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The eight profiled candidates have double-digit support in the latest national USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

Political skills

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., learned grass-roots political organizing in Chicago, as both a civil rights lawyer and director of the Developing Communities Project, which worked with the poor and families whose breadwinners had lost jobs in the declining steel industry. He also served as a state senator from 1997 to 2004, where he earned a reputation for bipartisanship.

In his biography, "Obama: From Promise to Power," David Mendell portrays Obama as committed to making a difference, occasionally cocky and thin-skinned in private, and a man in a hurry.

To the man who introduced him to organizing and grass-roots politics in Chicago's tough South Side in the mid-1980s, Obama "was extremely idealistic."

Says veteran Chicago organizer Jerry Kellman: "He identified very much with those who were on the outside of things."

Obama's idealism soon met street reality, and some viewed him as an interloper lacking in the authentic experiences of the poor he represented. He upset some leaders in Chicago's black community by challenging or confronting established leaders. That included a 2000 primary challenge of Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., which Obama lost badly.

Kellman said in a Dec. 4 interview that as a community organizer, "Barack was effective, and people who had something to protect in terms of turf, in terms of an established power base, would look for ways to discredit him. And the best way to discredit him was to portray him as an outsider."

But both Kellman and Mendell describe an Obama who eventually became more pragmatic, more accepted and, in 2004, triumphant in one of the most effective first steps on the national stage in American political history.

Obama became a protege and key ally of Illinois Senate President Emil Jones.

In a Nov. 16 interview with Gannett News Service, Jones described the young Obama as a "very effective legislator" who gathered bipartisan support for legislation "by working with legislators and getting to know them and not being dogmatic in debate, even though their views may have been different."

Jones saw similar political instincts when Obama said in a debate in July that he would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela.

Obama's critics, most notably Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., called his answer naive. The implication: that Obama's grandiose "let's talk it out" vision might end up with him caving in to or being used for propaganda purposes by enemies of the United States.

"I am not afraid of losing a propaganda battle with some petty dictator," Obama told a University of Virginia audience in October.

Obama — who's been in the Senate less than three years — faces Clinton and a field of Democrats who have much longer resumes on everything from health care policy to the Middle East. His relative freshness helps him drive home that he is the true change candidate in 2008.

"I have to point out there are a couple of guys named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who had two of the longest resumes in Washington, and they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation," Obama says.

Communication skills

The nation was introduced to Barack Obama when he gave a dynamic speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. He focused on his story — an update of Horatio Alger — recounting the different worlds of his white mother from Kansas and his black father from Kenya. His father, Obama said, had grown up herding goats and going to school in a tin-roof shack.

That speech foreshadowed some of the style and substance voters would be seeing more of: his message of inclusiveness and his self-effacing humor, referring to himself as the "skinny kid with a funny name."

Obama often says his wife, Michelle, a Chicago native and like him a graduate of Harvard Law School, keeps him humble and in check.

Obama's campaign rallies are designed to pump up a rock-star persona, with thumping rock-and-roll and R&B, from Dave Matthews to Gnarls Barkley, aimed at often-youthful crowds. Obama calls out faces in the crowd, laughs at his own jokes and works rope lines with a Bill Clintonesque vigor. Lean and at ease roaming the stage, the 46-year-old's baritone voice invites audiences to participate, and individuals offer shout-outs such as, "We love you, Obama."

Along the way, Obama has picked up many celebrity backers, none more powerful than media mogul Oprah Winfrey. Her recent rallies for Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina drew thousands of people.

Obama's dialect sometimes reflects his audiences. Speaking in Manning, S.C., in November he took on the cadence of a Southern preacher that had not been evident in an intense debate in Philadelphia just a few nights before.

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