Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4,
1961, in Hawaii. His parents, who met as students at the University of Hawaii,
were Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, and Barack Obama, Sr., a black
Kenyan studying in the United States. Obama's father left the family when Obama
was two and, after further studies at Harvard University, returned to Kenya,
where he died in an automobile accident nineteen years later. After his parents
divorced, Obama's mother married another foreign student at the University of
Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From age six through ten, Obama lived with
his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he attended Catholic and Muslim
schools. "I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as
a black child and as a white child," Obama later recalled. "And so what
I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me."
Concerned for his education, Obama's mother
sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham,
and to attend Hawaii's prestigious Punahou School from fifth grade through
graduation from high school. While Obama wa
s in school, she divorced Soetoro,
returned to Hawaii to study cultural anthropology at the university, and then
went back to Indonesia to do field research. Living with his grandparents,
Obama was a good but not outstanding student at Punahou, played varsity
basketball and, as he later admitted, "dabbled in drugs and alcohol,"
including marijuana and cocaine. As for religion, Obama later wrote, because
his parents and grandparents were nonbelievers, "I was not raised in a
religious household."
Obama's mother, who "to the end of her
life [in 1995] would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal,"
deeply admired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and taught her
son, he later wrote, that "To be black was to be the beneficiary of a
great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong
enough to bear." But, as culturally diverse as Hawaii was, its African
American population was miniscule. With no father or other family members to
serve as role models (his relationship with his white grandfather was
difficult), Obama later reflected, "I was trying to raise myself to be a
black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me
seemed to know exactly what that meant."
Obama left Hawaii for college, enrolling first
at Occidental College in Los Angeles for his freshman and sophomore years, and
then at Columbia University in New York City. He read deeply and widely about
political and international affairs, graduating from Columbia with a political
science major in 1983. After spending an additional year in New York as a
researcher with Business International Group, a global business consulting
firm, Obama accepted an offer to work as a community organizer in Chicago's
largely poor and black South Side. As biographer David Mendell notes in his
2007 book Obama: From Promise to Power, the job gave Obama "his first deep
immersion into the African American community he had longed to both understand
and belong to."
Obama's main assignment as an organizer was to
launch the church-funded Developing Communities Project and, in particular, to
organize residents of Altgeld Gardens to pressure Chicago's city hall to
improve conditions in the poorly maintained public housing project. His efforts
met with some success, but he concluded that, faced with a complex city
bureaucracy, "I just can't get things done here without a law
degree." In 1988, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he excelled as
a student, graduating magna cum laude and winning election as president of the
prestigious Harvard Law Review for the academic year 1990-1991. Although Obama
was a liberal, he won the election by persuading the journal's outnumbered
conservative staffers that he would treat their views fairly, which he is
widely acknowledged to have done. As the first African American president in
the long history of the law review, Obama drew widespread media attention and a
contract from Random House to write a book about race relations. The book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995),
turned out to be mostly a personal memoir, focusing in particular on his
struggle to come to terms with his identity as a black man raised by whites in
the absence of his African father.
During a summer internship at Chicago's Sidley
and Austin law firm after his first year at Harvard, Obama met Michelle
Robinson, a South Side native and Princeton University and Harvard Law School
graduate who supervised his work at the firm. He wooed her ardently and, after
a four-year courtship, they married in 1992. The Obamas settled in Chicago's
racially integrated, middle-class Hyde Park neighborhood, where their first
daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998 and their second daughter, Natasha
(called Sasha), was born in 2001.
After directing Illinois Project Vote, a voter
registration drive aimed at increasing black turnout in the 1992 election,
Obama accepted positions as an attorney with the civil rights law firm of
Miner, Barnhill and Galland and as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law
School. He launched his first campaign for political office in 1996 after his
district's state senator, Alice Palmer, decided to run for Congress. With
Palmer's support, Obama announced his candidacy to replace her in the Illinois
legislature. When Palmer's congressional campaign faltered, she decided to run
for reelection instead. But Obama refused to withdraw from the race,
successfully challenged the validity of Palmer's voter petitions, and was easily
elected after her name was kept off the ballot.
Obama's time in the legislature initially was
frustrating. Republicans controlled the state senate, and many of his black
Democratic colleagues resented the hardball tactics he had employed against
Palmer. But he adapted, developing cordial personal relations with legislators
of both parties and cultivating Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones, Jr.,
another African American senator from Chicago, as a mentor. Obama was able to
get campaign finance reform and crime legislation enacted even when his party
was in the minority, and after 2002, when the Democrats won control of the
Senate, he became a leading legislator on a wide range of issues, passing
nearly 300 bills aimed at helping children, old people, labor unions, and the
poor.
Obama's one serious misstep during his early
political career (he later called it "an ill-considered race" in
which he got "spanked" by the voters) was a 2000 Democratic primary
challenge to U.S. Representative Bobby Rush. Rush is a former Illinois Black
Panther leader who subsequently entered mainstream politics as a Chicago
alderman and was elected to Congress from the South Side's first congressional
district in 1992. Obama was not nearly as well known as the popular Rush, and
the combination of his unusual upbringing and his association with
predominantly white elite universities such as Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago
aroused doubts about his authenticity as a black man among the district's
overwhelmingly African American voters. Obama suffered what he labeled "a
drubbing," losing to Rush by a 30 percentage point margin.
Returning to the state senate, Obama began
eyeing a 2004 race for the U.S. Senate seat held by Peter Fitzgerald, an
unpopular first-term Republican who decided not to run for reelection. In
October 2002, as Congress was considering a resolution authorizing President
George W. Bush to launch a war to depose the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,
Obama spoke at an antiwar rally in Chicago. "I don't oppose all wars,"
he declared. "What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is
a rash war." By speaking out against Bush's war policies, Obama set
himself apart from the other leading candidates for the Democratic Senate
nomination, as well as from most Senate Democrats with presidential ambitions,
including Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, John Kerry of Massachusetts, and
John Edwards of North Carolina. Obama's initially unpopular antiwar stance
eventually worked to his political advantage as the war became increasingly
unpopular with the passage of time.
Advised by political consultant David Axelrod,
who had a strong record of helping black candidates win in majority-white
constituencies, Obama assembled a coalition of African Americans and white
liberals to win the Democratic Senate primary with 53 percent of the vote, more
than all five of his opponents combined. He then moved toward the political
center to wage his general election campaign against Republican nominee Jack
Ryan, an attractive candidate who, after making hundreds of millions of dollars
as an investor, had left the business world to teach in an inner-city Chicago
school. But Ryan was forced to drop out of the race when scandalous details
about his divorce were made public, and Obama coasted to an easy victory
against Ryan's replacement on the ballot, black conservative Republican Alan
Keyes. Obama won by the largest margin in the history of Senate elections in
Illinois, 70 percent to 27 percent.
In addition to his election, the other
highlight of 2004 for Obama was his wildly successful keynote address at the
Democratic National Convention. "There's not a liberal America and a
conservative America," he declared. "There's a United States of
America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and
Asian America. There's a United States of America." Obama encapsulated his
speech's themes of optimism and unity with the phrase, "the audacity of
hope," which he borrowed from Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright was the
pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, a large and influential
black congregation where Obama was baptized when he became a Christian in 1988.
Obama also used the phrase as the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006),
which became a national bestseller in the wake of his newfound national
popularity. Describing his religious conversion, Obama wrote, "I felt
God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself
to discovering His truth."
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