Al Qaeda attacked the West in Kenya, Bali and New York. Obama’s father was Kenyan. The senator was schooled partly in Indonesia. He attended college in New York. The parallels are strange. They can also be a source of the toughness married to intuition for which he still seeks complete expression. Nowhere in American history has the gulf between ideals and sordid practice been greater than on questions of race. It is precisely the gulf between high principle – not least habeas corpus – and unprincipled actions that has done the most damage to America’s image in recent years. Once again, Obama appears to bridge and reconcile. ‘We can’t entirely remake the world,’ he told me. ‘What we can do is lead by example.’