Despite the unremarkable past of its current resident, the White House has often been occupied by those who bring extraordinary life stories with them. The man from Hope. The cowboy movie star. The war hero. That Barack Obama's candidacy has been fueled by his own biography should therefore come as no surprise. Obama certainly hasn't been afraid to tell his tale. From his 2004 DNC convention address to the stump speech he bangs out today, we hear the details: the half-Kenyan, half-Kansan who became the first African-America to…oh, you know the rest. It's already history. Yet Obama's story is different.

It can't be neatly categorized away or seen as the life of a stock character. There's the childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, the drug use, the brilliant scholarship, the community activism—Obama, unlike previous presidents, can't be pinned down to a single word. I've never met anyone precisely like him, and I don't think anyone else has either (except, yes, of course, Obama's friends). Yet in this day and age, chances are most of us can relate to the lack of easy definition surrounding Obama.

The specifics of his life story are unfamiliar, but the broad contours are common. As I began to explain in a piece that appeared in Politico last week, that may be the heart of his appeal.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the noted Princeton thinker, has written at length about something he calls "cosmopolitanism." Obama may be cosmopolitanism's first national torch bearer. His story is the cosmopolitan story. Many people shudder upon hearing the term, thinking it entails a lonely moral relativism. Yet Appiah endorses it as a wise, and perhaps necessary, way of living in our globalized world. And throughout has campaign, so has Barack Obama.

The cosmopolitanism of Obama and Appiah is not rootless, nor is it valueless. Appiah tells us to "take your roots with you" as we go out into the broader, borderless world. Its fundamental value is this: "Everybody matters," as Appiah put it in a 2006 Times Magazine piece. And they matter not merely as members of a broader social identity—although such identities matter too—but as individuals working to fulfill their unique capacity for achievement. The 2004 DNC address that catapulted Obama into the stratosphere asserted the same thing. He argued then, as he argues now, that the "red" and "blue" vision of the pundit class obscures the fact that "We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states." In other words, we have individuals leading lives enormously more complicated than simple explanations would give them credit for. Obama, in this telling, is living the most complicated life of all: the "skinny kid with a funny name," as he describes himself, is a major political figure, because he successfully transcended such categorization. He stands in then for anyone who's lived a similarly complex, category-defying life; hence his position as cosmopolitanism's torchbearer.

Obviously, not everyone—and not every American—will embrace cosmopolitanism, and to pretend otherwise is foolish. "Cosmopolitans," writes Appiah in that same Times article, "think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by them all. So we hope and expect that different people will embody different values." Sound familiar? Obama has not called for any sweeping change in America's value system. He is, indeed, respectful of all cultures, and speaks of the need to "disagree without being disagreeable." This is vintage Appiah; it's also the complete opposite of George W. Bush. It's a call for a more civilized political discussion. Admittedly, there's a scent of conservatism at work here, and that makes some people who vote in Democratic primaries uncomfortable. An aversion to confrontation? What of the fighting, aggressive populism of John Edwards? Or Howard Dean? Or even Al Gore? How will an Obama stand up to the Republicans?

But when looked at as part of a cosmopolitan approach to politics, Obama's attitude makes sense even to this committed liberal Democrat. He's calling for a level of mutual respect in America that both the left and the right have lacked for some time. This isn't because Obama is a man of the right, or even the center. His call is fundamental to his cosmopolitan values, which stress individualism, and our ability to be different. "We d not have to deal decently with people from other cultures and traditions in spite of our differences; we can treat them decently, humanely, through our differences," writes Appiah in "Cosmopolitan Patriotism."

You can't get anything done if you lack the most fundamental respect for those you disagree with. As we've seen, they'll just filibuster you, and you'll just filibuster them back. But if you respect everyone's differences, and your differences come to represent everyone the differences that define the nation—well, then you might be able to achieve the mantle of leadership to which you aspire. And your story, impossibly complicated, infinitely layered, becomes the new American story.