Barack Obama: Life Before the Presidency
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 was 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."
