Leonard Pitts: Obama's appeal is a willingness to listen

When you walk around with Barack Obama's new book in hand, people give you looks.

These are not the looks you get with Dean Koontz or Walter Mosley books, not looks that register and forget in the same moment. No, if the book is "The Audacity of Hope," with Obama on the cover, the looks are different. Some lifting of the eyebrows, some lightening of the expression, some change of face that suggests not just recognition, but engagement.

Obama is trailed by a permanent cloud of buzz in which words like "smart," "handsome" and "presidential" figure prominently.

His response? Don't believe the hype. Obama is well aware that for many people he is, after only two years as a senator, just unformed clay they mold into the shape of their own political needs and wants. "I do hope people understand that I've got warts and will make mistakes," he says. "If they don't understand that, they should call my wife and she will be happy to outline those flaws for them."

It's a smooth laugh line, but it sets up a larger point: If people want to see change, they need to understand that change is not a man.

"Dr. King is one of my heroes... but I'm also mindful of the fact that it was a bunch of women who were willing to walk rather than ride the bus after doing somebody else's laundry and looking after somebody else's children that lifted up Dr. King... . I like to remind people that if you leave it up to the politicians, the problems in this country are not going to be solved. It's a group effort, and citizens have to be engaged if we're going to deal with these issues."

Paradoxically, it's the very fact that Obama says things like that -- that he speaks in complete sentences and pitch-perfect paragraphs and is willing to demand something more out of us than patriotic consumerism -- that draws people to him. He stirs some long dormant sense of the possible.

To put it another way, Obama doesn't sound very much like a politician.

"Audacity" is a book less about policy than vision, i.e., a different and more idealistic way of framing a nation that lately has seemed split along seams of red and blue.

As Obama puts it in one striking passage: "I imagine the white Southerner who growing up heard his dad talk about niggers this and niggers that but who has struck up a friendship with the black guys at the office and is trying to teach his own son different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn't see why the son of a black doctor should get admitted into law school ahead of his own son. Or the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of those buildings as he is of the bankers who won't give him a loan to expand his business. There's the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager's abortion and the millions of waitresses and temp secretaries and nurse's assistants and Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath every single month in the hope that they'll have enough money to support the children that they did bring into the world."

It's a paragraph you cannot imagine from any other politician, if only because it acknowledges the humanity on both sides of some of the vexing questions of our time. More to the point, it acknowledges that human lives and, therefore, human challenges are complex and often contradictory, that there are truths beyond dogma and that sometimes, the other side has a point.

Suggest to Obama that all this makes him a politician willing to split the difference, to seek the middle ground, and he will disagree. He'll tell you he's a Democrat and he has certain "core principles" upon which he will not compromise. What you see in him, he says, is not centrism so much as just a willingness to listen to the other guy. Something we don't do much anymore.

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