Just eight years ago a little known Barack Obama arrived at the Democratic National Convention in Boston unable to obtain a floor pass. He ended up watching most of the speeches on TV monitors in the arena. He was so broke that his credit card was rejected at the car rental counter. His political future was bleak. He had just been trounced in his bid for Congress.
Four years later the change was remarkable. This time when Barack Obama attended the 2004 Democratic convention he was tapped as the keynote speaker, a coveted spot for up-and-comers, and as a U.S. Senate nominee generating political buzz, he fit the bill. Barack Obama still was an unaccomplished state lawmaker, a virtual unknown to the cheering delegates gathered in the Boston convention hall that July night. But his words lit up the crowd.
Now jump forward to the 2008 Democratic convention. On Aug. 28, Senator Barack Obama will step on the stage before a crowd of 75,000 to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. He will be at the summit of U.S. politics, a phenomenon who has smashed every fundraising record, drew astounding crowds, and made history.
How did this man go so far so fast? He is a candidate with political savvy and electrifying oratory skills, enormous confidence, and fierce drive, and an uncanny knack of making friends and forging connections in all the right places. He likes to get along with people. He listens to them. Someone said that he is lucky. And like I always say luck happens when preparation and opportunity meet. A lucky man is one who knows how to take advantage of a break when he gets it.
Senator Obama also has a life story unlike that of any man ever nominated for the U.S.'s highest office. And while his unconventional experiences have made him an unconventional candidate, they also have helped fuel his extraordinary rise. It is truly the American dream – one of the most unlikely political biographies of all times. When you look at his life, there are half a dozen times when he could have failed ... being abandoned by his father, his troubled teenage years... but he seems to weather adversity better than most people.
"It's a leap electing a 46-year-old black guy named Barack Obama," the Illinois senator told a crowd in July at a Missouri fundraiser.
There is his biracial roots and foreign-sounding name. It's his youth spent wrestling with questions about his racial identity and a foreign father he barely knew. It's his admission that he tried drugs as a teen. That kind of revelation is rarely made known by politicians. It's his travels from low-prestige community organizer in the poverty-ravaged corners of Chicago to the high-powered halls of Harvard Law School. And it's his rapid climb up the political ladder.
Barack Obama's life story is familiar to many by now. The Kansas-born mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (her father wanted a boy). The Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama Sr. Their meeting at the University of Hawaii, their marriage, the birth of Barack ("blessed" in Arabic). The father's departure two years later to study at Harvard, his return just once when Barack was 10. The childhood in Indonesia, homeland of his stepfather, Lolo Soetero; the exposure to poverty and beggars, crocodiles and roasted grasshopper. And then, after his mother's second marriage broke up, the return to Hawaii, where the young Obama (then known as Barry) enrolled in the prestigious Punahou School, a private academy in Honolulu.
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As a teen, Barack Obama was smart and liked to read but he wasn't particularly driven or ambitious (there were no obvious signs -- unless you count a grade school essay -- that pointed to politics as his destiny). He wasn't part of student government. He wasn't in any advanced placement classes. “He was a young man concerned with ... hanging out with his buddies, playing basketball and body surfing,” says his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng.
When his mother's work as an anthropologist took her back to Indonesia, Barack stayed behind for high school, living with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn, known as Tutu or Toot (Hawaiian for grandparent), and Stanley, or Gramps. He played golf and poker, he practiced his left-handed jump shot on a playground into the night (he had a minor role on his school's championship basketball team), he sang in the choir, he listened to the music of Earth Wind & Fire (great musical taste).
In some ways, he was a typical teenager. In other ways, he was anything but: His mother was far away, his father was gone forever, he had already lived in a Third World country and was growing up in Hawaii (all of which shaped him into someone who could easily be flexible and adapt to change).
At Occidental College in Los Angeles, he who started using his given name, Barack and took his first plunge into politics, speaking at an anti-apartheid rally. Barack was confident and casual on campus; he favored flip-flops, shorts and a trim Afro, and not one to dominate dorm discussions about political issues. But Occidental was a small liberal arts college and Obama wanted to expand his horizons, so he transferred across the country to Columbia University in New York.
Barack Obama graduated with a political science degree and held a few jobs in New York. It was there he received a call from an aunt in Nairobi, Kenya notifying him his father had been killed in a car accident. The news eventually led Obama on a journey to Kenya and a visit to his father's grave.
After New York, Obama headed to Chicago, a city where he knew no one, taking a low-paying job, motivating poor people to participate in a political system that had traditionally shut them out. Starting out as a $12,000-a-year community organizer, Obama walked the run-down streets of the South Side that had been devastated by the loss of steel mills and factory jobs. Working for the Developing Communities Project, Obama met with Black pastors and tried to mobilize people to speak up for themselves, whether it was lobbying for a job training center or cleaning up public housing. He established an easy rapport with people in the community, many of whom treated him like a son (they teasingly called him "baby face.") "He would tell us you've got to do things right, you've got to take the high road," says one of the project founders. "He would talk about no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. He would say, 'Don't get personalities involved.'"
