PRESIDENT
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
G'day folks,
Welcome to some background on a man who rose to the loftiest of positions. On November 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was elected
president of the United States over Senator John McCain of Arizona. Obama
became the 44th president, and the first African American to be elected to that
office. He was subsequently elected to a second term over former Massachusetts
governor Mitt Romney.
Early life
Obama’s father, also named Barack
Hussein Obama, grew up in a small village in Nyanza Province, Kenya, as a
member of the Luo ethnicity. He won a scholarship to study economics at the
University of Hawaii,
where he met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from Wichita, Kansas, whose
father had worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression and fought with the
U.S. Army in World War II
before moving his family to Hawaii in 1959. Barack and Ann’s son, Barack
Hussein Obama Jr., was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.
Obama’s parents later
separated, and Barack Sr. went back to Kenya; he would see his son only once
more before dying in a car accident in 1982. After remarrying an Indonesian
man, Lolo Soetoro, Ann moved with her young son to Jakarta in the late 1960s,
where she worked at the U.S. embassy. In 1970, Obama returned to Hawaii to live
with his maternal grandparents. He attended the Punahou School, an elite
private school where, as he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, he
first began to understand the tensions inherent in his mixed racial background.
After two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he transferred to
Columbia University in New York City, from which he graduated in 1983 with a
degree in political science.
Pre-Election Career
After a two-year stint working in
corporate research and at the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG)
in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago,
where he took a job as a community organizer with a church-based group, the
Developing Communities Project. For the next several years, he worked with
low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens
public housing development on the city’s largely black South Side. Obama would
later call the experience “the best education I ever got, better than anything
I got at Harvard Law School,” the prestigious institution he entered in 1988.
In 1996, Obama officially
launched his own political career, winning election to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat from the South Side
neighborhood of Hyde Park. Despite tight Republican control during his years in
the state senate, Obama was able to build support among both Democrats and Republicans
in drafting legislation on ethics and health care reform. He helped create a
state earned-income tax credit that benefited the working poor, promoted
subsidies for early childhood education programs and worked with law
enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and
confessions in all capital cases.
Re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully
in the 2000 Democratic primary for the U. S. House of Representatives seat held
by the popular four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. As a state senator, Obama
notably went on record as an early opponent of President George W. Bush’s push
to war with Iraq. During a rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza in October 2002, he
spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq: “I am not
opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars…I know that even a successful war
against Iraq will require a U. S. occupation of undetermined length, at
undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”
When Republican Peter Fitzgerald announced that he would vacate his
U.S. Senate seat in 2004 after only one term, Obama decided to run. He won 52
percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire
businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. After his
original Republican opponent in the general election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from
the race, the former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in. That July,
Obama gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in
Boston, shooting to national prominence with his eloquent call for unity among
“red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states.
In November 2004, Illinois delivered 70 percent of its votes to
Obama (versus Keyes’ 27 percent), sending him to Washington as only the third African American elected to
the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. During his tenure, Obama notably focused
on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and the health threat posed by avian
flu. With Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, he created a Web site that tracks all federal
spending, aimed at rebuilding citizens’ trust in government. He partnered with
another Republican, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy
weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia. In August 2006, Obama
traveled to Kenya, where thousands of people lined the streets to welcome him.
He published his second book, The Audacity of Hope, in October 2006.
2008 Presidential Campaign
On February 10, 2007, Obama formally
announced his candidacy for president of the United States. A victory in the Iowa primary
made him a viable challenger to the early frontrunner, the former first lady
and current New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he outlasted in a grueling
primary campaign to claim the Democratic nomination in early June 2008. Obama
chose as his running mate Joseph R. Biden Jr. Biden had been a U.S. senator
from Delaware
since 1972, was a one-time Democratic candidate for president and served as
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s opponent was
long-time Arizona
Senator John S. McCain, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner-of-war, who chose
Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. If elected, Palin would have been the
nation’s first-ever female vice-president.
As in the primaries, Obama’s
campaign worked to build support at the grassroots level and used what
supporters saw as the candidate’s natural charisma, unusual life story and
inspiring message of hope and change to draw impressive crowds to Obama’s
public appearances, both in the U.S. and on a campaign trip abroad. They worked
to bring new voters–many of them young or black, both demographics they
believed favored Obama–to become involved in the election.
A crushing financial crisis in the months leading up to the
election shifted the nation’s focus to economic issues, and both Obama and
McCain worked to show they had the best plan for economic improvement. With
several weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Sadly,
Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died after a battle with cancer
on November 3, the day before voters went to the polls. She had been a
tremendously influential force in her grandson’s life and had diligently
followed his historic run for office from her home in Honolulu.
On November 4, lines at polling stations around the nation heralded
a historic turnout and resulted in a Democratic victory, with Obama capturing
some Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) and key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won by Republicans in recent
elections. Taking the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park with Michelle and their two
young daughters, Malia and Sasha, Obama acknowledged the historic nature of his
win while reflecting on the serious challenges that lay ahead. “The road ahead
will be long, our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even
one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we
will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.”
Clancy's comment. This man and his wife would have to be two of the best stand-up speakers I've ever heard.
I'm ...
No comments:
Post a Comment