Everyone talks about Barack Obama's effortless charisma, his communications abilities. But earlier in his career, Obama projected as a smug, Ivy League elitist who made John Kerry look like a soul brother, writes Edward McLellan in Salon. And the best thing to happen to Obama? Losing.

Some excerpts: (free with a day pass)

As a correspondent for the Chicago Reader, I covered Obama's 2000 campaign to unseat Bobby Rush, the ex-Black Panther who's been a Democratic congressman from Chicago's South Side since 1993. It's the only election Obama has ever lost. As even one of his admirers put it, "He was a stiff." You think John Kerry looked wooden and condescending on the campaign trail? You should have seen this kid Obama. He was the elitist Ivy League Democrat to top them all. Only after losing that race, in humiliating fashion, did he develop the voice, the style, the track record and the agenda that have made him a celebrity senator, and a Next President.  ...

Obama returned to Springfield a loser. The week of his defeat, he sat down to his regular poker game at the home of state Sen. Terry Link, a fellow Democrat from the Chicago suburbs. The same words were on the lips of every pol at that table: I told you so. Obama didn't need to hear it. He knew he'd blundered.

"He made a lot of mistakes, and he learned," Link says now. "He forgot who he was. That he's Barack. He tried to sell to a crowd who wasn't buying."

Around that time, Obama also had a soul-searching drink with Miller, the Capitol Fax publisher. He was upset about the way Miller had characterized him, but "he took that criticism the right way," Miller remembers six years later, "and he could have taken it the wrong way."

"A lot of politicians, they know that they're smart," Miller says. "They know that they're capable. It messes with their minds. Politics is not a game of qualifications. It's a game of winning. That congressional campaign really showed that to him."

On the state Senate floor, Miller saw a more focused, more collegial Obama, who began to take his work -- and his fellow legislators -- seriously. Using his experience in constitutional law, he passed legislation to curtail racially motivated traffic stops and to require police to videotape murder confessions. He sponsored legislation that added 20,000 children to the state's health insurance program.

"I just can't emphasize enough how much this guy became respected, and how transformative it was," Miller says. "By 2004, he just had this aura about him."

Even black legislators, who had resented Obama in his early years, were won over. He earned the respect of Trotter, who watched his fellow senator mature from a résumé in search of an office to an effective legislator. Trotter was so impressed, he now sits on Obama's presidential exploratory committee.

"I wouldn't say losing humbled him," Trotter says, swatting away a term used by many of his white colleagues. "Barack is a competitor, and being a competitor, you don't like to lose. When he came back, he really immersed himself in the process. He learned he had to get an agenda, to get issues he felt passionately about. He also learned some of those 'get-along' qualities you need to get a bill passed. He has proven himself to me that he can take advice. He's not a one-man operation."