It is difficult for many of us to contain our enthusiasm for Barack Obama, yet we must try. We owe that to him. We should not reward his blockbuster performance at the Democratic National Convention by loading his shoulders with the fate of the nation. Not yet, anyway. That can wait, perhaps until, say, his 2012 presidential campaign? For now, Illinois’s self-described “skinny black kid with the funny name” offers an inspiring glimpse of what America’s next generation of black leadership could look like — a leadership that is not for blacks only. After a tidal wave of advance publicity, many wondered whether Obama, 42, a state senator currently without a Republican opponent for the U.S. Senate, could meet the challenge of delivering the convention’s keynote speech. No problem. The law professor knocked that ball out of the park. Journalists rushed to their thesauruses to find enough superlatives to describe him. Obama is not a conservative, yet conservatives would be hard-pressed to find much in this speech with which to disagree. Well-crafted, it rose above the usual political pep talk to echo the all-American voice of liberal patron saint Martin Luther King Jr. Obama brought Democrats to their feet with, “Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative-ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” Obama’s forceful baritone delivery adds a special resonance to those come-together sentiments because his life is an epic narrative of the American dream on the brink of a new multiracial and multicultural century. His mother was a white woman from Kansas and his father was a goatherd from Kenya who came to Hawaii on scholarship and later graduated from Harvard. Their son, born in Hawaii, and raised partly in Indonesia, became the first black president of Harvard Law Review and teaches law at University of Chicago. And with the wise counsel of his savvy attorney-wife Michelle, Obama seems to be keeping a cool head about everyone else’s high expectations. He is as intrigued as I am, he once told me, that Americans always seem to be searching for the next black leader, but he’s not going to start measuring curtains in the White House when he has not even been elected to the Senate yet. In his broad outreach, his is trying mightily to fairly represent all constituencies, but with a special sensitivity about issues of great concern to black folks. He has voted for racial profiling bans, funding for child health care and earned income tax credits. “I try to remind people,” he said after his speech, “that I live in the African American community but I am not limited by it.” Nor should the rest of us impose racial limits on him. That’s not always easy. It’s hard to suppress the hope that Obama offers that the American Dream can work for all of America’s dreamers. Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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