Home »

[TiCam]

Barry in Wakiki beach, Hawaii

"All of these different strands in me—the black, the white, the African—all of that has contributed directly to my success because when I meet people, I see a piece of myself in them. And maybe they see a piece of themselves in me," Senator Barack explains.

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas and a black man who came from Kenya to study at the University of Hawaii, where the two met in 1960. They were married for a brief time. His father, also named Barack, went on to graduate studies at Harvard and then back to Kenya, where he had two other families, one with a Kenyan wife from before his marriage to Barack's mother, and another with a second American wife. Obama saw his father one more time, several years later, and grew up idolizing him. Obama's Midwestern mother nurtured her son's appreciation of and identification with black culture.

The not-so-simple story of Barack Obama's youth

Barack Obama has dedicated his life to public service as a community organizer, civil rights attorney, and leader in the Illinois state Senate. Obama now continues his fight for working families following his recent election to the United States Senate and now as President of the United States of America.

Life without a father

It was a complicated time.

Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama's birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. The U.S. military was expanding on the island of Oahu, home to the new capital of Honolulu. And a young, iconoclastic white woman who had defied the social mores of the day by marrying a dashing black man from Kenya was coping with the fact that her new husband essentially had abandoned her and their young child in 1963 to study at Harvard.

Oblivious to all of this was a perpetually smiling toddler the entire family called Barry. In snapshots, the boy is a portrait of childhood bliss. He played on the beach. He posed in lifeguard stands. He rode a bright blue tricycle with red, white and blue streamers dangling from the handlebars.

In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background--raised for a time in the Third World, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban politics--makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political system.

Barrack and mother

Not as well known is the fact that the many people who raised him were nearly as diverse as the places where he grew up. There was his mother, Ann, a brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams.

"Looking back now, I'd say he really is kind of the perfect combination of all of them," said his half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. "All of them were imperfect but all of them loved him fiercely, and I believe he took the best qualities from each of them."

During her son's earliest years, Obama's mother, whose full name was Stanley Ann Dunham because her father desperately had wished for a boy, attended college at the University of Hawaii. Known as Ann throughout her adult life, she kept to herself. She became estranged from her husband, Barack Obama Sr., after his departure for Harvard and rarely saw the group of friends that they had made at the University of Hawaii.

One of those friends, Neil Abercrombie, then a graduate student in the sociology department, frequently would see young Obama around town with his grandfather Stanley, whom Obama called "Gramps."

"Stanley loved that little boy," said Abercrombie, now a Democratic congressman from Hawaii. "In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous."

A close friend of Obama's from their teenage years, Greg Orme, spent so much time with Dunham that he, too, called him "Gramps." Orme recalled that years later, at Obama's wedding reception in Chicago, Obama brought the crowd to tears when he spoke of his recently deceased maternal grandfather and how he made a little boy with an absent father feel as though he was never alone.

Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii during Obama's Punahou days, was more reserved but seemed to love having her grandson's friends over to play and hang out.

Obama's mother and grandparents

"Those were robust years full of energy and cacophony, and she loved all of it," Soetoro-Ng said of her grandmother, who has lived alone since her husband died in 1992.

Ann and the boy lived with the Dunhams in Honolulu until Obama was 6. Then his young mother, now divorced, met and married an Indonesian student studying at the University of Hawaii.

In one family photo before the mother and son moved to Indonesia, Obama walks barefoot on Waikiki Beach, arms outstretched as though embracing the entire beautiful life around him. The sailboat the Manu Kai (bird of the sea, in English) is about to set sail behind him.

Obama, too, was about to journey far from these familiar shores.

Memories of a racial awakening?

Obama has told the story--one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness--time and again, in remarkable detail.

He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an "ambush attack."

The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.

"I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," Obama wrote of the magazine photos in "Dreams."

Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in "Dreams." He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of Jakarta.

The reality was less tidy.

Obama and his mother joined her new husband, a kind man who later would become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer, family members in Indonesia say. Their Jakarta neighborhood resembled a village more than the bustling metropolis the city is today. Electricity had arrived only a couple of years earlier. Half the homes were old bamboo huts; half, including the Soetoro house, were nicer, with brick or concrete and red-tiled roofs.

