Unknown quantity: are the Democrats gambling a mystery man?(2008 )(Barack Obama )

IN the past two weeks, Barack Obama has not looked like his familiar self on the campaign trail. The grand, inspirational calls to hope before large crowds have grown less frequent, and a new kind of Obama performance has debuted: the defensive, stammering press conference in which the candidate dodges a few hard questions and rushes off.

Two names from Obama's past have been chiefly responsible for this changed tone and feel: Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright. Rezko, the indicted Chicago businessman and longtime Obama fundraiser, highlights Obama's rather murky political beginnings. Any politician who rises as quickly as Obama did on the South Side of Chicago is bound to have made some questionable friends along the way, and the Rezko affair has certainly started some people in the press and the political world wondering what else might lurk undiscovered in the senator's past.

Meanwhile Wright, the pastor of Obama's Chicago church, highlights the continuing mystery of Obama's basic ideology. Is he the cool and level-headed post-political politician who addresses every difficult issue by first expounding on how everyone, on all sides, has a point? Or is he a radical liberal who nods from the pews as his pastor leads the congregation in a chorus of "God damn America," insists that the September 11 attacks were "chickens ... coming home to roost," and dubs the country "The US of KKK A"? Obama's past fidelity to Wright has been unequivocal. The senator and his wife--who were married by Wright and had their children baptized by him--gave Wright's church more than $20,000 in donations in 2006 alone. And as Obama made clear in his speech on the subject in Philadelphia this week, he surely had a sense of Wright's strong views.

Just what the Wright and Rezko affairs actually tell us about Obama's past and his views is hard to discern at this point. But for Democrats, the greatest worry must involve not the substance of either scandal, but the fact that Obama's links to these controversies are only now emerging in full. What further unpleasant surprises await? What if this new and less appealing Obama is the real one?

The fact is, the Democratic party may be about to hitch its wagon to a remarkably unknown star, without much sense of what troubles may lie in his past--and the party's future.

The risks of running a relative unknown can be great. In 1988, Michael Dukakis seemed to offer real promise, as far as Washington Democrats could tell. He was a successful governor with an interesting life story, intelligent and well spoken, and even possessed of ethnic and blue-collar credentials. Only too late did they learn that they had nominated a thoroughly stereotypical, dogmatic liberal, and a boring one to boot.

In 2000, George W. Bush was also not a well-known quantity, and in the week before the election, with the polls looking up, word suddenly emerged of a drunk-driving charge he had never divulged. Bush's support suffered, and the country was left with the Florida debacle in which Bush barely eked out an Electoral College win in a way that hung a question mark over the start of his presidency.