Barack Obama isn’t your run-of-the-mill candidate. He’s an emissary from the future.

To embrace sustainability, people need to be sensitive not only to where we are, but also to where we’re headed. Take climate change: If you can’t look beyond the present, it’s a non-issue. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what it is for many people.

Until recently our politics have reflected our cultural inability to look forward. With the current presidential campaign, however, this pattern may finally be changing. For perhaps the first time in our history, the future is a key factor shaping the voters’ decision-making process.

More precisely, it is the future incarnate that is shaping their decision. Barack Obama embodies the future. He speaks to people of the future, and he speaks to them from the future. He is a bridge, an improbably talented politician doing skilled work in the here-and-now, and also a man whose message is, "I am the face of tomorrow."

People react to politicians for various reasons and on many levels. We definitely respond to who we imagine them to be; we may even respond at times to who they actually are. We put them to the test: We want them to make us feel safe, comfortable and hopeful. Winners have images people can attach to. Ronald Reagan was our ruddy, kindly uncle. Bill Clinton was smart and charming, with a touch of the devil about him. George Bush was the guy we’d have a beer with.

The future hasn’t really entered into this mix -- until now. How people feel about Obama reflects, among other things, how they feel about the future that is crashing with hurricane force into their lives.

It’s been the rule for our presidential candidates to have their psyches firmly planted in the present. With Obama, this familiar baseline is dissolved. He is post -- well, he’s “post” a lot of things.

For starters, and most visibly, he is post-Caucasian. Power is shifting to darker-skinned people. Globally China is ascendant. In the U.S., the Latino and Asian populations will almost double by 2050 as a percentage of the total population. Whites will be a minority (47 percent), compared to the current 67 percent figure. Barack’s face is a freeze-frame from the future.

Obama is also post-tribal. For hundreds of years, our world view has been limited and provincial. Us vs. them, Yankees vs. Red Sox, my country right or wrong. Politicians defy this mindset at their peril, which is a big reason our political discourse is so banal. We’re good and they’re bad. We’re right (or left) and they’re wrong. And so on.

This world view made sense -- and was, indeed, inevitable -- when all our knowledge came from the tribe. Now, however, information comes to us from sources far beyond these enclaves. This has produced a divide in our culture and often in our psyches, too. We’re still tribal, but we’re also global (or “world-centric”) and growing more so all the time. The result: a strange brew of old-style tribal politics-as-usual, mixed with a growing readiness to entertain and assimilate foreign points of view.

Obama reflects this division in a way that tilts considerably more toward the world-centric. He plays tribal politics, and he plays them to win (hence the familiar, if exaggerated, charge that he’s an "old-style Chicago politician"). At the same time -- and some see paradox in this -- he’s comfortable acknowledging that opposition views can have merit.

This readiness was on display during the first presidential debate with his repeated acknowledgement that “John is right.” People’s response to this depended on their world view. Tribalists saw it as a sign of weakness -- the beta dog was going belly-up. Globalists found it refreshingly mature.

Finally, Obama is post-modern. What I mean by this much-abused term is this: Obama integrates competing reality tunnels inside his psyche. As we’ve seen, he’s strongly tribal and strongly post-tribal too. His faith is a uniquely post-modern combination of a belief in Christ and secular humanism. His views on race are similarly nuanced.

One of the first rules of theatrical improvisation is, never say “but” when you can say “yes and.” This is because “but” negates while “and” supports. Barack Obama is our ultimate “yes and” candidate. He is black and he is white. He is tribal and world-centric. He understands black and white anger, and he’s transcended both. He’s got that old-time religion and the new-time religion. He’s got one foot in the present and the other in the future.

I believe this goes a long way toward explaining Obama’s appeal. He integrates multiple viewpoints into a new and higher-level mix, and he does so in ways that are new to national politics.

In this way, too -- as a man who can cope with complexity -- Obama is a man of the future.

These same qualities also explain why many people are frightened of Obama. The future can be a scary place.

He is not a “visionary politician” in our usual understanding of the term. His policies aren’t especially visionary, with the exception of his commitment to green jobs. In another sense, though, he is visionary, for this reason: simply by being who he is, he reveals possibilities.

The container, not the contents, are what’s relevant here. By virtue of his mixed blood and multi-faceted personality, Barack Obama embodies a world that is coming into being: a complex, post-tribal, rainbow-colored world. While it would be easy for us to be threatened by this world -- and many people are -- there’s something about Obama that tells us we needn’t worry. By all appearances, he is calm, contented and unflappable. These reassuring qualities tell people that Barack-World isn’t just a future place, it’s also a safe harbor, serene and coherent.

This is the ultimate Something About Barack. He doesn’t just show us the future. He offers us peace of mind there.

If he is elected, it will mean that a fundamental shift has taken place in the national psyche. It will tell us we’ve grown more comfortable with looking toward the future. It will say we’ve gotten more adept at accepting the world as it is and as it will be … and that we may finally be ready to tackle in earnest the challenge of sustainability.