Democrats' Barack tipped to be first black president

By RUPERT CORNWELL in Boston

Who gets the smart bet for first black President of the United States?

Less than a decade ago, Colin Powell was the man - and to this day, some believe the general might have beaten Bill Clinton in 1996.

Today the mantle has fallen on a somewhat more improbable figure - Barack Obama.

American political junkies love nothing better than to plot White House match-ups down the line, especially during convention season.

The match-up of the year, George W. Bush and John Kerry, has long since been talked to death.

The public topic here in Boston is whether Kerry can galvanise swing voters and win back the White House. The unofficial one is more fun: what happens in 2008 if he doesn't, or in 2012 if he does?

A Kerry win this year would obviously make his running mate, John Edwards, heir apparent. A loss would put Hillary Rodham Clinton squarely in the frame. But 2016, and it's Barack Obama - Barack who?

The mystery deepens when you learn he is but a state senator in Illinois, but is Democratic candidate, and clear favourite, in the contest for the open US Senate seat in the state in November's election.

Yet this 42-year-old politician, all but unknown nine months ago and who has not yet set serious foot in Washington, has already been glowingly profiled in the New Yorker magazine and scrutinised by the most distinguished political columnists in the land.

Today he receives a rookie's crowning distinction - picked to deliver the keynote speech that will cap the convention's second day.

One reason for this astonishing showcasing is simple - it can only boost the Democrats' chances of capturing the Illinois seat held by the retiring Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald. Also Obama's background - exotic even by US melting pot standards - dovetails perfectly with the party's aim to appeal across class and race.

His father was Kenyan, his mother came from Kansas. The couple met in Hawaii, and sealed a union appreciated neither in Africa nor on the Great Plains.

She later married again, to an Indonesian oil executive, and the new family moved to Jakarta. Then life led Obama back to the US - to California, Chicago and Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Law Review.

But political calculation and even that perfect CV are only part of it.

The keynote speaker is someone who party elders reckon will be a big part of the Democratic future. Traditionally the speech is delivered by an especially bright rising star.

In 1988, for instance, the keynoter was a young Arkansas Governor named Bill Clinton.

Obama, like the former President, has magnetism. He is slender, seemingly ever smiling, conveying the awareness that great honour has been heaped upon him, but serving notice that he will keep a level head amid all the fuss.

He is on the left of the party, not least on Iraq. In 2002 he declared that Saddam Hussein's decrepit regime was no threat to anyone, its weapons' capability much exaggerated, and that the US had no business launching an invasion. Kerry among others thought otherwise, but events have proved Obama right.

More important, he has a rare knack of making liberal positions sound reasonable. He can advocate a larger role for Government in national economic policy, without coming across as a tax-and-spend liberal.

So the Barack boom continues.

Ahead by 20 points in the polls, he seems destined to win in Illinois in November. And then who knows?

By 2012, he will have been US senator for eight years (just like John Kennedy in 1960) and by 2016, he will be a very presidential 54.

Of such stuff are convention scenarios spun.

- INDEPENDENT