I would maintain that hazmat was right when he said in another post: "[Obama] is only behaving exactly the way he did in his early senate career right up to when the primaries got heated...and maybe took a left turn for show during the primaries."  I hadn't really thought of it like that, but it much better describes his past and current behavior than saying he is now moving to the center.  Obama seemed to take a swing to the left of Hillary during the primaries--after Edwards left the race, he needed to pick up the support of voters like me, who were previously supporting more liberal candidates. It was also a good tactic for firing up the progressive base that could stuff the coffers using the internet.  And I admit, that I too became temporarily deluded into thinking he was more progressive than he is.  Now I am back to accepting my original assessment of him (the reason I initially supported Edwards), and yet, I still like Obama's approach and am enthused about an Obama presidency if things turn out well.

This first article I read that mentioned Obama was "The Candidate:  How the son of a Kenyan economist became an Illinois Everyman"

"Kirk Dillard, a leading Republican senator from the Chicago suburbs, looked chagrined when I asked him about Obama. 'I knew from the day he walked into this chamber that he was destined for great things,' he said. 'In Republican circles, we’ve always feared that Barack would become a rock star of American politics.' Still, Dillard was gracious. 'Obama is an extraordinary man,' he said. 'His intellect, his charisma. He’s to the left of me on gun control, abortion. But he can really work with Republicans.' Dillard and Obama have co-sponsored many bills."

The New Yorker has great writing, and these articles are, to me, frank assessments of Obama's character.  If you want to know who he is, you might want to read them, but I will provide some key excerpts.

The article above references his direct involvement with faith-based community organizations, easily explaining his support of such an approach:

"Fired with political idealism, he decided to become a community organizer. He wrote to organizations all over the United States, and finally got one reply, from Chicago. He moved there, going to work for a tiny, church-based group that was trying to help residents of poor South Side neighborhoods cope with a wave of plant closings. It was a humbling, exhausting, and only rarely edifying job; Obama stuck with it for three years."

Obama left organizing to attend Harvard Law School, and in 1990 became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.  He taught at The University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. 

"Teaching keeps you sharp,” Obama said. “The great thing about teaching constitutional law"—his subject—"is that all the tough questions land in your lap: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action. And you need to be able to argue both sides. I have to be able to argue the other side as well as Scalia does. I think that’s good for one’s politics.”

unhappy supporters are nothing new:

"...This is a regular theme with Obama: supporters who disagree with him. The two big Chicago daily papers both endorsed him enthusiastically in the primary, even though they disagreed with him on major issues—his opposition to the war in Iraq and, in the case of the Tribune, his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement."

From a May 2007 New Yorker: "The Conciliator":

"Obama is always disappointing people who feel that he gives too much respect or yields too much ground to the other side, rather than fighting aggressively for his principles. ...the writer Samantha Power, who has worked for Obama on foreign policy, says, “Standing on one side of the room with his arms folded is just not his M.O.”

"...his natural instinct is not dividing the baby in half—it’s looking for areas of convergence. This is part of who he is really deep down, and it’s an amazing skill. It’s not always the right skill: the truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle. But I think at this moment America is in a situation where we agree much more than we think we do. I know this from polling data—we feel divided in racial terms, religious terms, class terms, all kinds of terms, but we exaggerate how much we disagree with each other. And that’s why I think he’s right for this time.” Even when he was very young, Obama was scornful of, as he puts it, “people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.”

"Obama seems to be a true legislation nerd. When he talks about the maneuvering it took to line up the state’s prosecutors behind [a progressive police interrogation] videotape bill, and to keep the police associations neutral, his eyes narrow in pleasure. “You can’t always come up with the optimal solution, but you can usually come up with a better solution,” he said over lunch one afternoon. “A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence.” He nodded. Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” was playing in the background. “Or a good piece of music,” he said. “Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‘Huh. It works. It makes sense.’ That doesn’t happen too often, of course, but it happens.”

Obama in "Testing the Waters" (transcript of an interview with The New Yorker in November 2006, right before he decided to run for President):

"We are at an interesting moment in our political history, because I think that we have gone through a cycle, of maybe fifteen years, twenty years, in which...it feels as if many of the battles of the sixties have been refought, over and over again, and the cast of characters who were involved have taken a lot of the frameworks of the sixties—what it means to be a conservative, what it means to be a liberal—and just gone at it. And the country’s been very polarized and very divided as a consequence. And you do get a sense that there’s this hunger for a different kind of politics, one that hopefully is, from my perspective, at least, is strongly progressive, and recognizes the need for government to play a role in broadening opportunity for people, but that scrambles some of the old categories, and is less embedded in some of these old battles. And that, I think, is an enormous opportunity. I think that is an enormous opportunity particularly for Democrats."

"The Relaunch" The New Yorker, November 2007:

"Obama is not the most liberal candidate in the race, so he’s not defining his boldness strictly in ideological terms but, rather, as a sort of anti-politics that prizes truthtelling above calculation. When I asked him about this new tack, he seemed supremely confident. “I’ve been an observer of politics for two and a half decades, and what I’ve seen is that Democrats have not been able to move their agenda through Washington,” he said. “They have not been able to get the American people to embrace their domestic agenda, and they have been constantly on the defensive when it comes to their foreign-policy agenda. And it seems to me that, you know, if you’re not getting the outcomes you want, you might want to try something different.”

Now you have fewer excuses for not knowing who this guy is.  I'm betting that his presidency will be a different beast than we are used to, and I'm ready.

New Yorker authors quoted:  William Finnegan, Larissa MacFarquhar, David Remnick, and Ryan Lizza