Former playmates remember Obama as "Barry Soetoro," or simply "Barry," a chubby little boy very different from the gangly Obama people know today. All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood--primarily because he was bigger and had black features.

Obama, Ann, Maya and Gramps

He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. He also was one of the only neighborhood children whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school in an area populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal landowning Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. Some of the Betawi children threw rocks at the open Catholic classrooms, remembered Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in 2nd grade.

Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped their language and who was very quiet as a result. But one word Obama learned quickly in his new home was curang, which means "cheater."

When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, "Curang, curang!" When a friend gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled, "Curang, curang!"

Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most mercilessly. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn't want him tagging along, followed a group of Adi's friends to a nearby swamp.

"They held his hands and feet and said, 'One, two, three,' and threw him in the swamp," recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up. "Luckily he could swim. They only did it to Barry."

The other kids would scrap with him sometimes, but because Obama was bigger and better-fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat.

"He was built like a bull. So we'd get three kids together to fight him," recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. "But it was only playing."

Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian in six months. Yet those who knew him disputed that during recent interviews.

Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama's 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel sounds. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his studies as a result.

The teacher, who still lives in Obama's old neighborhood, remembers that he always sat in the back corner of her classroom. "His friends called him `Negro,'

"Darmawan said. The term wasn't considered a slur at the time in Indonesia.

Still, all of his teachers at the Catholic school recognized leadership qualities in him. "He would be very helpful with friends. He'd pick them up if they fell down,'' Darmawan recalled. "He would protect the smaller ones."

Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most telling story.

In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama "wrote he wanted to be president," Sinaga recalled. "He didn't say what country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy."

When Obama was in 4th grade, the Soetoro family moved. Their new neighborhood was only 3 miles to the west, but a world away. Elite Dutch colonists once lived there; the Japanese moved in during their occupation of Indonesia in World War II. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and sculpted bushes.

Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school--this time a predominantly Muslim one--where he was enrolled. As he had at the old school, Obama sat in a back corner. He sketched decidedly American cartoon characters during class.

"He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman," said another friend, Widiyanto Hendro Cahyono, 46. "Barry liked to draw heroes."

Then, one day about a year after he had arrived, Obama was gone.

"Suddenly we asked, 'Where's Barry?'

"remembered Ati Kisjanto, 45. "And we were told he had already moved away."

Not one of 'the brothers'

As much as young Obama stood out physically in the classrooms of Indonesia, so, too, did he at Punahou School, the elite private prep academy his mother moved him back to Hawaii to attend.

Obama, his mother and new baby sister, Maya, moved into a small apartment near the school's sprawling, lush campus. And from the first day of 5th grade right up until his graduation in 1979, the young man was one of only a small number of black students at a school heavily populated by the children of Hawaii's wealthy, most of them white and Asian.

Then and now, Punahou and Hawaii liked to see themselves as more diverse and colorblind than the rest of the nation. But the reality felt far different for the handful of African-Americans attending classes there.

Rik Smith, a black Punahou student two years older than Obama, remembers a Halloween when white students would dress as slaves, coming to school in tattered clothes with their faces painted black with shoe polish. "Like being black was a funny costume in and of itself," recalled Smith, now a doctor who specializes in geriatrics in California.

"Punahou was an amazing school," Smith said. "But it could be a lonely place. ... Those of us who were black did feel isolated--there's no question about that."

As a result, the handful of black students at Punahou informally banded together. "The brothers," as Lewis Anthony Jr., an African-American in the class of 1977 put it, hung out together, often talking about issues involving race and civil rights. They sought out parties, especially at the military bases on the island, where African-Americans would be in attendance.

Obama, however, was not a part of that group, according to Anthony and Smith. Both of them seemed surprised to hear that in "Dreams"--which neither of them had read--Obama writes about routinely going to parties at Schofield Barracks and other military bases in order to hang out with "Ray," who like Anthony and Smith was two years ahead of him in school.

"We'd all do things together, but Obama was never there," Smith said, adding that they often brought along the few other black underclassmen. "I went to those parties up at Schofield but never saw him at any of them."

Obama devotes many words in his book to exploring his outsider status at Punahou. But any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that he had a racially diverse group of friends--many of whom often would crowd into his grandparents' apartment, near Punahou, after school let out.

