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He is like Jay Gatsby — sprung from his platonic conception of himself, an invented American, an ideal, an original design of black man as cool child of the U.S. vision and its enlightenment.

He is both inspiring Moses and the detached, unemotional, buttoned-down executive woven credibly into one personality. Think of Ronald Reagan with an incandescent Jeffersonian IQ.

Now with the votes counted and the global cheers subsided, the question becomes: What sort of Barack Obama will Americans and the rest of the world see in the White House a year from now? What, from those seemingly contradictory impulses, will emerge as the leadership style of the world's most powerful man?

While political scholars don't entirely agree on what they do see, concrete hints of the man's persona can be gleaned from the campaign trail and, perhaps more tellingly, from the speeches that have so inspired his fellow citizens.

There's a strong belief among political scientists that he won't have a long honeymoon and that the campaign oratory that captured the world might well become suspect. He is likely to be a very public president, reaching over the heads of Congress to appeal directly to the American people to achieve his objectives. His policies will be clearly defined. He will run a tight, cohesive White House ship.

And the president he most likely will be compared with is not the elitist intellectual Thomas Jefferson who in many ways he resembles, but the great communicator Ronald Reagan, who began his two terms in 1981 facing the same sort of economic upheaval confronting Mr. Obama but managed to stay connected to Americans, albeit by employing a lot of blue-sky political spin.

Ten weeks from assuming office, Mr. Obama, with his elusive personality hidden behind a mask of cool detachment, has been called the Rorschach blot politician, because everyone sees in him what they want to see.

Which may come to haunt him.

McGill University political scientist Harold Waller, an academic specialist on American political life, says Mr. Obama's greatest vulnerability is that he has raised the public's expectations for change so high — "You can see the reaction of people at the grassroots level" — that he can't deliver on them.

"If he is unable to deliver on those expectations there will be great disappointment, which will transfer into dissatisfaction with him."

University of Toronto political scientist Renan Levine, formerly of North Carolina's Duke University, believes Mr. Obama's presidential style will be to use his oratorical talents to speak directly to the American people about his political objectives, which will translate into public pressure on Congress.

Other scholars interviewed agreed the U.S. public has a large appetite for hearing from Mr. Obama and that he likely would take every opportunity to speak in public, to use his obvious appeal on television, perhaps to give interviews and hold news conferences such as yesterday's, where his performance was rather solemn. (It has been noted, in fact, that Mr. Obama can quickly turn off his campaign-platform sizzle and become rather stodgy and professorial in small groups.)

Political scientists also agreed that on the evidence of the superb efficiency of his campaign team, Mr. Obama would run a well-organized, effective White House, that his style in office would be calm and unruffled, and that his policies — unlike those of predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — would be clearly articulated.

York University political scientist Stephen Newman said the evidence from the campaign suggested strongly the White House would operate on a basis of strong loyalty to the president.

"I think Obama has been able to mobilize — and this is what makes his campaign look more like a movement — I think he has been able to mobilize people, I think he has been able to count on their loyalty. Over time it's difficult to maintain that, to control disgruntled people from speaking out.

"But you won't see that for a while, and you'll only see it if policies go screwy, or if Obama were to be seen as betraying the principles on which he campaigned — that he wants to reach out; no more politics as usual, whatever that means.

"He has demonstrated enormous leadership in running this campaign. And he's smart, not only in running the campaign but in the people he's surrounded himself with. And unlike the current occupant of the White House, he appears to be someone who actually listens to other people and is capable of making a judgment when people present him with ideas.

"It's nice to have a smart guy in the White House. The best leaders are people who are smart in this way. It's not so much book smart as practical intelligence, the ability to manoeuvre in pursuit of a goal. I think Obama has that."

What remains unknown is how effective he will be in setting the political agenda for his country and what skills he has for dealing with Congress.

The machinery of U.S. politics is dramatically different than it is in Canada, where the prime minister and cabinet hold virtually unchecked power (although somewhat constrained in a minority Parliament).

A U.S. president, to get legislative action on his agenda, has to do trade-offs with the agendas of powerful congressional leaders.

None of the political scientists interviewed foresaw Mr. Obama confronting a hostile or recalcitrant Congress with Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

But as Prof. Levine from the University of Toronto pointed out, none of the elected Democrats really owe anything to Mr. Obama. He had no long coattails that pulled them into office. Many of them outpolled him in their respective states. And the election wasn't so much about Democrats winning as it was about Republicans losing.

What other hints to Mr. Obama's persona?

Queen's University computer scientist David Skillicorn, who constructed a sociolinguistic program analyzing the U.S. presidential candidates' speeches for deception, said Mr. Obama's discourses show far more evidence of artifice than the words of Hillary Clinton or John McCain — more evidence that, to connect widely with voters, Mr. Obama presented a face that was not his own.

On the basis of his program, Prof. Skillicorn said, "We have no idea what kind of president Obama is going to be because everything he's said that's been public over the past year has been so far, apparently, from what he really believes that we simply have no ground for projecting. That was starting to become obvious to people watching the campaign towards the end."

The program uses the work of University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker to compare the different vocabularies people use when they advocate for something they believe in and for something they don't believe in.

The strongest indicator of deception is the use of first-person pronouns: People who are putting on a facade tend to say "we"; those who are being candid are more inclined to say "I." (This is especially revealing with men. When men say "we," it doesn't mean inclusiveness; it means an iron fist in a velvet glove.)

The use of "but" and "or" indicates candour because the speaker is trying to refine meaning. But the use of negative emotion words (there are about 80 of them) creating a targeted "other," and motion words (such as "going," "running") are deceptive because they divert attention from the substance of what a speaker is saying.

Prof. Skillicorn said that when he read transcripts of Mr. Obama's speeches he found them "very dusty."

"If you read over his speeches you find yourself wondering why do people get excited because I would be asleep. But of course it's not like that. When you hear him deliver, it's a different thing."

He said he also looked at Reagan speeches and found his level of spin higher than Mr. Obama's although more ideological and less abstract.

"My one prediction is that his approval ratings will drop like a stone some time over the next few months because it will become clear that he can't be all these things that everyone thinks he's going to be. He can't be in principle, but in the difficult situation the U.S. finds itself in, he can't be in practice either. And so I think there's going to be a lot of disillusionment."

For now it's Mr. Obama's moment in the sun, the man who like the Great Gatsby has chosen what kind of American he wants to be — who's no longer excluded from America's central identity but is suddenly the offshore guy who is the profound representative of his culture.

Like Corsican Napoleon for the French. And Macedonian Alexander the Great for the Greeks. And literary Irishmen everywhere.