Barack Obama
Barack Obama (born August 4, 1961) is an 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 University of Chicago law professor, Obama is currently running for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. If successful, Obama would be the only serving black U.S. senator and just the fifth in the country's history (following Hiram Revels, Blanche K. Bruce, Edward Brooke, and Carol Moseley Braun).
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 and is Caucasian. 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 divorced. His father eventually returned to Kenya, and he saw his son only once more before his death 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.
Of his years in Hawaii, Obama has written, "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 president of the Harvard Law Review. While working one 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
In 2004, Obama decided to run for the U.S. Senate. In the Democratic primary, he trailed Blair Hull before Hull was brought down by stories of alleged abuse of his then-wife. Obama went on to win a decisive victory in the primary, overcoming a number of other challengers.
In the 2004 Senate race itself, he originally faced businessman and educator Jack Ryan, the winner of the Republican primary. Ryan trailed Obama in the polls (Illinois usually votes Democratic), and the race had been considered to be leaning towards Obama by professional forecasters. But during the campaign, a California court ruling opened files related to Ryan's 1999 divorce from actress Jeri Ryan, in which she alleged that he had forced her to attend sex clubs and have sex with him in public there. Immediately before the files' release, Ryan insisted that there was nothing damaging in them, leading Republican leaders to question Ryan's integrity. Ryan was forced to leave the race, leaving Obama without a Republican rival.
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: 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 has an uphill battle, as Obama has used the absence of an opponent to concentrate on downstate, more conservative areas that ordinarily serve as the base for a Republican nominee. In addition, Keyes 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." [1] He has also drawn criticism for a remark he made after a similar controversy erupted over Hillary Clinton running for Senate in New York: "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 this case was different, since important principles were at stake and the Illinois GOP had asked him to run (the New York Democratic Party had asked Clinton to run, so the difference is unclear).
Public profile
In his 1995 memoir, Obama admitted having tried both marijuana and cocaine during his fatherless youth. (In later interviews, he said "I guess I wasn't a politician when I wrote the book.") This openness appears to have staved off attacks, in contrast to his opponents' handling of their own controversies.
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. Favorable coverage of Obama has also appeared in The New Yorker and in E.J. Dionne's Washington Post column. His candidacy has also aroused interest in Kenya.
There has also been a great deal of coverage of the Republicans' problems in fielding an opponent. With Obama thought to be highly likely to win, he has been spending much of his time supporting other candidates on the Democratic ticket in Illinois.
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." [2] 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
- Barack Obama from the Open Directory Project
- 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.
- A free audio download is also available from the iTunes Music Store (in Advanced Audio Coding format with FairPlay digital rights management).
- Campaign finance report from OpenSecrets.org, a project of the Center for Public Integrity