One of those kids was Orme, a smart, respectful teenager from a white, middle-class family. Though Orme spent most afternoons with Obama and considered him one of his closest friends, he said Obama never brought up issues of race, never talked about feeling out of place at Punahou.

"He never verbalized any of that," Orme said during a telephone interview from his home in Oregon. "He was a very provocative thinker. He would bring up worldly topics far beyond his years. But we never talked race."

Whatever misgivings Obama had about Punahou, attending the school was largely his decision.

When his mother, a woman said to have been born with a keen sense of wanderlust, announced she was returning to Indonesia, Obama, then a teenager, asked to stay in Hawaii, according to Soetoro-Ng, 36, who still lives in Honolulu. Once again, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who had been as much parents as grandparents throughout the young man's life, said he could live with them.

Obama's teach in Hawaii

"I don't imagine the decision to let him stay behind was an easy one for anyone," Soetoro-Ng said. "But he wanted to remain at Punahou. He had friends there, he was comfortable there, and to a kid his age, that's all that mattered."

One place Obama has said he found a sense of community was on the basketball court. A member of the varsity squad, though not a starter, Obama and his teammates brought Punahou the state championship in 1979, his senior year.

Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called "Barry O'Bomber" by teammates. Alan Lum, who later would coach the basketball team at Punahou as well as teach elementary school there, recalled Obama as always being the first to confront coaches when he felt they were not fairly allotting playing time.

Obama wasn't shy about advocating for himself and his fellow backup players, Lum said. "He'd go right up to the coach during a game and say, `Coach, we're killing this team. Our second string should be playing more.'

But it was on the court in the off-season that Obama seemed to be even happier. Back then, Punahou was a completely open campus, with several basketball courts where 20-something men from Honolulu would come in the late afternoon for what often turned into flashy, highly competitive pickup sessions. Many of the men were black.

Orme would stay for the games.

"At the time, it was about basketball," said Orme, who has remained friends with Obama over the years and who plays basketball with him almost every Christmas when the two return to Hawaii to visit family. "But looking back now I can see he was seeking more from those guys than that. He was probably studying them and learning from them. He was a younger black man looking for guidance."

Old friend disputes memoir

Ray

Every senior graduating from Punahou gets to design a quarter-page in the yearbook. They compose notes to friends and family and include photos or quotes that best represent them.

On page 271 of the 1979 Oahuan, Obama's entry reflects the crossroads he found himself at as he prepared for life beyond Hawaii. He thanked "Tut and Gramps," his nicknames for Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, but didn't mention his faraway mother.

He also thanked the "Choom Gang," a reference to "chooming," Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. Obama admits in "Dreams" that during high school he frequently smoked marijuana, drank alcohol, even used cocaine occasionally.

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama wrote in "Dreams."

In the book, Obama discusses race and racism at his high school with one other Punahou student, "Ray,'' the young black man described in detail in "Dreams" as perpetually angry at the white world around him. "It's their world, all right," Ray supposedly shouts at Obama. "They own it and we in it. So just get the f--- outta my face."

But Kakugawa, in the interview Saturday, said Obama's recollection of that conversation was mistaken. "I did say we were playing in their world," he explained, "but that had nothing to do with race. He knew that."

Kakugawa explained that he had meant they were playing in the world of the elite people who populated and ran Punahou--famous Hawaiian families like the Doles, owners of the pineapple fortune, or the original developers of Waikiki, the tourist mecca. "It just wasn't a race thing," he reiterated again and again.

Obama confirmed in an interview earlier this month that the Ray character in "Dreams" actually is Kakugawa.

In another passage from the book, Ray complains that white Punahou girls don't want to date black guys and that he and Obama don't get enough playing time as athletes, speculating that they'd be "treated different if we was white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or f------ Eskimo."

But Kakugawa, a convicted drug felon, said Saturday that he had never been the "prototypical angry black guy" that Obama portrays. Because of his biracial heritage, he said, he was "like everyone in Hawaii, a mix of a lot of things."

A close friend and track teammate of Kakugawa, John Hagar, also said he was surprised by Obama's description of the character representing Kakugawa as an angry young black man. "I never picked up on that," Hagar said. "He was just one of those perfect [ethnic] mixes of everything you see in Hawaii."

