What do we know about Barack Obama?

There are rumors flying out there, some through email blasts that take on a life of their own, about the life of Sen. Barack Obama. When I was on radio this week talking about the New Hampshire primary, one of the callers wanted to alert listeners about Obama’s Muslim faith and the danger he poses to the country. That’s one of the rumors out there. He’s a Christian who spent a little time in a Muslim school (as he did a Catholic school) in Indonesia as a youth.

But who is he? WaPo has some good questions and answers here about the senator Americans know so little but seem to love so much.

Some highlights:

Obama’s Jan. 3 triumph let loose a giddiness bordering on exhilaration among voters and, especially, media commentators, who hailed his triumph as “historic,” even though he was not in fact the first African American to win a major presidential nominating contest. (Jesse Jackson won 13 primaries and caucuses in 1988.)

Are we hearing that referenced anywhere?

Many of the voters and pundits who were thrilled by Obama’s compelling Iowa speech 10 days ago remain intoxicated, heady with the hope that he can deliver not just “change” — any candidate running would do that — but a categorically different kind of change from Clinton or the Republican candidates. So what explains the magic?

A lot of people are using the word “magic”, which generates more of that kind of thinking.

Obama’s allure differs from the infatuations of past election cycles because it can’t be traced to what he has done or will do.

Key point. This is a moment in time, suspended, with great infatuation over the sound and image of a presidential candidate (he sounds and looks charming and genteel), but not anchored to information or evidence.

In his legislative career, Obama has produced few concrete policy changes, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a rank-and-file fan who can cite one. Not since 1896 — when another rousing speechmaker, William Jennings Bryan, sought the White House — has the zeal for a candidate corresponded so little to a record of hard accomplishment. But merely asking if Obama has done enough for us to expect he’d be a good president misses the point, because that measures the past rather than imagining the future.

He’s riding the wave of popularity that he is because of imagination.

Yet if Obama charms us by pointing to tomorrow, he doesn’t come bearing a new ideological vision…Obama fans rarely tout his specific ideas.

They probably can’t name any, other than the general idea that he’ll “bring change.” Which, by the way, any new president will.

No one claims his agenda entails radical innovation or differs much from Hillary Clinton’s. On the contrary, Obama’s ideology, insofar as he has articulated it, seems to be a familiar, mainstream liberalism, heavy on communitarianism. High-minded and process-oriented, in the Mugwump tradition that runs from Adlai Stevenson to Bill Bradley, it is pitched less to the Democratic Party’s working-class base than to upscale professionals.

The writer here is historian who is working on a book about spin in American politics. He has a focused perspective on both, concluding that…

Obamamania — the phenomenon, not the man — leads us to believe that if only we vote for an African American, an avatar of “change” and healing, we can slough off the burdens of our past — the burdens of finding answers to problems such as the rising number of out-of-wedlock births, the obscene size of the black male population behind bars, the rotten state of city schools, the simmering white resentment about affirmative action, the black-white gap in life expectancy and the cascade of government failures that turned Hurricane Katrina from a breakdown of emergency relief into a disgraceful racial scandal.

But it’s early, and the tough questions are yet to come. How about we start this ‘change’ right now, into a race on principles and policies?