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In one, Sarah Palin is seen as [heaven forbid] VP-in-waiting to presidential aspirant Republican John McCain, writes Graydon Carter, "who’s a 72-year-old hothead with high blood pressure, and one who has also suffered four instances of the most serious form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma. Not to get overly morbid here, but it bears mentioning that McCain’s father died at 70, and his grandfather at 61, both of heart attacks. That’s the worrying part...."

"Sarah Palin is pro gun, including semi-automatic weapons. Pro domestic drilling [which high school economics teaches to leave alone]. And pro indoor tanning, apparently. But she’s anti embryonic stem-cell research and anti-abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. She’s also anti-evolution. (And why is it that supporters of the theory of intelligent design are so often the ones who appear to have been most shortchanged in that department?) And she’s against comprehensive sex education for teens–a curious stance for a woman with a pregnant, unwed 17-year-old."

This other issue of Vanity Fair I’m so delighted to have has a story by Vanity Fair national editor Todd Purdum on the start of Barack Obama’s political life. "By the fall of 2002, Barack Obama had been in the Illinois state senate for six years. He was a member of the Democratic minority, representing a swath of Chicago’s South Side....

"Is he tough enough? That’s the question being asked of Barack Obama. To those who have known the candidate since boyhood, it’s not just those ‘dreams of my father’ that make Obama a contender, but also his mother’s daring, his grandmother’s grit, and his own relentless drive.

"A few months later Obama went to see Emil Jones Jr., the newly chosen state-senate president and the man who loomed as perhaps the most powerful black politician in Illinois ...They had first met in the mid-1980s, when Obama, as a community organizer on the far South Side. ...Jones had had to jockey for a place on the stage near the new mayor at a public event that Obama had helped plan.

"Jones... was wary of Obama, a freshly minted agitator from Columbia University. Obama and other community activists were the sort who used politicians as foils, ‘shunned them, more or less, I guess,’ Jones told me...in his office high above the city... Jones went on: ‘They were in-your-face types. I happened to see them out there one day. And I told them, I said, ‘Come on in the office.’

"A friendship was born. A decade later, after returning to Chicago with a law degree and the mantle of first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama won his own state senate seat, taking the place of an incumbent who had decided to run for Congress...Obama arrived in Springfield and told Jones, then the minority leader, that he wanted to ‘work hard.’ He promptly became Jones’s point person on a number of tricky issues, including ethics reform. Now, with Jones elevated to the senate presidency, Obama was approaching him with a cold-eyed proposal.

"‘After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later,’ Jones recalled, relishing the tale. ‘And he said to me, he said, ‘You’re the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er." Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: ‘And I told Barack, ‘You think I got a lot of pow-er now?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er.’ And I said, ‘What kind of pow-er do I have?’ He said, ‘You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor." Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. "I said to Barack, I said, ‘That sounds good!’ I said, ‘I haven’t even thought of that.’ I said, ‘Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?,’ and he said, ‘Yeah. Me.’ ‘We met a little later that day, and I said, ‘That sounds good. Let’s go for it.’

"This is not a story about the presidential horse race. It’s not about the policy positions of a freshman senator and candidate for national office. It’s about the enduring character of a boy and a young man, and how that character has emerged in adulthood. The Barack Obama who wrote so poignantly of adolescent alienation and the search for racial identity is the same Barack Obama who learned, the hard way, how to deal with the likes of Emil Jones Jr., a man whose cellphone ring tone is the theme from The Godfather. Obama’s good looks and soft-spoken willingness to ponder aloud some of the inanities of modern politics have masked the hard inner core and unyielding ambition that have long burned beneath the surface shimmer. He is not, and never has been, soft. He’s not laid-back. He’s not an accidental man. His friends and family may be surprised by the rapidity of his rise, but they’re not surprised by the fact of it.

"In The Audacity of Hope, whose publication in the fall of 2006 effectively turned what was first billed as a book tour into a march toward the New Hampshire primary, Obama cops a plea to the quintessential qualification for any presidential candidate: ‘A chronic restlessness, an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me.’ He has tried to turn this to his advantage. ‘I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington,’ he said in announcing that he would run for president. ‘But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.’

"Obama’s restlessness is a quality that would lead him to conclude, again and again, that the time had come to make a move–to take a chance, to aim higher–when others told him to wait his turn. Far more often than not, his timing has been right."