Asked Saturday about Kakugawa's recollections, the Obama campaign declined to make the senator available. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama "stands by his recollections of these events as related in his book."

"There's no doubt that Keith's story is tragic and sad," Burton added.

While Obama rocketed to political prominence, his friend headed down the troubled road Obama had feared he was following. Since 1995, Kakugawa has spent more than 7 years in California prisons and months in Los Angeles County Jail on cocaine and auto theft charges.

Another story put forth in "Dreams" as one of Obama's pivotal moments of racial awakening checks out essentially as he wrote it. Obama recounts taking two white friends, including Orme, to a party attended almost entirely by African-Americans.

According to the book, the characters representing Orme and the other friend asked to leave the party after just an hour, saying they felt out of place. The night, Obama later wrote, made him furious as he realized that whites held a "fundamental power" over blacks.

"One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school. And he clearly didn't appreciate that," Orme said. "I never knew, until reading the book later, how much that night had upset him."

High School Graduation

As Obama's senior year drew to a close, his mother sent him letters from afar, about life in Indonesia and her work there with non-profit groups doing economic development. She also sent advice about his future. College would be his next stop. She mixed encouragement to keep up his grades with laments about American politics.

"It is a shame we have to worry so much about [grade point], but you know what the college entrance competition is these days," she wrote. "Did you know that in Thomas Jefferson's day, and right up through the 1930s, anybody who had the price of tuition could go to Harvard? ... I don't see that we are producing many Thomas Jeffersons nowadays. Instead we are producing Richard Nixons."

In the spring of 1979, Obama's mother and Maya, Barack's younger half sister by almost nine years, flew to Hawaii for his high school graduation. If young Obama had struggled to find a place at Punahou, it was well hidden on this day as well. He laughed and posed for photos with friends.

With a trimmed Afro, Hawaiian flower leis around his neck, Obama was surrounded by the disparate people who shaped him. In one photo he hugs his beaming sister.

In a striking snapshot with his grandparents, Stanley smiles proudly while Madelyn hugs him fiercely, as though she doesn't want to let him go forth into a world far from the remote island that for so long had been his home.

Obama and sister Maya at graduation

THE COLLEGE YEARS

Obama says he was still goofing off for the first two years of college, which he spent at Occidental in Los Angeles. He continued to play basketball, which friends say he is still quite good at, and was involved in other organized activities. He also spent "a lot of time having fun."

He changed course junior year when he transferred to Columbia. "I realized I wanted to be in a more vibrant, urban environment," he says. As a transfer student, he didn't receive housing, so lived off campus in various makeshift arrangements, such as living in one bedroom of a three-bedroom apartment, and renting a sixth-floor walk-up with slanting floors on the East Side, "just north of gentrification," as he describes it.

As he pursued a political science degree, specializing in international relations, Obama says he was somewhat involved with the Black Students Organization and participated in anti-apartheid activities. "Mostly, my years at Columbia were an intense period of study," he says. "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."

Obama says it is difficult to separate his college experience at Columbia from the urban experience of living in New York City, and his memoir offers little about his time on campus. One noteworthy event during Obama's college years, however, was his learning in 1982 of his father's death from a car accident. It was not until years later, however, when Obama's older half-sister visited him in Chicago, that he learned how inaccurate his image of his father had been. After working for an American oil company in Kenya and then for Kenya's Ministry of Tourism, the economist fell out of favor with the government, was blacklisted from finding work and was socially outcast. He became a heavy drinker, turned abusive to his American wife and eventually was destitute, borrowing money from relatives for food, as Obama describes his sister's account in his memoir.

Dad's only visit to see Barry

"All my life, I had carried a single image of my father … The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader. That image had suddenly vanished," Obama wrote. "Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! The king is overthrown, I thought. … Whatever I do, it seems, I won't do much worse than that, I thought."

Upon graduating from Columbia, Obama attempted a career as a community organizer. He wrote that when classmates weren't sure what that was, he didn't have a sufficient answer for them. "Instead, I'd pronounce the need for change," he wrote. "Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

"That's what I'll do, I'll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change."

