Obama madness: is the junior Illinois senator the Democrats' savior?(POLITICS)(Barack Obama )

IN late October, during the home stretch of the most intensely contested midterm election in years, many Democrats seemed to drop everything, forget about 2006, and fall into a swoon over somebody who is not, at the moment, running for anything. Illinois senator Barack Obama appeared on Oprah, Meet the Press, and the cover of Time--in a story headlined "Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President"--and in no time found himself anointed the Future of the Democratic Party.

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Or maybe even more than that. The online magazine Slate flatly declared that in the course of ten days Obama "turned American politics upside down." Time's Joe Klein called him "the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy." Other admirers threw around phrases like "American idol" and "rock star."

The Obama boomlet just happened to coincide with the publication of the senator's new book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. And sure enough, with Oprah's help, the book shot to number one on the Amazon.com sales chart. But the wave of publicity was much more than book hype. The speed with which some Democrats and their allies in the press rushed to embrace Obama said more about the state of the party and its presidential prospects than about Obama himself. And what it said was: We're really, really nervous about Hillary Clinton.

"There is a ton of nervousness about Hillary," says a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. "There are a lot of people looking for an alternative, and they don't see it yet." Everybody knows the problem: Mrs. Clinton has tons of money, huge name recognition, and a big organization, yet a significant number of Democrats believe she is unelectable, given the baggage that she carries from her husband's years in the White House. For those Democrats, the first contest of the 2008 Democratic presidential race will be to determine who becomes what the strategist calls the "anti-Hillary."

For a while, former Virginia governor Mark Warner looked like a front-runner for that honor. Then Warner pulled out, confessing that he just didn't want it bad enough to undergo the trials of a campaign. Former senator John Edwards is another candidate, having emerged from the party's 2004 loss mostly untouched. Perhaps even John Kerry is in the running, although it's not clear Democrats would give him another chance. Whatever the case, now they've all got Obama to contend with. "He gets even with those guys just by getting in," says the strategist.

But what if Obama won the race to be the anti-Hillary, and then won the Democratic nomination? Were that to happen, Democrats would almost certainly go from being extremely nervous about Hillary to being extremely nervous about Obama. Because for all we've read about him--at age 45, he has already written two books about himself--we don't really know that much about the junior senator from Illinois.