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Barack Obama
Barack Obama. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Barack Obama. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Barack Obama

This article is more than 16 years old
In his campaign to become the first black US president, the 'new rock star' of the Democratic party has leaned hard on his background, accentuating hope and opportunity, writes Richard Adams

The moment Barack Obama became a contender for the US presidency can be pinpointed quite precisely at just after 9pm on July 27, 2004. Although political junkies already knew he would be running for senator in Illinois, until then he was just a local politician from Chicago. Twenty minutes later, after a barnstorming, nationally televised speech to the Democratic party convention in Boston, Obama was catapulted into the front ranks of his party.

"Let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely," Obama began, outlining his unusual background: a father who grew up herding goats in Kenya and a mother from Kansas. "My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or 'blessed', believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success."

What stuck in many viewers' minds was Obama's theme of unity at a time of partisan division. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there's the United States of America," Obama said. "There's not a black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America. There's the United States of America." And there was room, he said, for "a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too".

The reaction was startling. The New York Times dubbed him "the Democratic party's new rock star" and CNN talked of "Obama-mania". Those watching in Boston expected John Kerry to be elected president and his defeat by George Bush sent many Democrats into deep depression. The memory of Obama's soaring speech and his resounding victory in the Illinois senate race was one of the brightest spots in a dismal election year. But almost no one in the audience, including Obama himself, expected that a little over two years later he would be a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

More than a little of his attraction comes from his kaleidoscopic personal history. His father was born in Nyanza, near Lake Victoria, and won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he met Obama's mother Ann Dunham, a white Kansan. The pair married and their son was born in Honolulu in August 1961 and given his father's name. But Obama senior left when his son was two years old, first to Harvard and then to Kenya to work as a government economist. Obama's mother later married an Indonesian, and the family moved to Jakarta in 1961, where Obama attended school until the age of 10.

The family returned to Hawaii and Obama was brought up by his grandparents and attended a prominent private school, Punahou, where he was known to classmates as Barry. He went on to attend university, first Occidental College in Los Angeles and then to the Ivy League prestige of Columbia to finish his undergraduate degree in 1983.

The years that followed were key. Rather than going directly to graduate school, Obama worked for four years for the Developing Communities Project in Chicago, a Saul Alinsky-inspired group aiming to mobilise grassroots organisations within the city's poor black neighbourhoods. Chicago was, and still is, a fulcrum of black activism. There Obama not only made his first forays into politics but at the Trinity United Church of Christ on the city's Southside he also found a comfortable place for his previously unformed religious beliefs.

At the age of 27, Obama was accepted to Harvard University's law school, where he graduated magna cum laude - with great honours - and was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, responsible for editing US jurisprudence's most prestigious publication. He was the first African-American to hold the post, and the resulting publicity brought with it a book deal, which resulted in the publication of Dreams From My Father. The book is remarkable for its candour and insight - revealing not only Obama's complex family tree but also his use of marijuana and cocaine as a student.

Graduating from Harvard, Obama returned to teach at the University of Chicago and work for a law firm specialising in civil rights. He met and married a fellow lawyer, Michelle Robinson, and they have two daughters together - Malia and Natasha. By 1996 he had been elected to the Illinois state senate, and was ready for greater things. In 2000 he made a misguided bid to win the nomination for a safe congressional seat but was decisively defeated by veteran incumbent Bobby Rush. "It was a race in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong," he recounted in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, published last year.

Obama's next opportunity was more successful. When an incumbent Republican senator stood down, one strong Democratic candidate declined to run and another was hurt by revelations of domestic violence, and he comfortably won the Democratic nomination. In the general election in November 2004 Obama's luck continued to hold. The Republican candidate was forced to withdraw after lurid sexual claims and Obama captured the seat with 70% of the vote.

The buzz surrounding Obama continued after the election - at one point his face was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Men's Vogue. The voices urging him to run for the presidency got louder, especially from Democrats wanting an antidote to Hillary Clinton. Others saw him as a fresh face untainted by the party's failures during the Bush era, especially as he had vocally opposed the invasion of Iraq. In October 2002, Obama told an anti-war rally in Chicago: "I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war ... I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences."

While his opposition to the Iraq war gives him an edge over rivals such as Clinton and John Edwards - who both voted to authorise the invasion - it is Obama's ethnic background that marks him out. Race remains an open wound in US society and many see Obama's candidacy as a way of salving it.

Obama is part of a new generation of black politicians - including Newark mayor Cory Booker and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick - who did not rise up through the civil rights movement or churches that launched the generation of Jessie Jackson. His father being a Kenyan places him outside debates over the painful legacy of slavery and segregation. But Obama has attracted criticism from the likes of Stanley Crouch, a black columnist for New York's Daily News, who wrote: "Other than colour, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves."

So far the campaign - headed by his media guru, David Axelrod - has consciously leaned on Obama's biography, accentuating hope and opportunity. That leaves many policy details blank, with the danger that such a campaign may wilt in the furnace of primary politics. In the blunt words of Rahm Emanuel, the influential Democratic congressional leader, to be tough enough to sustain a run for the White House, Obama's campaign must learn "the economic efficiency of the four-letter word" to win its fights.

Obama himself has few illusions as to the challenge he faces, telling an interviewer: "What I am constantly trying to do is balance a hard head with a big heart."

Life and times

Born: August 8 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii

Family: Married to Michelle Robinson Obama, with two children, Malia Ann and Sasha

Education: Graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and Harvard Law School in 1991. Became first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990

Career: Between 1985 and 1988, worked as a community organiser in Chicago, Illinois. Worked for Chicago law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland from 1993 to 1996. Taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993. Won a seat on the Illinois state senate in 1996 and, after a failed run for the House of Representatives in 2000, was elected senator for Illinois in 2004

Religion: Trinity United Church of Christ

Campaign Manager: David Plouffe

Media adviser: David Axelrod

Fundraising campaign chair: Penny Pritzker

Pollsters: Paul Harstad, Cornell Belcher

Policy director: Cassandra Butts

Website: barackobama.com

Senate website: obama.senate.gov

MySpace: myspace.com/barackobama

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