Obama, Barack

Source:

 African American National Biography

Obama, Barack

(4 Aug. 1961– ),

lawyer, writer, U.S. Senator, and President of the United States, was born Barack Hussein Obama Jr. in Honolulu, Hawaii, the only child of Barack Obama, a government official in Kenya, and Stanley Anne Dunham, an educator. His mother was a white American originally from Kansas, and his father was a black Kenyan. The couple met while studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and separated when their son was two years old. Obama Sr. left Hawaii to study at Harvard University and later returned to Africa to work as an economic planner for the Kenyan government. After the couple divorced, Anne Dunham married Lolo Soertoro, an Indonesian businessman, with whom she had a daughter, Maya.

Hawaii was the primary site of Barack's childhood and adolescence, although from the age of six to ten he lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the household of his stepfather. For his secondary schooling Obama attended the elite Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, graduating in 1979. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia University in New York City, where he received a BA in Political Science in 1983. He then worked for several years as a community organizer in Chicago, Illinois, before entering Harvard Law School in 1988. It was at Harvard that influential observers first glimpsed the intellectual power, political dexterity, and personal magnetism that have subsequently become widely appreciated. Obama earned a position as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious forum in legal academia, and then in 1990 proceeded to be elected as its president, the first African American to ascend to that post.

Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois and 2008 presidential candidate, speaks at a charity event in New York City, 4 December 2006. (AP Images.)

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After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1991, Obama returned to Chicago where he reconnected with community organizing and married a fellow lawyer, Michelle Robinson, in 1992. The couple had two daughters, Malia and Natasha (known as Sasha). After working on PROJECT VOTE, a voter registration effort in 1992 that helped win Illinois for the Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton and the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Carol Moseley Braun, he began work as an associate attorney with the law firm of Miner, Barnhill, and Galland in 1993. Obama also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 to 2004, but it became increasingly apparent that Obama had decided on a career in politics rather than academia. In 1994 he won election to the Illinois State Senate and twice won reelection, representing a district in Chicago's South Side. In 2000 he made a bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, challenging the incumbent, Bobby Rush, who soundly defeated him in the Democratic primary election. In 1995 Obama published Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. In this memoir, he ruminates on the complexities of his upbringing, particularly the haunting absence of his father, and reveals indiscretions as a teenager involving the use of drugs.

Because of his parentage and upbringing, several commentators have raised questions about his racial status. The journalist Debra. J. Dickerson asserts, for example, that Obama should not be designated as black; she writes that “by virtue of his white American mom and his Kenyan dad … [Obama] is an American of African immigrant extraction.” Obama himself is quite clear about the matter, describing himself as an African American (or black) largely on the basis of ascription. “If you look African American in this society,” he remarked, “you're treated as an African American.” In 1940 W. E. B. Du Bois quipped that “the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” Obama updates that view, noting that when he tries to catch taxis in Manhattan, drivers are quite clear about his race; they all too often refuse to pick him up for obvious racially discriminatory reasons, just as they all too often willfully ignore other black men seeking rides.

In 2003 Obama sought election to the U.S. Senate. Initially his chances of winning seemed slim as he faced Democratic Party competitors who were more experienced or had superior access to funding. Obama, however, prevailed handily in the 2004 primary. In the general election, scandal helped Obama as his Republican opponent quit the race in light of revelations stemming from an acrimonious divorce. In desperation the Illinois Republican Party recruited Alan Keyes, a conservative black former diplomat and media commentator from Maryland, to run against Obama. But that gambit failed miserably as Obama swept to a landslide victory—winning about 70 percent of the popular vote—to become the junior Senator from Illinois. Obama was only the fifth black Senator in the history of the United States, following Republicans Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi, Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, and Democrat Carol Mosley Braun of Illinois.

