When Sen Barack Obama started his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, opinion leaders in the US thought he was a ranked outsider. When he won a couple of primaries, they brushed it aside as freak victories. Of course, from the beginning of the process, he was thought as a man who possessed the Kennedy-like charisma to lure the crowd, but lacked anything concrete-including a well-oiled campaign machinery-to upset Sen Hilary Clinton.

Well-oiled it may be, but Hilary’s campaign, has started to run out of steam after the Super Tuesday. They say she is paying the penalty for not having a plan B to carry out after she had failed to provide the knockout punch during the Super Tuesday primaries. Now the Hilary campaign seem to have realised that the momentum Obama has gathered in the last few weeks has been too strong to be halted by anything.

Another aspect of this historical primary is the fact that it is decided more on personality than on policies. Obama campaign is successful in portraying him as an alternative to the status quo. Irrespective of his actual intentions, he is also successfully shown as an anti-war candidate, who professes reconciliation rather than hostility, a message the war weary public has started to like.

Election, political observers would agree, is won by style than by substance. So, how much ever Hilary may speak of her policies, she is discovering to her chagrin that it is unlikely to make an impact, as Obama is winning the approval of many by his sheer personality.

Experts in the US say clashes of personalities — almost to the extent of excluding policies — are virtually unknown in their country. Sure, personalities are part of the equation. But their appeal also depends on their plans for running the country or how they propose to solve its intractable problems. They are finding, at least in Barack Obama's case, that lack of policy or “Short on details” has virtually no impact on his popularity.

Last year, Fox news had reported that Obama studied in a Madrasa when his mother and step father took him to Indonesia. There were attempts to make issues out of his open admission about smoking cocaine, the paternal grandmother in Kenya who turned out not to be the real mother of his father and, recently the photograph of him dawning the Somali elder’s robes during his visit to Kenya in 2006. Nothing seems to have hurt his popularity.

Things like Obama’s seemingly murky association with a Chicago property developer and his comments that he, as President of the US, will have no hesitations in sending US troops into Pakistan to fight the Taliban without Islamabad’s permission, experts say, would have been enough to end the campaign of a candidate, especially given the astuteness of his opponent in matters like foreign policy. But, the harder the media works to derail Obama, the stronger he appears in his progress towards securing the Democratic nomination.

Whatever may be the reason, Obama has proved that a tinge of brown in the skin isn’t a disadvantage even in a country that is yet to reconcile with race differences. Like Tiger Woods, who has become a Golfing legend in a country that had “Whites only” Golf clubs until recently, we are bearing witness to a leader who is set out to change the political landscape of the country that still influences the world.