At the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, an obscure 39-year-old African-American state senator from Illinois tried and failed to obtain a floor pass. So low were his fortunes that, in another rejection, his bank card was refused by a nearby cash machine.

Eight years later, an extraordinary 7m Americans gave up their free time in one way or another to help elect that same man to the presidency. One of them was Al Gore, from whose convention floor the young politician was debarred. The bookish product of a broken interracial marriage and peripatetic childhood poverty won the world's most powerful office by convincing an ample majority of compatriots who turned out on Tuesday that he would bring the change they craved.

By no means has Barack Obama's journey to the White House been free from criticism. Some say he has the thinnest résumé of anyone to lead America. Others see a self-appointed Messiah with less executive experience than Jesus. Still others depict him as an empty vessel into which the naïve, particularly the young, project whatever fantasies they wish.

Some of that may be true. Yet in conversations with people who have known Mr Obama at all stages of his life, from a friend at his elementary school in Jakarta, where he wrote that one day he would be president, to his initial meeting last year with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser who says, “Obama made the best first impression on me of anyone since John F. Kennedy,” a different portrait emerges.

These people depict a man who, in Mr Brzezinski's words, is “better equipped in temperament and intellect for the highest office than anyone I can think of in recent memory”. Close friends describe someone who is so self-possessed that nothing appears to rattle him. “I have never heard Barack raise his voice – not once,” says Valerie Jarrett, his friend and mentor of 17 years who is widely tipped to be a senior counsel in the Obama White House. “His highs are never very high and his lows are never very low.”

Lawrence Tribe, the renowned Harvard constitutional law professor, who hired Mr Obama as his research assistant on his first meeting with him – something he has never done before or since – says: “Absolutely nothing throws him into a panic ... he has enormous calm and tranquillity.”

Such an unusual measure of self-control can sometimes strike people as arrogant. Anyone already sceptical about some of Mr Obama's more prophetic self-assertions was sent into a tailspin after listening to Oprah Winfrey describe Mr Obama as “The One, The One we have been waiting for” when the celebrity television host endorsed him last year.

One of them was John McCain, who made little secret that he viewed Mr Obama as an inferior opponent. “I can't tell you how frustrated John has been – to the point of self-destruction – by facing off against someone that he doesn't respect,” says a close friend who chatted frequently with the defeated Republican nominee throughout the general election. “John has been in public service one way or another since 1954. What has Obama really done?”

By conventional measures, the answer is: strikingly little. Much has been made of the two, mostly fruitless, years spent in his twenties as a community organiser among unemployed steel workers on Chicago's south side when he could have been making money on Wall Street. Then there is his time as a legislator. After his eight years as an Illinois state senator, he served four years in the US Senate, two of which he has spent almost permanently on the campaign trail. Unlike some of the lesser qualified recent presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, neither of whom had national or foreign policy experience, Mr Obama has not served as the governor of a state.

In her drippingly sarcastic Republican convention speech in August when nominated as Mr McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin said that even being mayor of Wasilla, an Alaskan town of 9,000, involved taking actual decisions. Mr Obama himself, at the jokey annual Gridiron dinner with Washington-based journalists two years ago, parodied his lack of experience. “Really, what else is there to do? Well, I guess I could pass a law, or something...”

Mr Obama has probably the least conventional – and, to some people, the most refreshing – background of any White House occupant in decades. “People often say someone or other lacks experience for the presidency,” says Mr Brzezinski. “But in truth, nothing can prepare you for the job. So you have to look to other qualities, such as character and judgment.”

Born to an 18-year-old white mother from Kansas and a black father in his mid-twenties from Kenya, “Barry” Obama found his childhood years were spent moving from place to place. His upbringing was very different to that of most presidents in three respects. First, he spent several years away from the US mainland, in Indonesia and in far-flung and racially diverse Hawaii, where he was reared by his grandparents. “Living abroad and having a father who was foreign gave him a sense of the world that was enriching,” says Ms Jarrett.

It may also have given him a perspective on how others sometimes view Americans. In his book, Dreams From My Father, which he started writing at 31 when he had become the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, Mr Obama says his mother taught him to “disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterised Americans abroad”.

Second, the Obama childhood years were penurious. Other presidents including Abraham Lincoln, who was raised in the semi-proverbial log cabin and whose short Illinois résumé Mr Obama almost precisely tracks, grew up in poverty. But none grew up in a single-parent family or was sent off to live for years with grandparents. In his campaign speeches, Mr Obama often mentioned his mother's struggle with cancer in which she devoted much of her final months trying to get insurance companies to pay medical bills.

Michelle Obama, who has devoted much of the last 21 months to sketching out her husband's biographical roots, repeatedly says, “Barack gets it,” in a partially successful attempt to convince sceptical blue-collar whites that he is not an east coast elitist. “Barack's mother taught him to raise yourself up by your bootstraps and work hard for everything to the best of your ability,” says another of Mr Obama's friends. “He was raised on food stamps. He knows where he comes from.”

The third and genuinely unique aspect to Mr Obama's background is his mixed-race descent. In his book, he writes of the “split second” response of people when they learn that he is neither white nor black. “Privately they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose – the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.”

Coming from a mixed background can create a lifelong conundrum for some. Others get to see the world through more than one pair of eyes – never complacent, always questioning, often more intelligent than those around them. Mr Obama fits the second description. Friends and colleagues describe him as someone acutely sensitive to other people's predicaments, including those who work for him.

In contrast to almost every presidential campaign in living memory, Mr Obama's has suffered no defections, leaks, public bickering or sackings. Even fierce critics have expressed admiration for the sense of loyalty and devotion that he inspires in those who work for him.

Friends attribute much of this quality to his background. “When you are an outsider you can either try to be like everybody else or you can identify with other outsiders,” says Gerard Kellman, who recruited Mr Obama to work as a volunteer on Chicago's south side. “That includes people who were poor, people who faced discrimination . . . it made him more reflective.”

Even in those years, Mr Kellman says he saw in Mr Obama some of the hallmarks of his campaigning style. On occasion, ministers would accuse him of being a “pawn of Jews and Catholics” because of the source of funding for the community projects. But Mr Obama would “work through it with patience and humour – the same traits we saw in his debates with McCain”. Continued    Source: The Financial Times