Obama had been warned. That November of 2006, at dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Washington, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle had reminded Obama that he had never really been attacked before.

“I told him he should think about how he might react if his wife was attacked – the emotional discipline it takes,” recalled Daschle.

At about the same time, with his fellow Illinois senator, Richard Durbin, Obama had talked about the physical risks.

At a political event at the Union League Club in Chicago before Thanksgiving, Obama told Durbin that many of his African-American friends were advising him not to run, some of them because they were afraid he would get killed. (Durbin shared their fears and began lobbying to get Obama put under Secret Service protection.

In May, eight months before the first primary, the Secret Service would begin standing watch over Obama, the first time such protection had been extended to a candidate so early in the process.)

Michelle Obama was worried about her husband’s safety, but was also seized with a kind of free-floating anxiety, recalled Durbin.

Even after she said yes, she asked Durbin, “They’re not setting him up, are they?” The “they” was all the people who were urging Obama to run. Michelle wondered at their motives.

Obama understood his wife’s fears and even, to some degree, shared them, but he had a way of turning empathy into persuasion.

“Her initial instinct was to say no,” Obama recalled. “She knew how difficult it was for me to be away from the girls, she feels lonely when I’m not around, so her initial instinct was not to do it. And I think she also felt that, you know, the Clintons are tough, and that I would be subject to a lot of attacks.”

So that Christmas season, 2006, Michelle and Barack went for some long walks on the beach in Hawaii, where they were visiting his grandmother, and “just talked it through.

It wasn’t as if it was a slam-dunk for me,” said Obama.

“I think part of the reason she agreed to do it was because she knew that she had veto power, that she and the girls ultimately mattered more than my own ambitions in this process, and if she said no we would be OK.”

Michelle was able to extract a promise: if he ran, her husband would have to quit smoking.

In some ways, running for president was a preposterous idea for someone who had served as a two-term state legislator and had spent only two years in the United States Senate. But Obama, a careful student of his own unique journey, could see the stars coming into alignment–the country was exhausted by the Iraq War (which he, alone among leading candidates, had opposed as “dumb” from the outset).

As Obama saw it, the conservative tide in America was ebbing, and voters were turning away from the Republican Party. People were sick of politicians of the standard variety and yearned for someone new – truly new and different.

Another politician with a superb sense of timing, Bill Clinton, perfectly understood why Obama saw a golden, possibly once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity.

The former president believed that the mainstream press, whose liberal guilt Clinton understood and had exploited from time to time, would act as Obama’s personal chauffeur on the long journey ahead.

“If somebody pulled up a Rolls-Royce to me and said, ’Get in‘,” Clinton liked to say, with admiration and maybe a little envy, “I’d get in it, too.”

Barack Obama can be cocky about his star power.

On the eve of his speech to the Democratic convention in 2004, the speech that effectively launched him as the party’s hope of the future, he took a walk down a street in Boston with his friend Marty Nesbitt. A growing crowd followed them.

“Man, you’re like a rock star,” Nesbitt said to Obama.

“He looked at me,” Nesbitt recalled in a story he liked to tell reporters, “and said, ’Marty, you think it’s bad today, wait until tomorrow.‘

And I said, ’What do you mean?‘ And he said, ’My speech is pretty good‘.”

Obama’s 2004 convention speech launched him into the strange world of celebritydom; he acquired the kind of aura that can transform a skinny, scholarly man with big ears into a sex symbol.

Eureka Gilkey, one of Obama’s aides, recalled going with him when he made a speech to the Democratic National Committee shortly after he began his campaign. Obama was mobbed outside the bathroom.

“These were DNC members; they’re supposed to be jaded by politicians,” recalled Gilkey. “Not trying to tear their shirts off. I remember going home that night, and my boyfriend saying, ’What is that purple bruise on your back?‘ I had bruises on my back from people pushing and shoving, trying to get to [Obama] ... I remember grabbing women’s hands because they were trying to pull his shirt from his pants. I couldn’t believe it.”

Obama was growing accustomed to adulation. Greg Craig was not the only old Kennedy hand to fall in love. At Coretta Scott King’s funeral in early 2006, Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy, leaned over to him and whispered, “The torch is being passed to you.”

© NEWSWEEK 2008