To Current Biography

Barack Obama. Aug. 4, 1961-
U.S. senator from Illinois (Democrat)
 

Barack Obama emerged from a hard-fought March 2004 primary campaign to become the Democrats’ choice to fill the Illinois U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Peter Fitzgerald. That victory pegged Obama, then an Illinois State senator, as a rising star in the party, to be sure. But few other than political insiders and the residents of his home state knew much about Obama, which is why the decision to make him the keynote speaker on the second day of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, held July 26–29 in Boston, Massachusetts, was met with curiosity. "Tonight is a particular honor for me because—let’s face it—my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely," he admitted in the opening of his address, referring not only to his relative obscurity but to his background and upbringing. The product of the marriage between a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, Obama proceeded to talk about his family, calling theirs "a common dream, born of two continents." "I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage . . . ," he continued. "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible."

The defining characteristic of the contentious 2004 presidential campaign had been (and continued to be) the division between so-called "Red" and "Blue" America: red being the pundits’ blanket signifier for the allegedly Republican, conservative, and religious denizens of southern and midwestern states, and blue connoting the supposedly Democratic, liberal, secular population of the Northeast and West Coast. Amid this talk of red and blue, Obama delivered a message of shared values that crossed all color lines, racial and electoral. "Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes," he declared to an energized crowd. "Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latin America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America. . . . We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. . . . In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?"

Obama’s speech immediately made him the political equivalent of a rock star. "Here’s a guy who hasn’t served a day in the [U.S.] Senate, and I just saw an ‘Obama ’08’ [for President] button," David Axelrod, Obama’s media consultant, told Shira Boss-Bicak for Columbia College Today (January 2005). "It’s out of control." The self-described "skinny kid with a funny name" also became fodder for pop culture: possible mispronunciations of his name, for example, was the topic of one of David Letterman’s "Top 10" lists on The Late Show. Carried on a wave of good will and media attention, Obama went on to trounce his Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, with 70 percent of the vote, to become the fifth African-American to serve in the U.S. Senate, and only the third to do so since Reconstruction. Obama is also the first male African-American Democrat to be elected to the Senate. In the first few months of his freshman term, Obama has responded to the media attention with hard work, humility, and a purposeful avoidance of the spotlight. "I don’t think humility is contradictory with ambition," he told Jeff Zeleny for the Chicago Tribune (March 20, 2005). "I feel very humble about what I don’t know. But I’m plain ambitious in terms of wanting to actually deliver some benefit for the people of Illinois."

Barack H. Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, also named Barack, which means "blessed" in Swahili, was born in the town of Alego along the Kenyan shore of Lake Victoria. A member of the Luo tribe—a nomadic people who had originated in the Sudan along the White Nile and migrated to Kenya—the elder Obama proved to be a gifted student. He won a scholarship to study in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, before being selected for a government sponsorship to go, in 1959 at age 23, to study econometrics at the University of Hawaii. The school’s first African student, he established himself among its intellectual and social leaders, serving as the first president of the International Students Association, which he helped organize, and graduating at the head of his class in only three years. In 1959 he took a Russian class, in which he met an 18-year-old, female, Kansas-born anthropology major, Stanley Ann Dunham, known as Ann. The two fell in love soon after they met and married in 1960.

The elder Barack Obama received a scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the scholarship covered only his own expenses, however, and he left Hawaii alone when his son was two. He and his wife later divorced, and young Barack would see his father only once more, at age 10. When the younger Obama was six, his mother remarried, this time to a man named Lolo, an Indonesian-born fellow student at the University of Hawaii. The family moved to Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, where Obama’s sister Maya was born. Ann taught English to Indonesian businessmen at the U.S. Embassy, while Lolo ascended from government surveyor to executive with an American oil company. When Ann and Lolo’s relationship—which eventually ended in divorce—began to dissolve, Ann sent Obama back to Honolulu to live with her parents, who enrolled him in the prestigious Punahau Academy, a college-preparatory school attended by the islands’ elite.

One of a handful of black students in the academy, Obama grew more conscious there of issues regarding race and identity. While his skin color and hair texture set him apart from the vast majority of his schoolmates, his home life made him socially, if not economically, similar to his classmates, as he had been raised by a white mother and grandparents in a middle-class environment. He sought black role models from among the men he played basketball with on the local public courts and his grandfather’s poker buddies. "I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere," Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, published in 1995 and in different form in 2004. In the book he recalled sensing that his race affected the way others responded to him: "The feeling that something wasn’t quite right stayed with me, a warning that sounded whenever a white girl mentioned in the middle of conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder; or when a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball; or when the school principal told me I was cool. I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge?" "I engaged in self-destructive behavior," he told Sandy Banks for the Los Angeles Times (March 13, 2005). "Sometimes I lashed out at white people and sometimes I lashed out at black people."