In the middle of his senatorial campaign, Obama delivered an address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that made him a celebrity. In his speech “The Audacity of Hope,” beyond urging the election of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry (a plea that the electorate rejected by a slim margin), Obama sounded a rousing call for national unity that resonated far beyond the base of supporters that rapturously cheered him:

"There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there's the United States of America. There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America…. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into Red States and Blue States: Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. 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 … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

The meteoric trajectory of Obama's career following his much-cited DNC speech and senatorial victory was astounding. Popular fascination and admiration gave rise to a new phenomenon—“Obamamania.” Time has named him one of “the world's most influential people” and “one of the most admired politicians in America.” Observers compared him to John F. Kennedy, who had been the first Catholic and last incumbent Senator to win the presidency.

Obama's second best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), helped feed the growing public curiosity about Obama's political philosophy. A declaration of his ambitious desire to reform a broken American political system, the book offered a lucid dissection of Obama's views on economic opportunity, politics, faith, race, and family. The fact that the book sold over 180,000 copies in its first three weeks of publication was testament to his skills as a stylist. Indeed, a review of the book in the New York Times suggested that Obama was “that rare politician who can actually write—and write movingly and genuinely about himself” (Kakutani, “Obama's Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon,” New York Times, 17 Oct. 2006).

Having struggled as a youngster with the issue of his racially mixed background, Obama as a mature adult openly embraced the various traditions and influences to which he was an heir. In an October 2006 interview on the OPRAH WINFREY Show, Obama quipped that when his extended family gets together for holidays “it's like the mini United Nations. I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher. We've got it all.” He unequivocally describes himself as black, yet insists that that designation place no limits on either his own imagination or his image in the minds of others. “I am rooted in the black community,” he has declared, “but I am not limited to it.”

The Democratic Party's recapture of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections further boosted speculation that Obama might launch a bid for the presidency in 2008, even though he had not yet completed a full term in the Senate. The issue of Obama's lack of experience seemed of less concern to many voters, however, in the light of growing concerns about the American military presence in Iraq. While many of the leading Democratic candidates for 2008, notably New York Senator Hillary Clinton, had supported President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, Obama, then still in the Illinois Senate, had opposed the war.

On 10 February 2007 Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States. In the first quarter of 2007 alone he had raised $25 million, an indication of his likely viability as a candidate in 2008. Whether Obama would become the first black to win the presidency was unclear. What was clear, however, was that his candidacy constituted a serious effort, as opposed to a merely symbolic one, as was largely the case of the presidential candidacies of Shirley Chisholm, Al Sharpton, and even Jesse Jackson. That hardboiled professional politicians believed that Barack Obama had a chance to win the highest public office in the United States was itself an historic landmark. By January 2008, Obama’s campaign had raised an additional $115 million and his fundraising had overtaken even Hillary Clinton, the junior senator from New York and favorite for the nomination. Obama won the Iowa caucus but then lost the New Hampshire primary to Clinton, a foreshadowing of the rest of the nomination race, during which the Clinton team worked their every advantage, including the issue of Obama’s relative lack of executive experience and the idea that white Americans were ultimately incapable of rallying behind a black candidate.

In fact, though race was a factor throughout the nomination process, it never became as great an issue as feared (or hoped for, depending on the person) by many around the country. Much of the race-focused attention and debate centered on Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, with whom Obama had a long-term and close relationship stretching back twenty years. Many people were offended by remarks made by Wright after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which were taken to be anti-American. This led to heightened scrutiny of Wright’s sermons, which were construed especially by conservative commentators and the mainstream media in particular to be not only anti-American, but also racist and anti-government—regardless of the original context in which such statements and sermons were made, and ignoring similar statements from white evangelicals.

