Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) took the initial step in a White House bid, announcing via his official site that he is filing a presidential exploratory committee.

As for what comes next?

“On February 10, at the end of these discussions, in my home state of Illinois, I’ll share my plans with my friends, neighbors and fellow Americans,” he said.

This surely has a lot of Democrats excited. After all, Barack Obama is fun to think about. But what does he actually stand for? Does anyone even know?

There’s no doubt he’s compelling. But is he the kind of man who could lead America, and is he ready for a national campaign of this nature? Democrats, and Republicans too, are curious about Obama - not merely about his allure, but about his voting record and where he’d try to lead the country if he were elected president.

According to MSNBC research, Obama’s record in his whole two years in the U.S. Senate and as an Illinois legislator shows him fitting snugly in the Democratic mainstream:

• Sympathetic to lower-income people
• Supportive of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on the right to get an abortion
• Supportive of phased withdrawal of troops in the Iraq war, but also of continual funding of those now there
• Wary about laws that might impose what he sees as an undue burden on minorities
• Eco-friendly enough to want to see certain places kept off limits to oil and gas exploration

His environmental record is of particular interest to those of us here at AfterW.org, who laud Al Gore for his work - past and present - in support of radical legislation, and pray that the Democratic nominee in 2008 will follow his lead.

Last March, Obama voted against a bill that would have paved the way to oil and gas exploration in part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In July, he voted to filibuster a bill that would have opened eight million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling.

But in determining where Obama fits in the political spectrum, there is perhaps no better evidence than the more important vote a Senator gets - confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee. When President George W. Bush named John G. Roberts Chief Justice of the United States in 2005, Obama was one of 22 dissenting votes.

In voting against Roberts, Obama aligned himself with the prominent West Coast and Northeast liberals in the party - Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton of New York. On the flip side, he was at odds with western and southern Democrats, most of whom who voted to confirm Roberts.

While he praised Roberts on numerous occasions, even going so far as to say he was sorely tempted to vote for him, Obama ultimately said he was skeptical of Roberts’ perspectives on how the world works and his empathy for the less fortunate.

“He has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” Obama said. “He seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination, and seemed dismissive of the concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.”

Perhaps because he is the child of a biracial marriage, Obama is especially concerned about government treatment of racial minorities. As a member of the Illinois state senate in 1999, he sponsored a bill to require police to compile statistics on the racial identity of all motorists they stop, a response to allegations that police stopped blacks more frequently.

In 2001 he voted against a bill in the Illinois legislature that would have allowed the death penalty to be imposed if a gang member committed murder “in furtherance of the activities of a gang.” Obama stated it would treat minorities unfairly, and that lawmakers were over-reacting to one incident in which gang members murdered a man in Chicago.

Obama also drew upon his unique background in supporting native Hawaiian self government. In 2005, Obama, who was born in Hawaii, backed the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, which would have allowed Native Hawaiians to set up their own governmental body to open government-to-government negotiations with the United States.

The bill limited eligibility to take part in this new government to the direct lineal descendants of “the aboriginal, indigenous, native people” who lived in Hawaiian Islands prior to 1893. The new governing body would “make sure that the Native Hawaiians are full members and not left behind as Hawaii continues to progress,” he urged.

But critics, such as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said it “would create a race-based and racially separate government for Native Hawaiians,” and filibustered it, establishing a 60-vote threshold Obama and others were not able to overcome.

As for the most controversial issue in America right now, the Iraq war, Obama has called for a gradual withdrawal of American troops. But at the same time, in a speech givenlast November, he left the door open for a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq.

He specified conditions under which the withdrawal could halted or delayed, such as if the parties in Iraq reach an effective political arrangement that stabilizes the situation and they offer us a clear and compelling rationale for maintaining certain troop levels, and if the U.S. believes that a further reduction would put American troops in danger.

Obama also made it clear that, for him, leaving Iraq did not mean leaving northern Iraq, the Kurdish region.

Obama said last week he was trying to figure out a way to pay for some operations in Iraq, but not for the additional 21,500 troops President Bush has ordered to go there. He has expressed that he wishes to avoid “a game of chicken” with the president.

“The big dilemma,” he said, is “trying to figure out what mechanism we can use to stop what I’m convinced is the wrong policy, without shortchanging the young men and women who’ve already been deployed.”

This is clearly a carefully constructed position that seems in character for a brilliant politician who has already gotten very far in his 10-year career as an elected official. But can he take it to the next level? Or will he Obama be subjected to repeated doubts about his experience and other attacks even his charisma and incredible talents cannot counter?