Amid his confusion Obama experimented with drugs and alcohol and let his grades slip. He nonetheless managed to graduate from Punahau, in 1979, and later that year he enrolled at Occidental College, in Los Angeles, California. After two years he transferred to Columbia University, in New York City, to study political science with a specialization in international relations. "Mostly, my years at Columbia were an intense period of study," Obama told Boss-Bicak. "When I transferred, I decided to buckle down and get serious. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk." One morning during his first semester at Columbia, in November 1982, he received a call from Nairobi, informing him that his father had been killed in a car accident. "At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man," he wrote in his memoir.

In the period leading up to his graduation from Columbia, in 1983, Obama sought work as a community organizer, writing letters of application to progressive grass-roots organizations across the nation. His letters went unanswered, however, so he took a job as a research analyst for a financial consulting company. He was soon promoted to financial writer. "I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank," Obama wrote in Dreams from My Father. "Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve." He quit his job and worked on a campaign to promote recycling in New York City, while sending out a second round of letters in search of community work. He eventually landed a job with the Developing Communities Project, a nonprofit coalition of secular and church groups on the South Side of Chicago. For three years he canvassed the neighborhood door-to-door and met with local business and political leaders in efforts to save manufacturing jobs, launch job-training programs, and improve city services in South Side housing projects. Along the way he acquired the skills and experiences that formed the foundation for his future political career.

During Obama’s time in Chicago, his older sister Auma, the product of his father’s first marriage (to a Kenyan woman) and one of seven half-siblings with whom he shares a father, came to the United States for an extended visit—during which she told Obama some of the details of his father's life. In the mid-1980s, when Obama was working as a community organizer and preparing to attend law school, he decided to travel to Kenya to see his father’s homeland. "There, he managed to fully embrace a heritage and a family he’d never fully known and come to terms with his father, whom he’d long regarded as an august foreign prince, but now realized was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities," the lawyer and novelist Scott Turow, who is a friend and political supporter of Obama's, wrote for Salon (March 30, 2004, on-line).

In 1988 Obama entered Harvard Law School, where he gained national attention in 1990 as the first African-American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review, the nation’s most prestigious legal academic journal. "The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress. It’s encouraging," he told Fox Butterfield for the New York Times (February 6, 1990). "But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance." He earned his J.D. degree, magna cum laude, in 1991. While in school he had worked as a summer associate in a Chicago firm; Michelle Robinson, an associate attorney who had graduated from Harvard Law the year before, supervised him. The two married in 1992.

That year Obama led a voter-registration drive on Chicago’s South Side that added approximately 150,000 new people to the rolls and helped the Democrat Bill Clinton to win Illinois in the 1992 presidential election. He turned down an offer to clerk for Abner Mikva, then chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit, to accept a position at the Chicago firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. There, he focused on civil rights law, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on behalf of voters’ rights. Shortly thereafter, he began lecturing part-time on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. "Teaching keeps you sharp," Obama told William Finnegan for the New Yorker (May 31, 2004). "The great thing about teaching constitutional law is that all the tough questions land in your lap: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action. And you need to be able to argue both sides. I have to be able to argue the other side as well as [the Supreme Court justice Antonin] Scalia does. I think that’s good for one’s politics."

All the while, Obama had ambitions to run for political office. In 1996 the Illinois Democrat Alice Palmer decided to give up her seat in the Illinois State Senate to run for Congress. Seeing his opportunity, Obama sought and secured Palmer’s blessing to run for her seat, which represents Chicago’s 13th District, covering the South Side, Hyde Park, and the University of Chicago. Palmer lost her bid for Congress and asked Obama to step aside so that she could run for reelection in the Illinois Legislature. Obama refused and, without a Republican opponent, easily won the election. He quickly gained a reputation as an effective legislator, skilled at working with the Republican majority. He sponsored and passed a bill requiring Illinois to share its data on its welfare program with researchers, and he helped to push through the first campaign-finance-reform legislation to pass in his state in a quarter-century.

Despite his fast start, Obama suffered two major political setbacks in 1999. A year-end vote on a controversial gun-control bill was coming to the floor of the State Legislature. The bill, forged in a bipartisan coalition between Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Richard M. Daley, and the Republican Illinois governor, George Ryan, faced intense opposition from the Nation Rifle Association, one of the nation’s most powerful lobbies, and the State Senate’s Republican majority leader. Obama, who supported the measure, was visiting his family in Hawaii. Despite pleas to return, he was absent for the vote. The bill was defeated, and the local press and his Senate colleagues excoriated Obama. Around the same time, Obama made an ill-advised run for the U.S. House of Representatives against fellow Democrat Bobby Rush. Obama thought Rush an ineffectual lawmaker, but the four-term representative and former leader of the local Black Panther Party was very popular. In the 2000 Democratic primary, Rush defeated Obama by a two-to-one margin.

