Barack Obama: Son of black economist from Kenya & white teacher from Kansas might be uniquely qualified to nudge the country toward the color purple.

Excerpts from Newsweek article entitled:

Barack Obama: The Dems' freshest face and rising star has a new challenge: to help his party relocate its moral core.

[D]esperate Democrats—viewing Obama's electrifying speech at the Democratic convention and landslide victory as about the only good news in a dismal election year—are already talking about him on the ticket in 2008. Although he will inevitably make most shortlists for vice president (and at 43, he's the same age JFK was when he was elected president), this speculation is almost comically premature for an incoming senator.

"One party seems to be defending a moribund status quo, and the other is defending an oligarchy," he says coolly. "It's not a very attractive choice." Obama's a Blue State Democrat, all right, and by most standards a liberal one. But Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, an architect of President Clinton's "Third Way" approach, sees him as a bridge from the left to the center of the spectrum: "Not just a phenomenal writer—he wrote that convention speech himself—but incredibly pragmatic."

Some party constituencies might be in for a surprise. Obama may be the only African-American in the Senate, but this is not a man who wants to be seen as the leader of black America. When he spoke at a Congressional Black Caucus reception recently, Obama graciously thanked several caucus leaders by name, then concluded with a short but telling statement: "I'm looking forward to working with you on behalf of all Americans."

To make sure he's concentrating on serving Illinois, he's turned down more than 200 speaking offers from around the world.

[H]e wants the party to reconnect to what he sees as its roots in a moral imperative: "This shouldn't be hard to do. Martin Luther King did it. The abolitionists did it. Dorothy Day [of the Catholic Workers] did it. Most of the reform movements that have changed this country have been grounded in religious models. We don't have to start from scratch."

But Obama does call for a "new narrative" that . . . restores "timeless values." Unlike many liberals, he readily admits that a faction of the Democratic Party during the 1960s twisted the American tradition of individualism into "licentiousness" and rejected the party's older values of family, community and faith. Ever since, he says, the Republicans have caricatured the Democrats for ignoring these values, a line of assault that has proved especially effective because communal and moral values were exactly what gave the Democrats their advantage in the mid-20th century.

"They attacked our strengths," Obama says. When Democrats lost these deeper moorings, their economic message rang hollow: "People figured, 'At least with Bush, I can go hunt with my friends and my wife can go to church'," he says, adding that for men who remember hunting with their dads, say, or women who enjoyed going to church with their grandmother or granddaughter, these cultural concerns become family issues that cut deep.

Obama doesn't believe that John Kerry lost because of "moral values." It's much more complicated than that. But he knows that the cultural divide and issues like gay marriage and abortion played a role, and that Kerry actually lost among his fellow Roman Catholics. The task now, Obama says, is not to back off on any particular issue but to at least open these cultural subjects for discussion again—and for Democrats to "reclaim and reassert in very explicit language that our best ideas rise out of communal values."

Obama began that process in his now famous keynote speech at the convention ("We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States"), which showed that an upbeat "One America" message still resonates. Running in the primary against white candidates, he did extremely well in heavily white areas. The experience of being cheered in Cairo, Ill., once among the most racist towns in America, was a breakthrough moment. This is not about "diversity" (a word he recognizes as horribly overused) but about embracing our hybrid origins and transcending our often narrow-minded past.

And Obama remains concerned about how some Democrats may go about finding religion. "It's dangerous to try to engineer this in some synthetic way through the party. If it's not organic, it comes off as phony. People can sniff it out," he cautions. "Democrats have to say to themselves, 'What are the values we care most deeply about?' then do the hard spiritual work ahead of time. You can't every once in a while just throw in the word 'God'."

Becoming the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review—the pinnacle of distinction for law students—was not the product of affirmative action or popularity but of academic candlepower and unrelenting work. Hill Harper, an actor now starring in "CSI: New York," was a law-school classmate of Obama's who remembers his competitiveness on the basketball court and humility off it. He didn't carry himself like the big man on campus that he clearly was, though he remained confident enough to accept an offer to write a memoir when he wasn't yet 30. For everyone else, the point of getting on the law review was to build their resumes. Not Obama. "He could have easily gotten a Supreme Court clerkship and six-figure salary from any law firm," Harper says. "But he was committed to doing the work he wanted to do"—back in Chicago, back in the community.

During the primary, Obama's expert grasp of foreign policy helped him bolt from the pack. He was an early opponent of the Iraq war, but made it clear he was against "this war, not all wars." (He supported the invasion of Afghanistan.)