Like Lincoln, Obama is not completely formed politically. His lean face, like Lincoln's face pre-beard, needs filling out, as do his ideas and prescriptions for leadership. What he has in common with Lincoln is a gift for plain and convincing rhetoric. After decades of spin, PC euphemizing, neocon proxy speech, and similar bullshit, the public sees Obama as capable of straight talk. He told the last Democratic convention that there were no Blue or Red states but only a United States -- and after the crowd heard that they wanted to trade in John Kerry like a bad wedding present.

Obama, who is not up for re-election this fall, has cut a swath through the heartland to boost other candidates and has generated huge admiring crowds. Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein said on NBC's Meet the Press show this week that the crowds of mainly Midwestern white people seem to feel tremendous gratitude to Obama for not being Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson -- a seemingly odd point worth examining.

Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. He grew up mostly in Hawaii, with a four-year side-trip in Indonesia. He had a distinguished academic career at Columbia and Harvard. Though he is half-African he carries none of the baggage of stereotypical American black culture. He doesn't speak in the patois of the ghetto (or pretend to), and he appears not to possess a sense of implacable grievance for being who he is.

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The convulsion that a President Obama might be elected into would be one first of economics. Our industrial economy is going to fall on its knees when global energy scarcities gets traction. There is going to be a scramble for resources world-wide and here in North America, and we are all set up to fracture along ethnic and regional lines as that occurs. The presence of a suddenly overwhelming, non-assimilated Hispanic population will only make things more difficult.

A President Obama would also very probably face a geopolitical crisis as the US, China, Russia, Japan, Europe, and the Islamic nations jockey desperately over energy resources while their own populations grow restive, desperate, angry, and possibly aggressive. In other words, a President Obama would possibly face a world war, a civil war, and a great depression all at once. This is not a happy fate for any leader, and so perhaps in the public perception of Barack Obama, in the rising of his star, so to speak, the public apprehends the outlines of tragedy, just as the historical Lincoln is an incomplete picture without the tragedy of his murder a few days after the resolution of the terrible war he presided over.