Obama bounced back emphatically in the following years. When Democrats took control of the Illinois State Senate in 2003, he successfully ushered 26 bills through the Legislature, including a large tax credit for the working poor and expanded health-care benefits for uninsured children and adults. Perhaps his greatest achievements were in criminal-justice reform. He co-sponsored landmark legislation to curtail racial profiling by requiring all police departments to record the race of every person stopped for questioning. He also sponsored a bill that made Illinois the first state to require its police to videotape interrogations in capital crime cases. Obama attained support from the police and state prosecutors by arguing that videotaping would cut down not only on coerced confessions but also on claims of police brutality. In addition, the videos are admissible in court, thus facilitating prosecution.

In entering the 2004 race to become the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, Obama joined a crowded field. The Democratic candidates alone included six others, among them Dan Hynes, the state comptroller and an Illinois Democratic Party favorite, and Blair Hull, a popular and wealthy businessman who invested $29 million of his own money in the primary. Obama’s campaign was able to raise $6 million, enough to get him some television airtime and spread his populist message to a base beyond Chicago. Running a disciplined campaign, Obama was able to stay solidly in second place—just ahead of Hynes but behind Hull—and he began to gain ground among white liberals. As the primary approached, it was revealed that Hull, whose expenditures had built a 10-point lead in the polls, had abused his ex-wife. His campaign crumbled, and Obama surged ahead, capturing 53 percent of the vote and the Democratic nomination, in March 2004.

In the campaign preceding the general election, Obama faced—at first—another popular and wealthy businessman, the Republican nominee, Jack Ryan. A former partner at the prestigious financial-services company Goldman Sachs, Ryan presented an image as polished as Obama’s: he, too, had a Harvard pedigree, having earned both his J.D. and M.B.A. degrees there. Ryan’s pro-life, pro-gun, anti-gay, and anti-tax platform placed him firmly on the political right and diametrically opposite Obama, which promised, at the very least, some spirited debate. In June 2004, however, Ryan withdrew from the race, after the public release of testimony from his divorce case, which stated that he had forced his ex-wife to engage in sexual acts she found distasteful. After a scramble that lasted over a month—through Obama’s Democratic National Convention address and the resulting surge in his popularity—the Republican Party settled on a new nominee for the Senate race: the former United Nations ambassador and presidential candidate Alan Keyes. A Maryland resident who had once famously labeled Hillary Clinton a carpetbagger, because the former first lady had declared her intention to run for a U.S. Senate seat representing New York shortly after she had moved there, the pugnacious Keyes was now the object of similar derision. Keyes, who is African-American, immediately went on the offensive. After Obama announced that he would not engage Keyes in six debates, as he had agreed to do with Ryan, the GOP candidate said that his opponent was afraid of facing him. The agreement with Ryan "was a special for in-state residents," Obama quipped in response to Keyes’s attack, according to Scott Fornek in the Chicago Sun-Times (August 10, 2004, on-line).

In the end, Keyes’s bluster took little toll on Obama’s campaign, which built for Obama so comfortable a lead in the polls that he was able to take time to stump for Democratic candidates in Wisconsin, Colorado, South Carolina, and other states, thus increasing his national profile and garnering favor among fellow Democrats. He also contributed $150,000 of his $14.3 million war chest to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as $245,000 to Democrats in closer races in other states. His campaign clearly had no need for the extra money: in November 2004 Obama captured 70 percent of the vote, handily defeating Keyes.

Since he took office, in January 2005, Obama has deliberately kept a low profile, focusing on learning the procedures of the Senate and carefully choosing his public appearances. He has responded to high expectations and questions about his future political ambitions with a "first-things-first" attitude and with jokes about "sharpening pencils and scrubbing floors" for his more senior colleagues. "There’s a large gap between the power that I’ll wield in Washington and the enormous needs that I see in Illinois, such as healthcare, lack of well-paying jobs and need for educational reform," he said, according to Shira Boss-Bicak. "What I do expect to be able to accomplish is where there are issues that everyone agrees need to be worked on, I’ll be able to insinuate myself into the debate and see that voices that otherwise would be left behind are introduced into those negotiations." Obama was appointed to three top Senate panels: the Environment and Public Works Committee, which provides oversight of the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency; the Veterans Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over compensation, pensions, and medical treatment for veterans of the U.S. military; and the Foreign Relations Committee, which has responsibility for U.S. foreign policy, including treaties with foreign governments and diplomatic nominations.

