20 January 2009
President Barack Obama
Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, brings a life story unlike that of any previous U.S. leader. The biracial son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from the American heartland, Obama shot to national prominence with a well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, in which he said:
There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate from the state of Illinois that year. Just four years later, he clinched the Democratic nomination for the White House and won the presidential election against Republican candidate Senator John McCain.
The Early Years
Barack Obama’s parents came from vastly different backgrounds. His mother, Ann Dunham, was born and raised in small-town Kansas. After her family moved to the Hawaiian Islands, she met Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan scholarship student enrolled at the University of Hawaii. The two married in 1959, and on August 4, 1961, Barack Obama Jr. was born in Honolulu. Two years later, the senior Obama left his young family, first for graduate study at Harvard and then for a job as a government economist back in Kenya. Ann and Barack Sr. divorced, and the young Obama met his father again only once, at age 10.
When Obama was six years old, his mother remarried, this time to an Indonesian oil executive. The family moved to Indonesia, and Obama spent four years attending school in the capital city of Jakarta. He eventually returned to Hawaii and went to secondary school there while living with his maternal grandparents.
Obama left Hawaii to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He later moved to New York City and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University in 1983.
Called to Public Service
Obama began his career as a financial writer with an international consulting firm in New York, but left that job in 1985 and headed to Chicago. There, he worked as a community organizer for a coalition of local churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.
After three years of this work, Obama decided to attend Harvard Law School, where he distinguished himself by being elected the first African-American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review and graduating magna cum laude in 1991.
Obama returned to his adopted hometown of Chicago, where he practiced civil rights law, taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, worked on voter registration in Chicago to help Democratic candidates In 1992 he married Michelle Robinson, another Harvard Law graduate. Barack and Michelle Obama have two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.
Obama made his first run at elective office in 1996, winning a seat in the Illinois State Senate. His legislative accomplishments over the next eight years in the state senate included campaign finance reform, tax cuts for the working poor, and improvements to the state’s criminal justice system.
The National Stage
After an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Congress in 2000, Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004. He easily captured the Democratic nomination, winning a greater share of the vote — 53 percent — than his six opponents combined.
His speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, with its soaring, polished language on the need to transcend partisan divisions and its call for a “politics of hope” rather than a politics of cynicism, catapulted Obama into the national media spotlight. He went on to win handily in the Senate race that autumn, capturing an overwhelming 70 percent of the popular vote.
Running for President
The long Democratic primary election campaign of 2008, with elections or caucuses in all 50 U.S. states, was historic in several ways. African-American and women candidates had run for the presidency before, but this time the two front-runners were a woman and an African American.
The Obama camp’s innovative strategy of targeting states that used caucuses rather than primaries to select delegates and focusing on smaller states that traditionally voted Republican in the general election paid off; he clinched the Democratic Party nomination and went on to defeat Republican John McCain for the presidency.
An Obama Presidency
Barack Obama is the among the youngest U.S. presidents. Born toward the end of the 1946-1964 baby-boom generation, he is the first president to have come of age in the 1980s. The atmosphere in which he grew up was markedly different from the socially tumultuous 1960s that shaped the outlook of earlier baby boomers.
The New Yorker magazine’s Larissa MacFarquhar offered one theory on Obama’s noticeable appeal across traditional political lines. “Obama’s voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate,” she observed, “but he has always appealed to Republicans, perhaps because he speaks about liberal goals in conservative language.”
The Washington Post political columnist E.J. Dionne may have summed up perfectly the serendipitous confluence between Obama’s candidacy and the American zeitgeist when he wrote:
Change, not experience, was the order of the day. Sweep, not a mastery of detail, was the virtue most valued in campaign oratory. A clean break with the past, not merely a return to better days, was the promise most prized.
