures, Obama has a meager record on foreign policy and national security concerns. In his most prestigious international relations post, as chairman of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, Obama has convened only enough hearings to approve presidential appointees.

According to his staff, he has made three trips abroad while in office, visiting 14 countries. Although he presents himself to voters as a seasoned globetrotter, his campaign would not offer an accounting of his personal travel prior to his run for the Senate.

Clinton, on the other hand, continues to emphasize her experience visiting 82 countries as first lady, often meeting with foreign leaders - in what appear to be a combination of ceremonial and more substantial roles.

"I think that it's important to have hands-on experience, like a lot of the old foreign-policy experts," said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute think tank and a biographer of several prominent American diplomats. "But it's also good to have a fingertip feel for the world, and I think Obama has it."

Many of the candidates have biographical experience that meets some of Obama's criteria. Senator John McCain of Arizona was born in the Panama Canal Zone and spent years in Asia while in the Navy, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney went to France as a young missionary, and Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor, has traveled worldwide for his global consulting firm.

None emphasizes his cosmopolitanism as insistently as Obama, who has written of his time spent living in Indonesia as a boy and his quest to learn more about his Kenyan father, from whom he was estranged.

In elevating those facts to presidential qualifications, Obama is trying to take one of his greatest weaknesses as a candidate - his lack of foreign policy experience - and funnel it through his greatest strengths: his compelling personal journey.

Obama's life has been at turns broadly global in its range and exceedingly local in its focus. For an individual who emphasizes roots shared across continents, Obama's professional life before he ran for the Senate focused on domestic, even parochial, concerns. He worked as a community organizer in a depressed neighborhood, a law professor specializing in the US Constitution, and a state senator representing a small slice of Chicago.

Indeed, when Obama talks about concerns abroad, he seems to discuss foreign policy not through a broader strategic lens but as a series of local problems with potentially wide-ranging consequences.

In a speech last April to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he went through each of his foreign trips to identify discrete problems - unguarded anthrax samples in Ukraine, conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, genocide in Darfur - that demanded American involvement.

On his 2006 trip to five African countries, Obama's familiarity with Kenyan culture helped him delicately raise touchy issues with the country's leaders, according to Air Force Major General Scott Gration, who accompanied Obama on the trip. "He's such a unifier that he can get to the tough issues and do it in a way that's nonconfrontational," said Gration.

Obama was able to understand the tribal complexities involved in public corruption in Kenya, according to Gration. When Obama mentioned to the country's president that camera crews traveling with him had been forced to pay a "fee" upon arriving in Nairobi, he managed to get action taken at the airport and the journalists' money refunded.

This past week, he broadcast an appeal to Kenyans to refrain from violence in the wake of a disputed presidential election.

"The [interest in the] local is a signal of his ability and desire to get his hands dirty," said Cass Sunstein, a former colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago. "He's someone who doesn't need to work with elites, who isn't even interested in working with elites."

Unlike Clinton, who uses her travel experience to assert her familiarity with foreign capitals and heads of state, Obama's focus to the soft credentials of biography emphasizes intuition - a combination of empathy and solidarity with the way people live in other countries - more than expertise.

But the connection between Obama's instinct and his views on foreign policy is not always clear. In his Des Moines speech, Obama said - without explanation - that his international background gave him "an understanding that led me to oppose this war in Iraq from the start."

A 2005 article in the Chicago Tribune noted that Obama's civilian passport, retired when he began traveling as federal official, included stamps vouching for trips "which he had taken across Asia, Australia and Africa as well as most of Europe."

Since he received a diplomatic burgundy passport, Obama has yet to visit Latin America and East or South Asia, and stopped once in western or central Europe - a brief stopover in London.

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki defended his record, saying, "The problem in Washington isn't that there haven't been enough meetings, it is that we have a fundamentally flawed foreign policy that Obama will begin to change the minute he is inaugurated."