Obama — who calls his organizing work "the best education I ever had" — became a skilled conciliator. He became very effective at getting people who initially did not get along to work together and build alliances. He found a way to be tough and challenging when he didn't like something. At the same time, he was not one to burn his bridges with people. This is the way a president should deal with adversaries instead of not talking to them. And they continue to say he has no experience. This is REAL experience. If you can be successful in the hard nosed Chicago politics you can be successful anywhere.
Chicago is the city where Barack Obama put down roots. He joined the Trinity United Church of Christ and became friends with its pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose remarks Senator Obama denounced after they created a national uproar. He no longer attends the church.
Chicago also was Obama's political boot camp, where he learned how to win over skeptics who wondered why that tall, skinny guy was at their door when Harold Washington, the first black mayor, was in City Hall. "Black people would say, 'Harold will take care of the problem. Why do we need a community organizer?'" recalls Mike Kruglik, a fellow organizer. "He'd say, 'We have to build the power ... we can't trust any individual politician.'" Senator Obama was not all work. He attended Chicago Bulls games and wrote short fictional stories that evocatively captured the feel of the streets. (He later wrote two best-selling books, one of them a memoir.)
Obama also remained close to his family. After her father died, Maya, who is nine years younger, says Obama "really took on the role of a father," taking her on college tours, introducing her to jazz, blues and classical music — and, much later, consoling her when their mother died of ovarian cancer at age 53.
Then Senator Obama made a giant leap from the tough South Side to the heady atmosphere of Harvard Law School, the training ground for America's political elite. He made history there, as the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious law journal in the U.S.
After his first year, Obama was a summer associate at a corporate law firm in Chicago where his adviser was Michelle Robinson, another Harvard law graduate and a product of a working-class family. They later married, and had two daughters, Malia, now 10, and Sasha, 7. As Obama prepared to leave Harvard, job offers poured in. But he already had a plan. He would return to Chicago for a political career.
At first, he chose a behind-the-scenes job. Obama ran a voter registration drive that added tens of thousands to the rolls. "He was very straightforward and had a no-nonsense, all-the-cards-on-the-table approach," recalls Sandy Newman, founder of the national group, Project Vote!
Obama also began carefully mapping out a path that positioned him for public office. He joined a small, politically connected law firm that did civil rights litigation. He and his wife, Michelle, lived in Hyde Park, the racially mixed neighborhood around the University of Chicago that is home to progressive politics, intellectuals and a sprinkling of Nobel Prize winners. By choosing to move to Hyde Park, he moved in an area where an independent can come out of nowhere to win. He also broadened his circle of acquaintances, impressing influential Democrats and party donors who proved invaluable in his campaigns.
Obama was a great networker. He worked all the right circles. Foes called him a calculating politician; friends called him a smart, methodical worker. He does nothing that's different from most politicians. The difference is he's extraordinarily gifted. His greatest capability is he never makes the same mistake twice. But that skill was nothing without a political opportunity. While waiting for one, Obama became a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He taught constitutional law. "He's a great conversationalist and a good listener," says Richard Epstein, a law school professor.
In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois state Senate, but as a member of the Democratic minority, his legislative proposals were consistently let down by Republicans. Some dismissed him as a college liberal. Obama won over many lawmakers in nearly eight years in the state Senate (inexperienced?). He played in weekly poker games, befriending suburban and White rural legislators. He also had an important ally in an old-school Chicago Democrat who became Senate president when the party took control of the chamber, a change that increased Obama's influence.
Obama had several legislative successes. He passed measures that limited lobbyists' gifts to politicians, helped expand health care to poor children and changed laws governing racial profiling, the death penalty and the interrogation of murder suspects. He reached across party lines to work with Republicans. He can compromise without giving up his principles.
Obama stumbled badly, though, in 2000 when he challenged Representative Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther member with deep roots in the community. During that contest, Obama was dogged by the question raised by some critics and Black politicians (whether he was "Black enough" for the district). He is running for president of the U.S. not president of the Black community. But in that congressional campaign, Obama was seen as the outsider. Rush, the insider, crushed him by 31 percentage points in the primary.
Two years later, Obama set his sights on another office: U.S. Senate. He won in a massive victory. Months later, Senator Obama impressed Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry during a joint campaign appearance in Chicago, leading to his stirring keynote speech. In 17 minutes, Senator Obama went from an obscure state lawmaker to a force in national politics.
When Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy 18 months ago at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, he was still unknown to most Americans. The freshman senator Obama had been in Washington just two years. He has appeared on numerous magazine covers, won two Grammys for recording his best-selling books, made TV appearances, received hundreds of invitations a week and traveled the country in 2006, campaigning for other Democratic candidates and building up relationships along the way. And the spotlight only grew during the primary season. Senator Obama proved to be an enormous draw on the campaign trail, packing arenas with overflow crowds as he promised an end to the Iraq war, a new era of bipartisanship in Washington and "change we can believe in."
Just like John F. Kennedy tapped into the television market in the 1960 election, Senator Barack Obama has tapped into the internet better than any candidate ever has, he knew what to do with the Internet and e-mail in a way no candidate has.
In Denver, at Democratic Party Convention, Senator Barack Obama will turn to the old-fashioned powers of speechmaking when he steps on stage to address the crowd and accept the nomination as the Party’s nominee for President of the United States. And this time, everybody will know exactly who he is.