Obama wrote letters to community organizations all around the country asking for a job, but received no positive responses. He ended up working as a research analyst at a consulting company before being promoted to financial writer. "I had my own office, my own secretary and money in the bank," he says in his book. But he left to pursue his original goal of activism. For six months, Obama carried on another letter-writing campaign seeking a job and worked with an environmental group to encourage City College students to recycle. At last, he landed a job with a nonprofit in Chicago.

Obama drove to his new home, not knowing anyone there, and worked for three years in low-income neighborhoods helping churches create job training programs and advocating school reform.

Grandparents visiting Barry in Columbia

In his late 20s, Obama attended Harvard Law School, where he received national publicity when he became the first African-American president of Harvard Law Review. Publishers contacted him about telling his life story, and he began to work on his memoir, which was published in 1995. It had a 15,000-copy print run but didn't win a large readership and soon slipped out of print. Last summer, in the midst of Obama-mania, stray copies started selling on eBay for 10 times the original cover price. In August, a division of Random House reissued it in paperback, and the book promptly climbed to The New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list.

"He has real intelligence and real substance." — Dick Devine

Obama spent one summer during law school as a summer associate in Chicago at the prestigious law firm Sidley & Austin. His mentor there was a first-year associate, Michelle Robinson, a Princeton and Harvard Law graduate who, despite resisting his initial advances, married Obama in 1992, the year after he graduated from law school.

"He could have written his ticket anywhere and made a fortune in industry or at a law firm," says Axelrod, the media adviser. Instead, Obama went the route of lower-paying but more gratifying work, as did his wife. "I always felt that the value of a really good education is you can take more risks," Obama said in November on Charlie Rose. "Ultimately, if I really need a job, if I've got to pay the bills, I'm going to be able to find one."

As a public-interest lawyer in Chicago, Obama worked on cases involving voting rights, employment discrimination and low-income housing. He also took a position as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught constitutional law and a seminar on civil rights, until taking leave a year ago. "They'd love nothing better than to have him as a tenured professor," says Abner Mikva, a former Congressman and a friend and colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago. "His student ratings are off the charts."

In 1995, at his friends' urging, Obama ran for political office. "I think that the reason I got into politics was simply because I saw the law as being inadequate to the task," he explained on Charlie Rose. "It's very difficult to bring about social change at this point through the courts. [And] community organizing was too localized and too small."

In 1996, Obama won the race for state senator representing Illinois' 13th district, which includes Hyde Park, the South Side and the University of Chicago. Unfortunately, it was at the cost of some political sore feelings. He had entered the race because the would-be incumbent, Democrat Alice Palmer, decided to run for a Congressional seat rather than for re-election as a state senator. Obama initially had her blessing to run for her state senate seat. When she lost the Congressional race, however, she decided to run for re-election in the senate and asked Obama to step aside. He refused, and she withdrew. Obama later called it "an unfortunate situation."

Obama admits to a fiercely competitive streak, yet he hasn't made any apparent ene

Barry'-s sister Maya

mies. In addition to being personable, he is tall and athletic, with a dazzling smile. In Springfield, the seat of Illinois politics, he joined in a regular 6:30 a.m. basketball game and took part in a long-running bipartisan poker game with other legislators. He has taken up golf in recent years and honed his skills so as not to be beaten too easily, an associate says. He is known for remembering things, large and small, and he doesn't like to disappoint anyone. He is a charmer, for sure, whose only obvious defect might be that he hasn't been able to give up smoking (cigarettes, that is).

Obama is a longtime member of the congregation of Trinity United Church of Christ. His pastor was the first person he thanked by name in his election night victory speech last November. Obama's wife is the director of the office of community affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and they have two daughters, Malia (6) and Sasha (3). Obama says that his favorite leisure pursuit is "rolling on the floor with my 3-year-old and 6-year-old and spending time with my family." He takes time out for movies and is "looking forward to the time when I'll again be able to read a book, and not just a policy brief."

As a state senator, Obama chaired the Public Health and Welfare Committee and championed a number of social justice issues. One of his first efforts was working on the state's implementation of the federal welfare reform of 1996. "At the time, he was close to being a freshman, and was in the minority in the state senate, and yet he managed to be extraordinarily important and influential on that issue," says Bouman, advocacy director of the Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago. Obama subsequently sponsored a bill, which passed into law, to require the state to share its data on the welfare program with researchers. (Some states won't disclose such data.) "It isn't all that sexy, but if you're a serious, thinking person who cares about public policy as well as politics, it was a forward-thinking thing to do," Bouman says.

