It’s been a good couple of weeks for the Obama candidacy. In addition to gaining a lead in Iowa, Obama also picked up two significant endorsements, at least in my book. The first was from tireless copyright-legal philosopher and genuine information-age freedom lover Larry Lessig, who offered his old friend a thoughtful and unabashed thumbs up.

The next came in the form of the December Atlantic Monthly cover story written by conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. The piece is an extended profile of Obama that positions him as the best way out of the destructive politics of the past thirty years—which have been an extension, according to Sullivan, of the larger Baby Boomer culture wars and personified this election round by Giuliani on one side and Clinton on the other. By birth and experience, Sullivan says, Obama stands outside all of that Boomer wrangling. He’s not fighting to win the argument over Vietnam. He’s not shamed by any role he may have played in the declining liberal fortunes during the era of Reagan triumphalism. He can make pragmatic agreements with conservatives without a sense of betrayal to a cause. As Sullivan puts it: “He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe…. He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.”

Sullivan is great, developing ideas that I, for one, vaguely felt about Obama but hadn’t shaped into full-on positions—ideas, for example, about Obama’s religiosity and the importance of his campaigning for office now and not later. I’ve excerpted some choice bits on Obama’s special bipartisan foreign policy appeal, just as a sampler, after the jump.

How has a black, urban liberal gained far stronger support among Republicans than the made-over moderate Clinton or the southern charmer Edwards? Perhaps because the Republicans and independents who are open to an Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist terrorism. It isn’t about his policies as such; it is about his person. They are prepared to set their own ideological preferences to one side in favor of what Obama offers America in a critical moment in our dealings with the rest of the world. The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

[....] If you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.