President-elect
Early life
Biracial background: Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was a student from Kenya who herded goats as a child. His mother, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kan., was a student at the University of Hawaii and the daughter of a furniture salesman. She married Obama Sr. unaware that he was already married to a woman in Kenya, with whom he had two children. Two years later, Obama Sr. accepted a scholarship at Harvard University and moved to Boston, and the couple divorced.
To Indonesia: Dunham married an Indonesian student named Lolo Soetero, and in 1967, when Barack was 6, the family moved to Jakarta. Barack (known as “Barry” as a child) attended Indonesian schools for four years. He was 9 when his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born. In 1971, Dunham sent Barack back to Honolulu to live with his grandparents, and in 1972 she left her husband and moved back to Hawaii with Maya. When Barack was in the fifth grade, his father came to visit him briefly — their first meeting since he was a toddler.
To college: Obama played basketball in high school, graduated with honors in 1979 and enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles. There he befriended Black students — who were few and far between everywhere else he had lived — but he had difficulty seeing himself as one of them. After two years, he transferred to Columbia University in New York, where he started running three miles a day and immersed himself in his studies. In 1982, he was informed in a call from Africa that his father had been killed in a car accident.
Early career
Community organizer: Obama graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science, and in 1985 he moved to Chicago and worked as a community organizer with poor residents of the city’s South Side. Despite his atheistic upbringing, he joined theTrinity United Church of Christ. In 1988, he traveled to Kenya to meet his grandmother, half-siblings and other relatives.
Harvard standout: In fall 1988, he enrolled at Harvard Law School. The following summer, he worked as an intern at Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where he met and began dating Michelle Robinson, a Harvard Law grad and first-year associate. In 1990, Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, the first Black man to hold the prestigious post. In 1991, he graduated magna cum laude and retu
On to politics: In 1996, Obama ran for and won an Illinois state Senate seat representing Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park. During his eight years in the state Senate, he would introduce more than 20 successful pieces of legislation.
One small failure, one big success
Failed House run: In 2000, in the biggest miscalculation of his career, he ran for a U.S. House seat held by four term incumbent Bobby Rush, a charismatic former Black Panther. Rush defeated him by a 2-1 vote in the Democratic primary.
Race for Senate: In 2003, with a one-term Illinois senator retiring, Obama entered the race for the U.S. Senate. He easily won the Democratic primary against a multimillionaire businessman whose ex-wife accused him of domestic abuse, and his Republican rival dropped out of the race in June 2004 after his ex-wife said he took her to sex clubs. To oppose Obama, the GOP drafted Alan Keyes, a conservative radio talk show host from Maryland.
Rising star: Obama was chosen to give the keynote address on July 27, 2004, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, where he said, “There is not a Black America and a White America, and Latino America and Asian America, there is the United States of America.” Obama went on to defeat Keyes with more than 70 percent of the vote. Obama, then 43, had the distinction of being elected to the Senate with relative ease.
Election 2008
Presidential run: Obama announced his run for the presidency in February 2007 at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill. He proved to be a standout at fundraising, and he won the nation’s first electoral contest, in Iowa. He went on to win 13 out of 22 states Feb. 5, Super Tuesday. His neck-and-neck delegate race with Sen. Hillary Clinton made this year’s primary contest one of the closest in history. Controversy dogged Obama when the media broadcast inflammatory quotes from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But despite narrowly losing many of the later primaries, Obama’s lead in the delegate count forced Clinton to drop out of the race June 7. Obama named Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate, formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington, D. C., and defeated John McCain on Nov. 4 to become the 44th President of the United States.
— San Jose Mercury News