In an attempt to quell the criticism over Wright, Obama delivered his “More Perfect Union” speech at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia on 18 March 2008. In it Obama discussed his relationship with Wright and repudiated many of Wright’s more inflammatory statements. Obama then went on to more broadly discuss the history of race and class relations in America, his own history as a person of mixed race, and his hopes for a future in which the problems of race moved beyond the simple dichotomy of whites versus minorities in America, where the march toward a “more perfect union” had reached a “racial stalemate,” in which blacks and whites harbored resentments that they had no means of expressing, instead letting them fester, which led to further divisiveness. Though lauded by people all over the country, liberals and conservatives alike, the speech failed to end the controversy, especially after Wright took it upon himself to go around the country to defend and justify himself, which only added fuel to the fire. As a result, Obama was forced to publicly break with Wright and to leave Trinity Church, which effectively stifled the furor and largely refocused public attention away from race and back to issues like the war in Iraq, the economy, and health care.

Throughout the rest of the nomination contest, Obama and Clinton raised unprecedented amounts of money and stayed very close in the delegate count, trading victories in primaries and caucuses. Obama did best in caucuses and primaries in the upper Midwest, west of the Mississippi, and in the states that had made up the Confederacy, where African Americans constituted as much as half of Democratic voters. Clinton outperformed Obama in primary states in the East, in California, and in Texas, where Hispanics voters overwhelmingly preferred her over Obama. In nearly all states, white women and voters over sixty-five years old strongly preferred Clinton. However, despite an especially strong showing by Clinton in the latter part of the nomination race, by the end of the primaries, it was clear that Obama would be the first African American to secure the nomination of any major national party for the office of President of the United States. On 7June 2008 Senator Clinton ended her run for the nomination and endorsed Obama’s candidacy.

Obama quickly moved to unify the party and to begin campaigning against the Republican candidate, John McCain, a Vietnam veteran and ex-prisoner of war and long-time senator from Arizona. Obama chose Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, while McCain’s running mate was the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, a little known and politically inexperienced conservative evangelical. Though the race for president appeared close at various times throughout the campaign, most commentators and serious students of American politics predicted a victory for Obama. A number of factors contributed to Obama’s victory. The discipline of Obama’s campaign in terms of message, unity of effort, and personal discipline showed Obama to be “presidential material” despite his relative lack of executive experience. Added to the strength and discipline of his campaign staff and supporters, by mid-October 2008 Obama had raised a record $640 million, at least half of which came from individuals giving less than $200. These record amounts gave Obama a great advantage over the McCain campaign in advertising and state-by-state efforts to “get out the vote.” Perhaps most importantly, voters clearly wanted the change that Obama represented: in foreign policy and the war in Iraq, in health insurance and access to healthcare, and especially with the economy, particularly in the wake of the banking and stock market crises that broke in the campaign’s final weeks. Finally, a great many people around the country who early on leaned toward supporting McCain were severely put off by his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The ill-prepared and inexperienced Palin was viewed by many as a cynical pick, chosen more as a way to shore up the archconservative base of the Republican party than as a serious choice of someone capable of taking over the presidency if such a need arose.

In the end, Obama’s victory was decisive. He won the Electoral College by 365 to 173. His margin of victory in the popular vote was the largest ever for a non-incumbent presidential candidate and his popular vote percentage of 53 percent was the highest for a Democrat since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson was elected to a full term in his own right. It was the highest overall percentage of votes since George H. W. Bush won in 1988. Indeed, Obama received more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, beating George W. Bush’s record total of just over 62 million in 2004.

Obama’s inauguration on 20 January 2009 was attended by an estimated 1.8 million people, far more than had attended any previous inaugural. The Rasmussen daily tracking presidential opinion poll registered approval of 65 percent of Americans for the new president. Hundreds of millions watched the ceremonies live across the globe, and, indeed the expectations for Obama’s presidency may have been even higher abroad than in the United States itself. The consensus among wordsmiths was that, compared to several of his more notable speeches, Obama’s 2009 Inaugural was “prose, not poetry.” But this was his intent. The straightforward, somber tone of the speech deliberately matched the severity of the crises at hand. It more closely resembled Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in 1933, also given at a time of global tension and economic crisis, than John F. Kennedy’s inspirational 1961 address, which captured the rising expectations of domestic postwar prosperity and decolonization abroad. Obama blamed the economic crisis not only on “the greed and irresponsibility” on Wall Street, but on a “collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” Americans, he insisted, would have to “put away childish things” and begin to make the hard choices necessary to restructure the economy, notably in terms of energy efficiency, education and job retraining, and health care. “The question we ask today,” he stated. “is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