The state senator also took on the issue of curbing racial profiling, advocated expanding health insurance coverage for the poor, and sponsored a bill to require videotaping police interrogations in homicide cases. Obama was among the lawmakers recruited by prosecutors to reform the juvenile justice code. "He was one of the few legislators who had 1) read the proposed legislation, 2) understood the major issues and 3) was willing to sit down and discuss the substantive points," says Devine, Cook County prosecutor.

Obama's agenda is liberal. He's not interested in sacrificing his values, nor will he be swayed by public opinion polls, those who work with him say. Yet he is a pragmatist. Bouman says Obama is the man to manage the situation "when there are competing interests and entrenched opinions or real battle lines drawn. Some things got done in Illinois because Barack got the sides to sit down and talk to each other and hammer something out."

On Meet the Press after the election, host Tim Russert asked Obama if it is possible to negotiate on divisive issues such as abortion. "Well, look, I think some are more difficult than others," Obama replied, and went on to give an example of finding common ground. "There's no doubt that on the issue of abortion, oftentimes it's very difficult to split the difference," he said, "although we can agree on the notion that none of us are pro-abortion, and all of us would like to see a reduction in unwanted pregnancies, for example, and we could focus on those issues."

Obama criticizes the nastiness of politics, trumpets positive messages and likes to say that Americans are ready for politicians who "can disagree without being disagreeable," a phrase he adopted from the late Illinois Senator Paul Simon.

Not many skeletons have been exhumed from Obama's closet. Salon.com's "Muckraker" columnist went on a mission to harvest some dirt on Obama's environmental record, but ended up declaring, "This guy is a bona fide, card-carrying, bleeding-heart greenie." Despite openly fretting about his family's financial stress, Obama apparently hasn't accepted any side payments from special interests. "He's absolutely clean," Bouman says. "Nobody can pay for as much as a Coke for him, and that's not the culture in Springfield, Illinois. It's pretty much no holds barred."

"I got into politics because I saw the law as being inadequate to the task."

Raising money for campaigns, which includes the necessity of appeals to personal friends and deep-pocketed community figures, was until recently a trying experience for Obama. "He wasn't comfortable with the process," Mikva says, "but he learned to be really comfortable with it."

Not, however, before insufficient funds was one factor that sank a bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2000, against the advice of some more experienced politicians, Obama challenged the Democratic incumbent, Bobby Rush. "A lot of people were frustrated with the incumbent and came to Barack and asked him to run," says Dan Shomon, who managed that campaign. They raised $535,000, not enough for television ads, Shomon says. Obama was stomped in the primary; he said he learned from the experience, and went back to the state senate.

Two years later, Obama announced he was running for U.S. senator. The incumbent, Republican Peter Fitzgerald, was retiring. It was a long shot. "The announcement was received respectably, but people didn't believe we could win," Axelrod says. "There were many turns of fortune in this thing."

The first challenge was fund raising. "It was an uphill battle at the beginning," Jarrett says. "State senate is very different from statewide office." Obama didn't have much name recognition outside of his district, and with a crowded field of seven candidates in the primaries, there were other places for Democrats to send their money. Even many of those who did contribute, Jarrett says, did so saying that while they wanted to support him, they didn't think he could win the race. "It was discouraging at times, because people who should have been with us — funders, labor and political leaders — weren't with us," Axelrod says.

Among the competitors were a popular state comptroller and a businessman who spent $29 million on his campaign. Obama raised $6 million in the primary, enough to get on TV and introduce himself to a broader constituency. His message got across. On March 16, he won the primary with 53 percent of the votes — more than his six rivals combined. That's when the national attention started and money began to flow more easily; the campaign raised another $15 million for the general election.

"Every single break that Obama didn't get in the Congressional race, he got in the Senate race," says Shomon, political director of the Obama campaign. "There were a lot of factors aligned to our benefit."

