In David Remnick’s biography The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, a picture emerges of someone who, even during his years of self-described “adolescent rebellion,”¹¹ was still, according to Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental College, “too sophisticated, too smooth somehow.”¹²

According to Lisa Jack, another friend from the time, he was “a hot, nice, everything-going-for-him dude.”¹³ Everywhere he went, people commented on his looks, his self-composure. When Michelle Robinson first set eyes on him in 1989, Remnick says, he was wearing a sports jacket, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and her first thought was “Oh, here you go. Here’s this good-looking, smooth-talking guy.”¹⁴ Obama carried the hero’s unconscious air of being chosen.

In 1995, though, Obama didn’t even make the front cover of his own memoir. When Dreams from My Father came out, it featured two black-and-white photographs of the black and white sides of his family, along with a drawing of a rural Kenyan scene. It was a sensitively told story about the author’s mixed-race family and his coming of age that sold modestly. It wasn’t until the reprint in 2004 that the focus shifted. Obama was a public figure by then, touted as a future president and about to become, at the age of 43, the only black senator in the United States.

Mine is the UK edition of the reprint, which has a large photograph of him on the front cover. Against the roaring sea, he stands, brows furrowed, arms folded, staring into the middle-distance. It’s the dynamic, reassuring pose of a superhero, held in check by a tiny stoop of the back which suggests not bad posture—too many hours in the library—but a measure of wariness. He looks to his right, almost behind himself. At his back, time’s winged chariot hurries near. He’s impatient for the future. Or maybe the photographer just wanted to make his ears look smaller. The effect, anyway, is of hope. The waves of history that roll unnoticed past most of us are stilled in his presence.

“Once did people say God when they looked out upon distant seas,” wrote Nietzsche, “now, however, I have taught you to say Superman.”¹⁵