Early Career of Barack Obama

Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States. Barack Hussein Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu to Barack Obama, Sr., and Ann Dunham. His father was a black man from Kenya; his mother, a white woman from Kansas. Leaving the family when Barack was only two years old, his father later returned to Kenya, where he subsequently worked as a government economist. Obama was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Hawaii and then, for a four-year period, by his mother and her second husband in Indonesia. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1979 to 1981 before transferring to Columbia University, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science in 1983.

Obama is the author of Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). His 2008 book, Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise, outlined his vision for the country.

Early Career

In the mid-1980s, Obama moved to Chicago to help church-based groups with job-training programs, school reform, and other services. He received a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1991. While at Harvard he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. After returning to Chicago, Obama organized a voter-registration drive for Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign; worked as a civil-rights lawyer; and served as a lecturer (1992–1996) and senior lecturer (1996–2004), specializing in constitutional law, at the University of Chicago Law School. He married Michelle Robinson, a lawyer, in 1992.

As a Democratic member of the Illinois Senate (1997–2004), Obama was chair of that chamber's Public Health and Welfare Committee. He helped to pass the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provided tax cuts for Illinois families, as well as legislation expanding early childhood education. He was a main sponsor of the state's first campaign finance reform legislation in 25 years. The charismatic senator delivered the inspiring keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. That November Obama ran for and won election as one of Illinois's U.S. senators. His congressional victory was one of the few bright spots for the Democrats that year, given the Republicans' retention of the presidency and their pickup of additional seats in both the Senate and the House.

In the Senate Obama was a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works, Veterans Affairs, and Foreign Relations committees. He was an early opponent of the Iraq War. His chief legislative accomplishment was to cosponsor, with Republican Richard Lugar, a major nuclear nonproliferation bill.

2008 Presidential Race

In February 2007 the senator, standing on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., announced that he would run for the presidency in 2008. Some 16 months later, on June 3, 2008, Obama had gained a sufficient number of delegates through the primaries, caucuses, and the pledges of superdelegates to become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. In so doing, he not only defeated his principal rival and former front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, but also made history by becoming the first African American candidate to lead a major party ticket.

In staging his successful campaign for the nomination, Obama had finished first in more than a majority of the primaries and caucuses, including 11 consecutive contests in February that gave him momentum over Senator Clinton; raised over $300 million in campaign funds, largely through small Internet donations; and received some key endorsements, including those of Sen. Edward Kennedy and such former opponents for the nomination as former U.S. senator John Edwards of North Carolina and New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson.

Obama's campaign emphasized that he had been against the Iraq War from the beginning, a position that resonated with the primary voters, and one that set him part from Clinton. In addition, Obama presented himself as an outsider, ready to bring about change in Washington. Moreover, his oratorical powers helped him to connect with a broad range of voters. In March, after anti-American and racially charged sermons by Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, came to light, the senator delivered a well-received speech calling for racial healing. He later disassociated himself from Wright and resigned from the church. Once it became clear that Obama would be the presumptive nominee, the senator focused his attention on the race against Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in the November election. Attracting the women and white working-class voters who had been so loyal to Senator Clinton were among the challenges that Obama faced.

Obama officially received the nomination of his political party at the Democratic National Convention, which was held in Denver on August 25–28. His acceptance speech was an extraordinary spectacle, delivered at INVESCO Field to an audience of over 84,000 people. At the time of this convention, Obama led McCain in most national polls and political observers considered him the front-runner. Political observers had also lauded his choice of Delaware senator Joseph Biden as his running mate. Whereas Obama was vulnerable to charges that he lacked sufficient experience in national politics and foreign policy to be president, Biden brought a record of three decades of service in Congress and a strong reputation for his knowledge of international affairs.

Opinion polls at this time showed that voters largely blamed the Republican Party and Pres. George W. Bush for an ailing economy. The polls also evidenced a strong public preference for a candidate who they believed could bring substantial change to national policy and who was seen as a better agent for change than McCain was. Throughout the campaign Obama emphasized McCain’s past support for many of the unpopular policies of the Bush administration.

Despite these advantages, the campaign became closely competitive after a successful Republican Party nominating convention and following McCain’s surprising choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. Initially, the choice of Palin energized the conservative voting base of the GOP (Grand Old Party) and also caused a very significant shift in the polls among white female voters who had been leaning to Obama. Yet the race eventually shifted back to Obama, who commanded a significant lead after a series of three presidential debates and a vice-presidential debate, and most significantly after a stunning collapse of the U.S. banking sector.

The public largely considered the Democratic candidates Obama and Biden to have won the televised debates. Obama’s economic message—including calls for stronger government regulation of the financial industry—resonated positively with voters during a time of economic uncertainty. Obama successfully offered a message of optimism, promising to prevent American jobs from being shipped overseas, to provide a tax cut to 95% of the population, to create a national health-care plan, and to deliver a variety of other domestic programs that would improve peoples’ lives.

Another positive for Obama was the huge advantage he achieved in campaign fund-raising. Because he had earlier decided not to accept public matching funds, which would have limited his fund-raising, he was able to raise an enormous amount of money for his candidacy, particularly over the Internet. He used this advantage to establish a powerful grassroots operation throughout the country, as well as to significantly outspend his opponent in television advertising. In many of the critical battleground states in the electoral college, Obama ran as many as four times the number of television advertisements as his opponent. With all of these advantages, in the later weeks of the campaign Obama opened up a sizable lead in national opinion polls.

By the end of election day, Nov. 4, 2008, an estimated 133 million American voters had cast their ballots—the highest total in U.S. history. Obama won a commanding victory; he took some 53% of the vote to McCain's 46%, and 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173. Late on the night of the election, as it became clear that he was the first African American to be elected president, Obama addressed some 125,000 people in Chicago's Grant Park. His speech continued his campaign theme of hope but also warned of the daunting tasks that lay ahead. "Even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century," he said. "There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and, for us to lead, alliances to repair."