Some clue to how he might approach that job might be found in The Audacity of Hope (Crown, $25). The phrase comes from his electrifying 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, which for most Americans was their first look at the junior senator from Illinois.

Audacity is a book less about policy than vision, i.e., a different and more idealistic way of framing a nation that lately has seemed split along seams of red and blue. And never mind that red and blue are too small, too simplistic, too limited, to encompass the complexity of human lives.

As Obama puts it in one striking passage: "I imagine the white Southerner who growing up heard his dad talk about niggers this and niggers that but who has struck up a friendship with the black guys at the office and is trying to teach his own son different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn't see why the son of a black doctor should get admitted into law school ahead of his own son. Or the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of those buildings as he is of the bankers who won't give him a loan to expand his business.

There's the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager's abortion and the millions of waitresses and temp secretaries and nurse's assistants and Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath every single month in the hope that they'll have enough money to support the children that they did bring into the world."

It's a paragraph you cannot imagine from any other politician, if only because it acknowledges the humanity on both sides of some of the vexing questions of our time. More to the point, it acknowledges that human lives and, therefore, human challenges, are complex and often contradictory, that there are truths beyond dogma and that sometimes, the other side has a point. Suggest to Obama that all this makes him a politician willing to split the difference, to seek the middle ground, and he will disagree.

He'll tell you he's a Democrat and he has certain "core principles" upon which he will not compromise. What you see in him, he says, is not centrism so much as just a willingness to listen to the other guy. Something we don't do much anymore.

Maybe people want leaders who listen again. Maybe that's what it means that faces change when they see Obama's image on a book. Maybe that's the reason somebody calls him "the real thing" in the same tone of voice you'd use for found gold. He will allow that he's gratified at the idea he might help inspire people to listen. "Because I do think that our politics over the last decade, at least, has been small . . . oftentimes petty.

And I think people are weary of that.

I think we saw a little of that in last Tuesday's election. We had all the negative ads and the slash-and-burn tactics seemed to have been rejected or at least were not as effective as they have been in the past. But, " he adds without irony, "I think people are still looking for what the next thing is."