A few weeks ago, things were looking grim for the big-eared, skinny guy from the south side of Chicago. A November 17th poll showed Barack Obama trailing Hillary Clinton by over twenty percentage points. His lackluster performances in the debates left something to be desired. His rhetoric was heady and eloquent but he was reluctant to get specific on the issues, a reticence that fueled attacks on the rookie senator's inexperience. In a very public change of strategy, the Obama campaign has recently pledged to go on the attack and be more forceful. But the damage may already be done. We know he had a cold that night here at Dartmouth, but standing on stage politely taking cues from Tim Russert, Barry came off as kind of a softie.

Has Obama's star really faded? Is Obamamania more of a dying echo than a sweeping phenomenon? Has Obama girl turned off the music and put her clothes back on? "A relationship is like a shark," Woody Allen says in Annie Hall. "To survive it has to always move forward." The same could be said of a presidential campaign. The rookie senator might have a dead shark on his hands.

There have been some recent signs of hope, though, for the Obama camp. As of December 2, Obama is only trailing Clinton by one point in Iowa. In response to his pledge to be more assertive, the press seems to have given Obama a sort-of rebirth on the cover of Time and The Atlantic Monthly, in the pages of The New Yorker, and in the up arrow graphic in Newsweek, where he's been described as "poised to be the comeback kid." But is it too little too late? He may have gained ground in Iowa, but his national numbers still haven't budged.

The race is certainly too early to call. There's plenty of runway left for any of the frontrunners to make a major stumble (I'm picturing the sudden emergence of new evidence to substantiate the vague, tabloid rumors of Hillary's love affair with her gorgeous young assistant--how about that for a Clintonian bimbo-eruption?). But Obama's loss of momentum is still disconcerting. National politics, it seems, really is dominated by manufactured personalities and empty sound bites. There was hope in the beginning that Obama wouldn't cave under the pressure to play it safe, that he'd maintain the spark, candor, and energy of his epic speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. He was smart, hip, and likeable--an intellectual dedicated to sacrifice and service; finally, a candidate who seemed to reiterate those famous lines, "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." And most of all, he was true--he spoke with a kind of honest clarity and reasonable logic that we hadn't heard in years.

Most of these qualities still stand for Obama. As a public figure, at least, the campaign hasn't fundamentally changed who he is (I doubt if he's even managed to kick that smoking habit). But the national political arena has certainly corroded some of his flare. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has repeatedly lambasted Obama for his sheepish behavior--particularly irritating for Dowd, his unwillingness to even mention Hillary's name when he tries a softball jab at the lady senator. Dowd is still skeptical of Obama's new, more combative style: in a recent column, she compared him to a child prodigy with "those enraptured with his gifts urg[ing] him on, like anxious parents, trying to pull that sustained, dazzling performance out of him that they believe he's capable of," but has yet to deliver. "His advisers and fundraisers have pressed him to go fortissimo," Dowd writes, and "many voters with great expectations are hovering, hoping for a crescendo."

From the beginning of his campaign, Obama has repeatedly dedicated himself to a new brand of clean politics, an idealistic game where fair play means sticking to the issues and avoiding personal attacks. He hoped this stance would catapult him to the moral high-ground, make him stand out against the petty mud-slinging of his peers. It was going to be a new kind of political noblesse, though one we've heard other pols try to champion. He would run a bloodless campaign and win on the merit of his integrity and vision. A nice idea, but it didn't exactly work. Obama's clean politics started to seem like no politics at all. The country was unsure what this guy was all about. His policy promises were couched in lofty and optimistic language but were fuzzy on the details (how exactly do we give poor children a better education?). His question-answering and public appearances became more calculated and safe. Leaving a firefighters convention in March, Obama famously danced around the question of whether homosexuality was immoral; after catching his breath, he eventually released a statement saying that no, he doesn't believe that all gays will burn in hell. Then there was the "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)" memo released anonymously by the Obama campaign, criticizing the New York senator's financial ties with India. The situation gave certain interest groups the chance to slander Obama as less-than-friendly to "brown" people. Rather than stand up for his staffers and put some weight behind a legitimate attack (what is Clinton doing investing all that money into a major siphon of American jobs?), Obama tried to weasel out of the situation by calling the memo a "dumb mistake." He even kowtowed to the politically correct witch-hunters, saying that the memo did not reflect his "longstanding relationship with the Indian-American community." This last part was particularly upsetting. It seemed to indicate a shift from the clear-minded, reasonable Obama of the past. There was nothing slanderous towards Indian-Americans in the memo. Did Indians find the simple mention of the word 'Punjab' offensive? Why was Obama defending himself to a group of people whom he hadn't wronged? He had caved under the unreasonable and senseless demands of modern politics to play it safe, stay neutral, and, whatever you do, don't piss anyone off.

