During the primaries, a great deal of controversy arose over Mr. Obama's relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his former pastor in Chicago. There may be some truth to speculation that Mr. Obama joined Mr. Wright's large, influential church to gain credibility (and votes) for his first electoral race for the Illinois Senate.
But Mr. Obama sat in the pews rather than standing at the pulpit, and he worked as a community activist, not as a preacher, before entering electoral politics.
Mr. Obama's class and childhood experience constitute a fourth characteristic of distinction.
Though he later moved to the south side of Chicago to become a community organizer, Mr. Obama was not raised as part of the urban underclass. Rather, his initial upbringing was middle class, and he lived in places (Indonesia, Hawaii) that are unfamiliar to the vast majority of American adolescents, white or black.
Finally, Mr. Obama is Ivy League-educated, as opposed to a product of one of the many historically black colleges across the United States. He graduated from Columbia University and then, after that stint as a local activist in Chicago, in 1991 finished a law degree at Harvard.
There are American black leaders who share some of these five characteristics, but it is hard to identify even a single one who shares them all.
The identities of the two most recent serious African-American candidates for president - the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson in 1984 and 1988 and the Rev. Al Sharpton in 2004 - are much more traditional in terms of their bloodlines, family histories, education, occupations and educational backgrounds. Of course, neither Mr. Jackson nor Mr. Sharpton came close to winning the Democratic nomination. Although both espoused liberal views fairly similar to Mr. Obama's, they were handicapped by their identities as "racialized" candidates.
The fact that he is not just a different American politician but an atypical African-American politician has played a significant role in Mr. Obama's history-making run this year.
Thomas F. Schaller teaches political science at UMBC. His column appears regularly in The Sun. His e-mail is schaller67@ gmail.com.