In terms of foreign policy, Obama’s address offered both continuity and change. In words that echoed George W. Bush, he vowed, “We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.” To Al Qaeda and others “who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents,” Obama was unyielding: "Our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken. You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you." Significantly, however, he also rejected as “false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” a stinging rebuke of the Bush administration’s restrictions on civil liberties and use of torture, and a clear indication of his plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Obama’s direct appeal to the Muslim world that he would “seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” marked a sharp break with his predecessor. It also reflected a clearheaded assessment that such a rapprochement was necessary for America to “responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.”

An analysis of Obama’s success or failure in meeting the goals set out in that Address must necessarily be tentative, from the vantage point of two-thirds of the way through the 2009-2012 term. In terms of the economy, Obama presided over an era in which unemployment has remained at levels significantly higher than in any decade since World War II. As Obama entered office in January 2009 the official rate stood at 7.0 percent, a dramatic increase from only 12 months earlier, when the rate had been only 4.6%. In October 2009 unemployment rose to near record post-war levels, reaching 10.1 percent, dipping back below 9 percent a year later, and remaining around 9 percent for most of 2011. Joblessness was particularly pronounced in California, Michigan, Florida, and North Carolina, all electorally rich states that had voted for Obama in 2008. While agreeing that the unemployment rate remained too high, the Obama administration reminded Americans of the undoubted global economic crisis it inherited, and that the proposals offered by Republicans in Congress—to drastically cut spending Social Security, Medicare, and Education, and ending Obama’s health care reforms—would have increased unemployment, weakened the economy, and impoverished many millions of American. Critics on Obama’s left suggested that Obama had naively sought compromise with a Republican Party that had no intention of meeting Obama halfway, notably on health care reform and reining in the excesses of Wall Street. Such criticism gained force following the mid-term Congressional elections of 2010, when Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and maintained only a slender advantage in the Senate that was often overcome by conservative Democrats voting with Republicans. Obama declared the defeat a “whupping,” while Republicans declared it a national vote of no confidence in Obama’s approach to the economy, and especially his health care proposals, which expanded insurance coverage to 30 million Americans, and had narrowly been approved by Congress earlier that year. While Congressional Republicans lacked the numbers to overturn “Obamacare” other opponents of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act looked to the Courts to reject the Act as unconstitutional. Although Obama was able to make two appointments to the Supreme Court—Sonia Sotomayor, the nation's first Hispanic Justice, and Elena Kagan—he did not radically shift the Court by doing so, since they replaced two of the more liberal Justices.

While no major Democratic politician officially opposed Obama’s policies in the way that Senator Edward Kennedy had attacked incumbent President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, the president was not without critics on his left. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman, for example, argued that a more expansive, traditionally Keynesian stimulus to the economy was necessary to revitalize a broken economic system. Obama maintained very strong support among African Americans throughout the first two years of his presidency, but that began to decline by the summer of 2011, as African American unemployment levels reached 16 percent—the highest since the era of Reaganomics. A Washington Post-ABC poll in September 2011 found that, while 86 percent of black Americans had a favorable view of the President, the number who were “strongly” favorable towards his performance had declined to 56 percent, from 83 percent five months earlier. Among Obama’s more vocal opponents within the African American community have been the public intellectual Cornel West, talk show host Tavis Smiley, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who have criticized him for doing more to bail out Wall Street than to help poor and working class Americans, and for failing to highlight the specific problems faced by people of color. Along with the Occupy Wall Street protests that began in the Fall of 2011, such criticism sought to move Obama to the left, as a corrective to the the rise of the right wing Tea Party movement which in 2009-2011 shifted an already conservative Republican Party even farther to the right.