An anonymous Obama aide was recently quoted in The New York Times saying that some prominent donors are starting to ask versions of the same question: "What happened to the Obama we saw at the 2004 Democratic convention," referring to Obama's keynote speech at that convention, a stellar public appearance that propelled him onto the national scene. The "One America" speech, as it's sometimes referred to, showcased the soon-to-be senator at his best. The speech's one unfortunate side effect was that it upstaged the party's presidential candidate--Kerry who? the cheering audience seemed to ask the few times Obama dropped the droopy-eyed nominee's name. The speech hit all the familiar notes--America as a land of tolerance and opportunity; the importance of education and hard work; the need for moral reform in government; the senselessness of going to war without the right justifications. But the old rhetoric sounded fresh coming from a guy who was candid, passionate, and willing, even, to get angry and indignant. Finally, a pol who would cut the crap and wasn't afraid to say something edgy. One of the biggest cheers during the speech rose after a laundry list of domestic social ills. As the standing crowd started to applaud and scream, Obama delivered the final punch that sent them into hysterics: we have to get rid, he shouted over the applause, of "the slander that says a black youth holding a book is acting white." This was a hell of a line that in the most truthful, no-nonsense way cut to the heart of America's most pressing domestic problem--the growing divide between the haves and have-nots and the disconcerting fact that that divide is largely racial. Obama knows the reality of the situation--that for this to change, for America to become a more equitable place, a society where the quality of a neighborhood and income brackets can't be grouped by race, attitudes on the streets need to change.

I heard Obama deliver this same line at a 2004 high school graduation on the south side of Chicago shortly before his run for senate. It rang just as true, and the crowd ate it up. Announcing his plans to run for president in Springfield, Illinois in February of this year, Obama recycled a lot of the "One America" speech, but he cut the slander line. He didn't mention it in his stump speech at Dartmouth this past spring, and he doesn't seem to have mentioned it in any of the speech transcripts posted on barackobama.com (a quick search of the transcripts suggests that the word 'black', in fact, rarely shows up at all). What could this mean? That Obama has suddenly stopped caring about educating black children? That he's used the line so many times it started to sound stale so he's left it out of more recent speeches? Or maybe he decided to tone down his rhetoric--"ease up on the black stuff, Barry," we can imagine some of his advisors saying. "When you're in Iowa they're going to think you sound like Al Sharpton."

Obama certainly does not sound like Al Sharpton. Writing in The New Republic in January, Peter Beinart argued that white people like Barack Obama because they see him as a "good black," whereas agitators like Sharpton, the vitriolic, controversy-prone preacher, are examples of "bad blacks." In this line of thinking, Obama is a palatable candidate for whites because of his elite pedigree and his ambiguous drawl, which can often sound more Cambridge, Mass, than south side, Chicago. But as Beinart points out, being the "good black" can be difficult. "The more whites love you," he writes, "the more you must reassure your own community [the black community] that you are still one of them."

There has been a lot of ink spilled the past few months over the authenticity of Obama's blackness. Writing for the left-leaning Salon.com, Debra Dickerson claimed that "Obama isn't black," since the term "'black' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves." In a New York Daily News column titled "Why Obama Isn't: Black Like Me," Stanley Crouch said the same thing, pointing out the genetic reality of the situation: "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan." Responding to these other pundits, Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates applauded Obama in Time for "choosing to be black" even when he was "given the escape valve of biraciality." For Coates, it's the circumstances of Obama's life that make him black. He's "married to a black woman," Coates writes. "He goes to a black church. He's worked with poor people on the South Side of Chicago, and still lives there."

For Obama, the debate over his race was settled some time ago. He told Charlie Rose in October of 2006, "If I'm outside your building trying to catch a cab, they're not saying, 'Oh, there's a mixed race guy." There is a lot of truth to this. As upsetting as it is, for the people in this country most obsessed with race--that is, those who still judge others by the color of their skin--the one-drop rule certainly applies. But the argument over Obama's race is really just a discussion on semantics. We won't ever reach one answer that suddenly guarantees him the black vote, or another that calms the anxieties of America's racists, and I'm not sure we'd even want to. Besides, as another New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, recently pointed out, Obama's race won't determine the outcome of the election: "Most Americans aren't racists, Republicans included," Rich wrote, adding that "those who are [racists] won't vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it's not Mr. Obama."

