Barack Obama
Barack Obama (born August 4, 1961) is a American politician from Chicago, Illinois. A Democrat and current state senator, Obama was the third African-American to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. A former law professor, he is currently running for the U.S. Senate. If successful, Obama would be only the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction (the two previous being Edward Brooke and Carol Moseley-Braun [1]).
Early life
Barack Obama was born at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. His parents were economist Barack Obama, Sr., of Kenya and S. Ann Dunham, a Honolulu resident who was born in Kansas. At the time of Obama's birth, both his parents were students at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His first name means "one who is blessed by God" in Swahili.
When Obama was two years old, the couple was divorced. His father eventually returned to Kenya and Obama saw him only once after that; he died in 1982. Ann Obama married another East-West Center student from Indonesia. The family then moved to Jakarta, where Obama's half-sister Maya was born (another half-sister, the daughter of Obama's father by a later marriage, lives in Nairobi). When Obama was ten, he returned to Hawaii under the care of his grandmother Madelyn Dunham. He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a prestigious academy that once taught the Hawaiian royal family. There he graduated with honors.
Obama reflected on his years in Hawaii and wrote, "The irony is that my decision to work in politics, and to pursue such a career in a big Mainland city, in some sense grows out of my Hawaiian upbringing, and the ideal that Hawaii still represents in my mind."
College and career
Upon finishing high school, Obama went on to study at Occidental College, then later Columbia University in New York City, majoring in political science. After graduation, he moved to Chicago and took up community organizing. He left Chicago briefly to study law at Harvard University, where he became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. While working a summer at a corporate law firm in 1989, Obama met his future wife Michelle Robinson, whom he eventually married in 1992 (they have two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha, born in 1999 and 2001 respectively). After graduating magna cum laude, Obama returned to Chicago in 1992. Once back, he organized an aggressive election effort for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, claiming to have registered over 100,000 voters. His talents gained him a seat at a local civil rights law firm; in addition, he became a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, where he still serves as a professor.
Politics
Illinois General Assembly
In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate from the south side neighborhood of Hyde Park, in Chicago. He served as chairman of the Public Health and Welfare Committee. The Chicago Tribune called him "one of the General Assembly's most impressive members."
Regarded as a staunch liberal during his tenure in the legislature, he helped to author a state earned income tax credit providing benefits to the poor. He also pursued laws that extended health coverage to Illinois residents who could not afford insurance. Speaking up for leading gay and lesbian advocacy groups, he successfully passed bills to increase funding for AIDS prevention and care programs. In 2000, he ran in the Democratic primary for Illinois' 1st Congressional district against incumbent black Representative Bobby Rush, but was badly defeated.
United States Senate Campaign
Obama's recent meteoric rise to national prominence owes much to the missteps of his political opponents, as well as to his own merits. In the U.S. Senate Democratic primary, he trailed Blair Hull before Hull was brought down by stories of alleged abuse of his then-wife. In the 2004 Senate race, his early opponent was businessman and educator Jack Ryan, the winner of the Republican primary. Ryan withdrew from the race after a California court ruling opened files related to his 1999 divorce from actress Jeri Ryan, which alleged that Jack Ryan had forced his former wife to attend sex clubs, leaving Obama without a Republican rival. Prior to Ryan's embarrassment, he was already trailing Obama in the polls (Illinois usually votes Democratic), and the race had been considered to be leaning towards Obama by professional forecasters.
Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka had considered running as a Republican to replace Ryan, but opted not to because of family and business considerations. On August 3, Illinois Republican Chairwoman Judy Baar Topinka announced two possible replacements: former United Nations Ambassador Alan Keyes and former presidential advisor Andrea Barthwell. After much deliberation, Keyes, at the time living in Maryland, was nominated on August 4 and officially accepted the nomination on August 8. Keyes will have an uphill battle, as Obama has used the lack of an opponent to concentrate on downstate, more conservative areas that ordinarily serve as the base for a Republican nominee. In addition, he has drawn criticism for running for Senate despite not living in Illinois at the time of his nomination (he has since established legal residency in Illinois). The Tribune sarcastically greeted him with an editorial, saying "Mr. Keyes may have noticed a large body of water as he flew into O'Hare. That is called Lake Michigan." [2] He has also drawn criticism for a remark he made after a similar controversy erupted over Hillary Clinton running for Senate in New York: on his radio show, Keyes said "I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it." Keyes has responded by saying that in this case, the principles of the nation were at stake, and so he would run after all, but has drawn large volumes of criticism for this.
Obama has so far deflected possible criticism of illegal drug use by his early admission of having tried both marijuana and cocaine, in contrast to his opponents' handling of their own controversies (he revealed it in a 1995 memoir; in later interviews, he says "I guess I wasn't a politician when I wrote the book"). In addition, much outside media appeared to favor Obama for coverage, including a generally laudatory article in The Economist in March 2004 during the primary race. Given Obama's current lack of an opponent, coverage has continued to dwell on him, or else on the poor handling of the situation by the Republicans. As such, Obama's victory is generally considered almost a given, and Obama now spends much of his time supporting candidates down the Democratic ticket in Illinois.
Obama has attracted numerous positive profiles in national publications, including largely favorable reporting in such titles as The New Yorker, as well as high marks from Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. His candidacy has also aroused interest in Kenya.
Keynote address
Obama was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, and became the third African American to do so (The first was Barbara Jordan, at the 1976 DNC).
As the keynote speaker, Obama helped set the tone for the party platform. At 42, Barack Obama is younger than nearly all other nationally prominent politicians. His speech proclaimed what he deemed to be the unnecessary and artificial divides in American culture and politics: "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America." Obama emphasized the importance of unity, and made veiled jabs at the Bush administration and the news media's perceived oversimplification and diversionary use of wedge issues: "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war, and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
The overall theme of Obama's address was the nature of the American Dream. Obama noted his interracial and international heritage: he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to a Kenyan immigrant father and a white mother from Kansas. He emphasized the power of education, recounting the privilege of attending the exclusive Punahou School and Harvard Law School despite his family's poverty, and tangentially criticized poor black youths who believe that reading a book is "acting white". He went on to describe his successful career in law and politics while raising a family in Chicago. "In no other country on Earth is my story even possible," Obama proclaimed. He identified himself as "a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too." Nearing the end of his speech, Obama began using an excited pace and heightened volume.
The address was generally heralded as a great success; conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks said "That's the kind of speech you go to the conventions to hear", and USA Today said Obama "exploded onto the national scene Tuesday, delivering a rousing keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that heralded his arrival as one of his party's fastest rising stars." [3] The speech was also noted as an attempt to shift the debate on "values" away from cultural issues such as same-sex marriage to other issues.
Further reading
- Dreams from My Father : A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama. 1995. ISBN 1400082773
External links
- Barack Obama Campaign Website
- Barack Obama Illinois State Senate Biography
- Barack Obama Illinois State Senate Website
- In-depth look at Obama from Democracy Now!
- An article about Obama from The New Yorker
- Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech in RealVideo, RealAudio, or MP3 format.
- Campaign finance report from OpenSecrets.org, a project of the Center for Public Integrity