One big break came in June, when Obama's would-be formidable Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs partner, withdrew from the race amidst news of a sex scandal. That sent Republican Party leaders scrambling to find a replacement candidate, and Obama later joked on The Late Show With David Letterman that the Republicans "couldn't find anyone out of the 12 million people in Illinois to run against me." Ryan was replaced by Marylander Alan Keyes, an African American who worked in the Reagan administration and has run for president.

More good fortune came in the form of the Kerry campaign inviting Obama to deliver the convention's keynote address. "They wanted somebody to represent the diversity of the party, and people knew he was a good speaker," Shomon says.

Obama is a natural and polished orator. What he has had to work on, those who know him say, are his one-on-one connections. During his eight years in the state senate, Obama spent more time with his constituents and learned to be an attentive listener, they say. Those skills were essential in connecting with statewide voters during the Senate campaign. Obama successfully appealed to inner-city blacks and suburban professionals as well as downstate farmers and factory workers. When he reached out to the state's rural areas, he was able to relate to the farmers there because "those folks were very much like the grandparents from Kansas who raised him," Axelrod says.

Obama drafted the convention speech on paper during two nights in a hotel room during the campaign. He writes all of his speeches, bills and other important documents, according to Shomon. When Obama finished the draft of the speech, he faxed a copy to Axelrod, who says, "I was reading it and handing each page to my wife, and my mouth was agape, because it was beautiful and profound. How many people in public life can write like this?" Axelrod says the consultants and the Kerry camp recommended few changes, and 80 percent of the final speech was the same as the original draft.

It was a hit. What first struck the audience was Obama's family's story. He said his foreign father "grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack." He described his paternal grandfather working in the kitchen as a servant to the British. Obama talked about his maternal grandfather "working on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression," enlisting to serve in World War II the day after the Pearl Harbor attack and coming home after the war to study on the G.I. Bill.

"[My parents] would give me an African name, Barack, or 'blessed,' believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success," he said. "They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential."

"The American people are looking for common-sense, practical solutions."

Obama delivered a positive message of diversity and unity and described "the true genius of America" as being "that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted, at least, most of the time."

He addressed "fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents … " His attacks on the Bush administration were descriptive rather than combative. He said, for instance, "If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties."

Obama said he had a message for "the pundits [who] like to slice and dice our country into Red States and Blue States … 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."

Obama gets a hug from his grandmother Madelyn as

his grandfather Stanley beams

The message seemed to work, for the Democratic Party and, especially, for Obama himself. "He was shot out of a cannon," Axelrod says. Seemingly every media outlet wanted to do a story about him, his ratings in his senatorial race jumped and he received thousands of invitations to events and to podiums. He became, while still running for his first national office, a national celebrity. "He's really on stage 24/7 now," Shomon says. "He can't go to the bathroom without someone recognizing him."

Friends and supporters have grown mildly concerned at the amount of attention that Obama has received. "He's risen so fast that it's very hard, for anyone, not to inhale some of this marvelous national press he's been getting," says Mikva, his friend and political mentor. "If you start to believe that you can't do wrong and that you walk on water, you stop asking for advice, and it will be your downfall."

Mikva and others close to Obama say, however, that they believe he can handle it as well as anyone. And if he should stumble over his ego, his wife can be relied upon to prune it.

"I've been blessed with a relatively calm, steady temperament and am someone who reminds myself that it's never as good as it seems and never as bad as it seems," Obama says.

With a campaign motto of "Yes we can," Obama won 70 percent of the vote. He likes to point out that he shared one million voters with Bush, confirmation of his theory that the Red and Blue America characterization is an oversimplification and that many individuals are conflicted about which party to identify with. "The American people are a non-ideological people," Obama said after the election on Meet the Press. "They very much are looking for common-sense, practical solutions to the problems that they face."

Obama is eager to solve problems, yet realistic about his place in the Senate. "I rank 99th in seniority and I'm in a minority party that took some hits in the last election," he says. "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 education reform.

"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."

As for speculation that he could be the country's first black president, Obama says that he will not run for anything in 2008. He is quick to temper high expectations and scrying about his lofty political future with quips about how he doesn't yet know where the Senate bathrooms are, and how he'll be "sharpening pencils and scrubbing floors" for the first few years.

"He says that the first thing is for him to learn to be a first-rate senator," says Jarrett, the finance committee chair. "If that leads to something else one day, fabulous. But first things first."