The most pressing issue with Obama's campaign isn't the ambiguity of his race, but the increasing ambiguity of his character. In 2004, a large percent of the country got behind the skinny young guy with a funny name because they were convinced by him as a person. They believed in his message of hope, his cogent grasp on the realities of life in America, and his abilities as an intellectual and moral powerhouse to lead and make sound decisions. Obama was a street-smart community organizer who spoke to the country in a convincing and genuine voice of candid honesty. But it seems that he has started to fall into the dull, insipid safety typical of national politics, the kind of safe pandering that his biggest threat, Hillary Clinton, has practiced for years. Clinton is a champion of the middle ground, an area where powerful convictions are diluted by a brute desire to win, when winning means compromising your true beliefs, answering tough questions in the most circuitous way possible and, in the end, not standing for much of anything at all. Arthur Schlesinger's diagnosis of another schizophrenic intellectual politico, Adlai Stevenson, could be applied to Obama: Stevenson's political career suffered from a "split between his desire to win and his desire to live up to the noble image of himself," the famous historian wrote in his diaries. Obama seems to dealing with the same issue.

But there is still time and there is still hope. The Obama camp has taken worries over the senator's lack of assertiveness to heart. In an October 27th interview with The New York Times, Obama promised to go on the offensive and confront Clinton more forcefully. But is this really the solution? The point is not that Obama should start slinging more mud at Hillary, but that he should try to stand his ground as an individual. Obama shouldn't have to compromise what he believes in just to win. He shouldn't buckle under the unreasonable pressures of political correctness and have to apologize to Indian-Americans for something he didn't do. He shouldn't be so guarded and cautious--so not himself--that he stumbles around a question so fundamental to his belief in a tolerant America. His new assertiveness should be directed at himself not at Hillary. It's the only way he'll win. There's nothing more unattractive than a finger-pointer who retreats into the safety and anonymity of the shadows.

In any case, Obama is still the best candidate running for president. Here's why. In the coming election, the issues aren't particularly important. No matter who wins, Republican or Democrat, they will have to deal with social security, education reform, immigration, and border security and, in all honesty, they probably won't make much headway in the four years they're in office. Washington, for now at least, is so unshakably bipartisan that any new legislation is almost guaranteed to be some sort of compromise. So, a vote based on a candidate's stance on stem cell research, for example, is irrelevant. Andrew Sullivan makes exactly this point in December's Atlantic Monthly. "Even on issues that are seen as integral to the polarization [of the candidates]," Sullivan writes, "the practical stakes in this election are minor." This even holds true for Iraq and America's use of military force around the world. "Every potential president," Sullivan continues, "Republican or Democrat, would likely inherit more than 100,000 occupying troops in January 2009; every one would be attempting to redeploy them as prudently as possible and to build stronger alliances both in the region and in the world. Every major candidate, moreover, will pledge to use targeted military force against al-Qaeda if necessary; every one is committed to ensuring that Iran will not have a nuclear bomb; every one is committed to an open-ended deployment in Afghanistan and an unbending alliance with Israel."

So if the issues don't matter, what does? Most prescient of all is the message the 2008 election will send to the rest of the world. In this sense, Obama is our best hope for redeeming America's standing in a global community that, at best, holds us in contempt, at worst, fights for our destruction. Imagine presenting Barack Hussein Obama as the new face of America. A man whose father was an African immigrant; who spent time at a Muslim school in Indonesia; who isn't a business man or a corporate lawyer, but a community organizer from Chicago. It's difficult to imagine a bigger blow to the current propaganda demonizing this country.

If he does win, though, I hope we end up with Obama the free-thinking, honest individual rather than a vacuous, cautious suit. Speaking recently at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, Obama seemed to have regained some of his old edge. "I'm in this race because I'm tired of reading about Jena," he told the crowd. "I'm tired of reading about nooses. I'm tired of hearing about a Justice Department that doesn't understand justice...I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college." That's the right stuff, but will he stick with it, not only through a general election--a race that often encourages candidates to lean moderate in the hopes of winning swing votes--but through a difficult presidency that is surely going to involve a lot of glad-handing and compromise? If he wins, it would be nice to hear President-elect Obama at his inauguration bring back that memorable line about eradicating the slander that says a black child carrying a book is acting white, setting his administration on the path to bridging America's persistent social, racial, and economic divides. Now that would be a moment of audacious hope.