Dharmaruci evidently hasn’t been swept away by Obamania as I have, so his post on Obama as “The Medicine Man” is a clearer-headed one than any you will find in this column:

The man creates a very strong impression on people. One of the strengths of astrology is that it can stand outside of strong impressions and look at the chart as an entity in itself, and reflect that back to the person. Whatever time he was born, he has Sun in Leo square to Neptune. And in the 1.06 chart (and for much of the day) he has Moon square to Pluto, and I want to run with this. This is HOT. The 2 most powerfully transformative planets – Pluto and Neptune – in challenging relationships with the 2 planets most central to the personality, the Sun and Moon.

He’s working at a heat that most of us could not withstand. Squares are very challenging and very creative, if you can handle them. And has the 2 most challenging squares of all. What you need to get them right is to have a healthy and steady Sun and Moon, to be aware of yourself, so that you can then be a channel for something bigger that has its own purposes. Obama is a channel, the squares give a strong dynamism and responsiveness in relation to the collective needs and desires of the USA. People sense this very strongly: here is someone deeply tuned into the collective.

The most powerful leaders will tend to have this. Hitler, for example, had the Pluto-Neptune conjunction of his time unaspected in his chart, in his case making him an undiscriminating channel for the desires of the collective: the lack of aspects meant this ability was out of control, and the darker desires of the German people had just as much say as the more creative desires.

So Obama also has this ability, he is a medium, a medicine man. He can be a focus for all the currents within the American nation, and in his case, because of the connection to his Sun and Moon, he can discriminate: something in him will tell him how to move all this forward, what steps to take that can unify and heal and move forward the nation AS A WHOLE. He is not just a Democrat: the outer planets address the entire collective that you are part of.

So I think that as he is at the moment, he can be trusted. Even though he lacks governmental experience, the outer planets will tell him what to do. But all the same, psychologically it is a knife edge that he walks on, it is a tightrope on which he is currently very sure-footed. More than most, he needs to keep his integrity, because the forces working through him are so strong. After say 6 years in Washington, how will he be faring? Because he is also an ordinary human being.

I love this take on Obama.

I will add my caveat, though that the 1:06 pm birthtime that DR uses has not been verified; it comes as a rumor from Frances McEvoy who has since died and cannot verify it, and the chart with this birthtime gives Obama a Scorpio ascendant. Because the ascendant is the part of the chart that we as viewers see, it is the easiest piece of the chart to guess. A Scorpio rising person is typically intense with a tendency towards being secretive and more concerned with amassing personal power than collaborating with others. And you will never see a Scorpio rising person with a smile plastered on their face like Obama has 99% of the time.

I’m working on a comprehensive post on Obama for my website that will put together some of the posts I’ve written here and incorporate some biographical data, but ALL of the anecdotal history of Obama’s career highlights his ability to reach across various viewpoints to build consensus. This seems quite obvious to me to be a Libra rising characteristic, which would mean a birth time around 11:30 am. This chart (which I can’t upload right now due to computer problems but will try to do soon) has a 10th house Sun which makes a lot of sense for Obama’s intense political aspirations, and an exact conjunction of the Sun to the Part of Fortune. But without any certainty of the birthtime, any discussion of houses is speculative.

update 2/26/08 at 7:00 am: Comments to this post suggest that my statement about Scorpio rising people not being big smilers is erroneous. I should point out that Obama, as a Leo, would have a great sense of humor and the opposition from Jupiter to his Sun, which bestows a great deal of confidence on him, also widens his sense of humor. Typically Scorpio rising also suggests someone who tends towards secrecy, and Obama is wide open with his personal life (some say a little too open). Unless Obama provides us with his birthtime, and til now he has not responded to queries, we may never know.