WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Barack Obama, who admits getting a free ride from the press and winning his Senate seat only after his opponents self-destructed, is far less tested than his top Democratic rivals for the White House.

“Going into a presidential race having never really taken a punch is very problematic,” cautioned Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report.

Former Sen. John Edwards went through the long and grueling presidential campaign of 2004. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton helped guide her husband through two successful White House bids.

In contrast to these Democrats, Obama was elected to the Senate for the first time just more than two years ago.

He won after watching his top Democratic rival “flame out” because of an “unflattering divorce file,” Obama wrote in his memoir, “The Audacity of Hope.” Then his Republican opponent “was felled by a divorce scandal of his own,” he added.

“There was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune,” he acknowledged. “To political insiders, my victory proved nothing.”

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said that easy victory could come back to haunt the Illinois Democrat.

“A lack of experience in the hothouse of national campaigns is a problem for Obama,” he said. “He thinks he’s ready, but no one really is when that first feeding frenzy hits.

“Hillary, by contrast, is more than ready,” he added. “That may be her greatest advantage in the battle, other than money.”

Obama is also acutely aware of his status as a media darling.

“For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacy for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary of unusually — and at times undeservedly — positive press coverage,” he wrote. “No doubt some of this had to do with … my novelty as a black candidate with an exotic background.”

He added, “I’ve watched the press cast me in a light that can be hard to live up to.”

That coverage is likely to grow tougher as the campaign progresses and scrutiny of all candidates intensifies.

Meanwhile, Obama’s short tenure on the national stage has made him something of a political Rorschach test.

“I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” he observed. “As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”

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