When Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois appears here today for Sheldon Whitehouse’s Senate campaign, many who hear him will be hoping they’re listening to a future president. The Senate’s lone black member, 45, is only a first-termer but is a gifted orator, a drawing card for Democratic candidates around the country and adored like a rock star.

The memo on media arrangements for a $50-a-person Whitehouse fundraiser at Rhode Island College’s recreation center — credentials, camera locations, etc. — is nearly as detailed as for a presidential visit.

On the phone the other day, Obama ruled out trying for president in 2008 and nicely deflected a question about the burden on him of expectations that some day he will run. “It’s a high-class problem to have,” he said, and other people face tougher challenges. “A burden is when, you know, you’re laid off your job or you don’t have health insurance and your kids get sick.”

One reason Obama was looking forward to being here is that his brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, is Brown University’s new basketball coach. After the 5:30 RIC event and a 6:30 $1,000 Whitehouse/Democratic Party fundraiser at the home of Jack and Sara McConnell, Obama speaks at 9 at Brown’s Salomon Center, a speech open to the public free of charge.

Obama hosted an Aug. 7 Chicago fundraiser that brought Whitehouse more than $50,000.

Obama says Republican Lincoln Chafee is a decent guy, but the election will be “a referendum on the Republican leadership in Congress.” He says Chafee is unable, and the GOP Congress unwilling, to hold President Bush accountable for bad decisions, and he decried a failure to move ahead on issues such as health care.

Chafee often parts company with Mr. Bush and the Republican line. But Obama says, “He does not break on that first vote to determine who’s going to be the leader of the Senate.”

Rhode Islanders hear this every day from Whitehouse: Have to elect a Democrat, have to take control of the Senate. But doesn’t this run counter to the eloquent message of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech? You remember: “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states. Red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. . . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes.”

Isn’t the 2006 Obama/Whitehouse message a call to divide America into blue and red? Obama told me, “The Republican Party has changed so drastically. It’s been hijacked by a group of absolutists and ideologues that are unrecognizable from the days of John Chafee. The whole Eastern Republican Party — [Clifford] Case, [Jacob] Javits — they would not know this party. They would not recognize what had happened. So the problem is not the Republican Party per se. The problem is this particular direction this administration and the current congressional leadership have taken the country in. That’s what needs to be reversed.”

He added, “I look forward to the day when you have thoughtful moderation on all sides, but that’s not who’s running Washington. Lincoln Chafee is not running Washington right now.” He said Chafee “is enabling a party that is acting contrary to what the vast majority of people in Rhode Island believe in.”

Polls increasingly suggest that this message is working for Whitehouse, and you wonder how or if Chafee can stop it.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.