So far, Obama has insinuated himself into several key debates before the Senate in the 109th Congress and shown an independent streak that sometimes defies party lines. Stating that President George W. Bush should be allowed some latitude in the appointment of his Cabinet, Obama contributed a "yes" vote toward the Senate confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. However, Alberto Gonzales’s role as White House counsel in setting guidelines for the treatment of suspected terrorists held in U.S. military prisons—which were seen by many as overly harsh and, therefore, illegal—led Obama to register a minority vote of "no" in the confirmation of Gonzales as U.S. attorney general. Obama voted for a lawsuit-reform measure that changed the rules of class-action lawsuits in such a way as to reduce large-dollar judgments; the measure passed in the Senate. He opposed legislation to reform bankruptcy law to make it more difficult for consumers to avoid debt repayment, and he came out against a proposal to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, in Alaska. The Senate passed both bills.

Most surprising to Democrats was Obama’s support of congressional intervention to grant the right of federal court review to the parents of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a 15-year persistent vegetative state who had become the object of a protracted legal dispute between her parents and her husband over her right to die. Her husband, whose legal right to determine what was best for his wife in the absence of her own ability to do so was backed by the courts, asserted that his wife had declared while still cognizant that she did not want to be kept alive artificially; he wanted her feeding tube removed, which would result in her painless (as her doctors agreed) death from starvation. Terri Schiavo’s parents, on the other hand, wanted her kept alive and fought for the right to determine her care. The public and political battle that erupted around the family’s legal rights fell, for the most part, along party lines—with conservatives in favor of the parents and liberals behind the husband. "There’s nothing unconstitutional about having a little more due process than was due," Obama said in defense of his decision, as reported by Rick Pearson in the Chicago Tribune (March 27, 2005). "Do I like the fact that Congress acts in rash fashion as opposed to deliberative fashion on this or any number of situations but fails to act on crises like the Medicare situation? No. But I have been there for only 3 1/2 months. What troubled me at the margins was not sufficient to raise an objection and shut down the Senate."

In the introduction to his memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama wrote, "The opportunity to write it first arose while I was still in law school, after my election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. . . . A few publishers called, and I, imagining myself to have something original to say about the current state of race relations, agreed to take off a year after graduation and put my thoughts to paper." The book received middling reviews. "At a young age and without much experience as a writer, Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing," Paul Watkins wrote for the New York Times Book Review (August 6, 1995). "But what would he have us learn? That people of mixed backgrounds must choose only one culture in which to make a spiritual home? That it is not possible to be both black and white, Old World and New? If this is indeed true, as Mr. Obama tells it, then the idea of America taking pride in itself as a nation derived of many different races seems strangely mocked." In a more complimentary assessment, a critic wrote for Kirkus Reviews (April 15, 1995): "At its best, despite an occasional lack of analysis, this affecting study of self-definition perceptively reminds us that the dilemmas of race generally express themselves in terms of individual human struggles." The book quickly fell out of print. However, following his electrifying Democratic National Convention address and the attendant upswing in public interest in Obama, copies of the memoir began appearing on the Internet auction site eBay, where they sold for several hundred dollars each. The memoir was then reissued in paperback, with an updated preface and a copy of the convention speech in the back; the book was otherwise unchanged. As of mid-May 2005, the 2004 edition of Dreams from My Father had spent 36 weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list. In February 2005 Obama signed a $1.9 million, three-book deal with Random House. The first volume to be published is a children’s picture book about his childhood, tentatively scheduled to appear in 2006.

Barack Obama’s honors include the Crain's Chicago Business "40 Under 40" Award, 1993; the Monarch Award for Outstanding Public Service, 1994; the Legal Eagle Award for litigation leading to Illinois's compliance with national "Motor Voter" Legislation, 1995; the Best Freshman Legislator Award from the Independent Voters of Illinois/Independent Precinct Organizations, 1997; the Outstanding Legislator Award from the Campaign for Better Health Care and Illinois Primary Health Care Association, 1998; and a 2005 NAACP Image Award. Time magazine named him one of the most influential people of 2005. In Kogelo Village, Siaya District, Kenya, a school has been renamed the Senator Barack Obama Secondary School, and locals there have begun referring to a popular beer called Senator as "Senator Obama" (a dubious honor, given that Obama does not drink). He now divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Chicago, where his wife, Michelle, the executive director of community affairs at the University of Chicago, and two young daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha, reside. Michelle told Jonathan Alter for Newsweek (December 27, 2004) that her husband "is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change."