Compared to his economic record, opposition to Obama’s foreign policy has been more muted, both in Congress and the country at large. Many—Obama included—expressed surprise when he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, having been in office for less than a year. Nonetheless, by adopting a more internationalist, less didactic tone than his predecessor, notably in a well-received speech on America’s relations with Islam in Cairo in 2009, Obama continued to enjoy a strong degree of support abroad. Obama’s failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center drew some criticsm at home and abroad. While many Republicans in Congress attacked Obama for “betraying” Israel, the consensus of opinion in most nations—Israel and a few western European nations aside—was that Obama had been insufficiently critical of Israel’s settlement programs and military actions in Gaza. Most observers at home and abroad credited the Obama administration with three solid foreign policy achievements: limiting and then definitively ending the American military presence in Iraq by the end of 2011; capturing or killing many Al Qaeda leaders, most notably Osama Bin Laden in May 2011; and working through NATO to assist the Libyan resistance movement that toppled the regime of Moamar al-Qadaffi in October 2011. To be sure, some criticized Obama’s use of drone technology to eliminate targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa, but the tactic has proved popular. Domestically, Obama faced some opposition for his intervention in Libya from isolationists (of both left and right) who saw it as an intervention too far and some Senate Republicans like John McCain who had wanted greater and earlier American involvement. Overall, military budgets increased under Obama from 2009 to 2011, and were projected to remain high through 2012, despite the broad efforts by both political parties to cut overall government spending.

While there was some debate as to whether an actual “Obama Doctrine” in foreign policy could be determined, his administration’s pragmatic approach to the “Arab Spring” of 2011 is instructive. In the cases of the mass movements to overthrow autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, Obama’s response was to encourage reform, place diplomatic pressure on the old leaders to step aside, and to take a relatively hands off approach to the reform process once the ancien regimes had been toppled. In Libya, pressure from NATO allies resulted in the U.S. committing weaponry and logistical support to the rebels, while limiting American boots on the ground. Obama also called for autocratic Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to step down as a result of his brutal repression of dissent, and imposed stringent economic sanctions when it did not. Obama stopped short, however, from seeking a military solution in Syria, however, aware that, unlike Qadaffi, who had lost any influence he once had over African and Middle Eastern allies, Syria’s Assad continued to enjoy the support of both Iran and Iraq.

On the two most important foreign policy issues facing his presidency—Iran and Afghanistan—it remained unclear what Obama’s legacy would be. On Iran, Obama’s initial approach was more conciliatory than his predecessor, but continued to pursue sanctions and to urge Iranian abandonment of its nuclear weapons program. That program appears to have been delayed by sanctions and by the Stuxnet computer virus—perhaps released by Israel—which degraded Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity. An alleged ploy by Iran to assassinate the Saudia Arabian ambassador to the U.S. in Washington prompted Obama to propose even tougher sanctions against Iran. As he had promised, Obama did draw back forces from what he viewed as a “war of choice” in Iraq in order to focus on the “war of necessity” in Afghanistan. In 2009 Obama agreed to an increase of 33,000 extra personnel to Afghanistan, to remain until 2012. Two years later, that surge—a compromise between the more hawkish and doveish members of his administration— had made little headway. Despite the elimination of many Taliban leaders, large swathes of the nation remained hostile to the occupation or to the Hamid Karzai regime, while Karzai himself became increasingly hostile to the American presence. October 2011, marked the tenth anniversary of the American military presence in Afghanistan, a period longer than the U.S. involvement in World War I, World War II and Korea, combined. While most Americans remained fixed on problems facing the economy, it remained to be seen whether a growing desire to bring U.S. forces home from Afghanistan would shape the political agenda as Obama faced re-election in 2012.

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