FOR MOST OF 2008, I'VE NURTURED deep-seated reservations about Barack Obama. Thanks to the McCain-Palin campaign, I've learned to appreciate what he has to offer this country. ¶ The reservations remain. I consider Obama a genius at self-promotion through selective "self-disclosure," a brilliant and ambitious politician who knew, at least from the time he left Harvard Law School, that he would end up exactly where he is now, and an opportunist who blithely used people, positions and institutions to make that happen as quickly as possible. ¶ I reject as pandering Obama's claim that his campaign to get himself elected president is all about us. I cringe to recall his story that a long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright required something like accepting a loving but flawed family member. I'm troubled by his inflation of his state and national legislative accomplishments. And I'm stunned by Obama's protest that knowing when to call a fetus human is beyond his pay grade. I consider that a facile way to avoid taking a clear position on an especially divisive issue. ¶ But my reservations pale in comparison with what the Republicans expect you and me to believe. John McCain has kept asking who Obama really is; McCain's campaign has answered that he's a dangerous man: ready to surrender in Iraq, unconcerned about the welfare of our troops, ready to call them killers. Sarah Palin has been proclaiming to her fans that Obama is not their kind of American. Noting that he has been friendly with a 1960s "domestic terrorist," she insinuates that he "pals around" with a whole lot of them. And so, not surprisingly, McCain recently has been taken aback by supporters who believe Obama really is a radical -- or a Muslim in Christian clothing. All this is a deliberate attempt to win an election by touching something deep and dark in the American psyche, by inviting the ignorant, the narrow-minded and the resentful to demonize the "other." Obviously, that is just what some have been aching to hear. Given the negative reaction of many, the attempt might be discontinued. But its poison is out there and should be confronted.

So, speaking as one of his previously hesitant supporters, I'm here to say that I think I know Barack Obama, and that he is the exact opposite of what we've been hearing.

As the highly educated, professionally successful and politically committed son of an American mother and a Kenyan father, Obama is an outstanding 21st-century example of the increasingly diversified American dream.

As a child of a child of the '60s, he exhibits a chastened form of that decade's idealism and hopefulness but none of its rage, and none of its sense that institutions must be turned upside down to prepare for the future. He does demonstrate a typically American conviction that whatever our national challenges and conflicts, we can overcome them by listening to and working with each other.

Obama's religious affiliation is one typically American version of Christian faith. I'd call it yuppie evangelical Christianity, chosen for the comforts of forgiveness and community. It's a form of Christianity, by the way, that includes both Protestants and Catholics.

Seeing Obama this way, I still have issues with him. I'm glad he came out against the war on Iraq even before it started. But I wish he had gone beyond calling that war dumb. I wish he'd condemned it as immoral.

And I'm glad he could belong to Pastor Wright's congregation without contracting Wright's occasional anti-Americanism -- but I wish he had picked up at least a little of the pastor's intensity, and a lot of the "liberation theology," including "black theology," that supports that intensity.

But here's the thing. Not only is Obama not a radical Muslim, he's not even a radical Christian. Not only is he not a terrorist, he's not even a maverick. He's what George W. Bush once wanted to be: a uniter, not a divider.

And that's why he'll get my vote in November.

Frank Reilly, who lives in St. Paul, is a prolife Democrat and Catholic theologian.