BLACKS4BARACK: Meet Barack Obama

Barack Obama Background

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 election to the United States Senate.

Sworn into office January 4, 2005, Senator Obama is focused on promoting economic growth and bringing good paying jobs to Americans. Obama serves on the important Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees legislation and funding for the environment and public works projects throughout the country, including the national transportation bill. He also serves on the Veterans Affairs Committee where he is focused on investigating the disability pay discrepancies that have left thousands of veterans without the benefits they earned. Senator Obama also serves on the Foreign Relations Committee.

During his seven years in the Illinois state Senate, Obama worked with both Democrats and Republicans to help working families get ahead by creating programs like the state Earned Income Tax Credit, which in three years provided over $100 million in tax cuts to families across the state. Obama also pushed through an expansion of early childhood education, and after a number of inmates on death row were found innocent, Senator Obama enlisted the support of law enforcement officials to draft legislation requiring the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.

Obama is especially proud of being a husband and father of two daughters, Malia, 8 and Sasha, 4. Obama and his wife, Michelle, married in 1992 and live on Chicago ’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.

Barack Obama was born on August 4th, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.

Say It Loud...BARACK AND I'M PROUD !

BARACK OBAMA

An American & Kenyan Hero

By Christopher Wills Associated Press

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KOGELO, Kenya »Barack Obama pushed through surging crowds and hurtled down roads lined with screaming fans yesterday before settling into the calm of a quiet meal with his grandmother in the Kenyan hamlet where his father grew up and is buried.

The U.S. senator from Illinois stopped at his father's grave for a few moments before ending his visit to the compound, a collection of small buildings, towering mango trees and assorted dogs and chickens.

"Anytime a child comes back to a parent's grave, it makes you reflect on your mortality and the next generation," Obama said, adding that he was especially happy to be able to bring his two daughters along.

Obama also spent much of the day studying the toll AIDS is taking on African families. He and his wife took HIV tests as thousands of people watched and he visited a project that helps grandmothers find the money to care for children orphaned by AIDS.

Obama's 85-year-old grandmother, Sarah, met him at the foot of the small hill where her house sits and hugged him. Then they and Obama's family walked to the house amid a crush of relatives, friends and reporters. Someone carried a huge American flag.

The family shared a meal of chicken, porridge, cabbage and more. His grandmother had told reporters that she would make eggs, which she said was the appropriate thing for a grandmother to serve a visiting grandson.

"She said she was only going to fix eggs, but I think somebody convinced her to go overboard," Obama said.

The 1979 Punahou Schools graduate began his day with an appearance at a hospital in Kisumu, Kenya's third-largest city. Thousands of people waited for him, even climbing trees for better views, as he visited a mobile HIV-testing center. When Obama appeared, the crowd surged forward and had to be held back by police.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, entered the mobile lab and underwent HIV tests in an effort to reduce the public stigma associated with testing in Kenya. He said the results were good news but the most important thing was the control that comes with knowing their HIV status.

"If a U.S. senator can get tested and his wife can get tested, then everybody in this crowd can get tested. Everybody in this city can get tested," Obama said.

As he left, people surrounded his car and the others with him, running alongside.

People lined up along city streets and rural highways and dirt roads to cheer Obama as his caravan passed by. The students of Jubilee High School rushed to the road in their uniforms of white shirts and dark pants. Old men waved. Barefoot children stared.

With his Kenyan heritage, Obama is getting a warm reception everywhere, but the reaction has been even stronger in this part of the country -- home to the Luo tribe, which includes Obama's family.

Kenyans have claimed Obama as one of their own, even though he was mostly raised in Hawaii and did not know his Kenyan father well. This is his third visit to Kenya, but his first since being elected the United States' only black senator in 2004.

"We love him so much. He has the same blood as our origins," said Austin Ochieng as he waited in a tree for the chance to see Obama. "We are expecting a lot of development from him. We also expect employment. We need him to talk to our government."

Obama's father, also named Barack, grew up herding goats and going to tin-roof schools, but he won a college scholarship in Hawaii. There, he married Obama's mother. The two soon separated, however, and Obama's father eventually returned to Kenya and worked as a government economist.

His father died in a car crash in 1982.

(N.Y. Times) In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya.

On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.

“She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was very much her philosophy of life — to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.”

Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Mr. Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic presidential nomination. He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama.

They were close, her friends and his half-sister say, though they spent much of their lives with oceans or continents between them. He would not be where he is today, he has said, had it not been for her. Yet he has also made some different choices — marrying into a tightly knit African-American family rooted in the South Side of Chicago, becoming a churchgoing Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity as a black man.

Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died. (top)

And when The Associated Press asked the candidates about “prized keepsakes” — others mentioned signed baseballs, a pocket watch, a “trophy wife” — Mr. Obama said his was a photograph of the cliffs of the South Shore of Oahu in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered.

“I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book — less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life,” he wrote in the preface to his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” He added, “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”

In a campaign in which Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made liberal use of his globe-trotting 96-year-old mother to answer suspicions that he might be an antique at 71, Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother’s memory sparingly. In one television advertisement, she appears fleetingly — porcelain-skinned, raven-haired and holding her toddler son. “My mother died of cancer at 53,” he says in the ad, which focuses on health care. “In those last painful months, she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well.”

‘A Very, Very Big Thinker’

He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who worked, went to school and raised children at the same time. He has credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his ability to do the right thing. But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Ms. Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known.

“She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.”

The Final Months

After her diagnosis, Ms. Soetoro spent the last months of her life in Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.) Mr. Obama has recalled talking with her in her hospital bed about her fears of ending up broke. She was not ready to die, he has said. Even so, she helped him and Maya “push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.”

She died in November 1995, as Mr. Obama was starting his first campaign for public office. After a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends drove to the South Shore in Oahu. With the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, Mr. Obama and Ms. Soetoro-Ng placed their mother’s ashes in the Pacific, sending them off in the direction of Indonesia.

Janny Scott, New York Times: March 14, 2008

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Meet Obama's Right Hand Man....

REGGIE LOVE

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Love now knows that when it comes to food, Senator Obama “eats pretty much anything, from chicken wings and barbecue and ribs to grilled fish and steamed broccoli.” But when he is campaigning in a small town with limited options, a cheeseburger is always a good bet. (“Cheddar is the cheese of choice,” Mr. Love added.)

He knows that “the boss,” as he calls Mr. Obama, likes MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He keeps a supply of both on hand.

And he has learned that all campaigns have their superstitions — Senator John McCain has a penchant for heads-up coins — and that Mr. Obama is no exception. That means that Mr. Love and Mr. Obama, for luck, play basketball every primary day.

Mr. Love, 26, is Mr. Obama’s body man, the personal aide who shadows the senator and anticipates everything he needs — and everything he does not need. He is not a bodyguard (security is provided by the Secret Service), but rather the ultimate assistant, rarely more than a body length away from the candidate.

Young, eager campaign aides are stock characters in movies and on television, but few have quite the élan of Mr. Love, who, at 6-foot-5, is about three inches taller than the tall candidate, fitter than the fit candidate (he can bench press more than 350 pounds) and cooler than the cool candidate.

“There’s no doubt that Reggie is cooler than I am,” Mr. Obama said, laughing, in a phone interview. “I am living vicariously through Reggie.”

Mr. Love, who played football and basketball at Duke, usually starts the day with Mr. Obama with a dawn workout in the hotel gym. They end the day more than 15 hours later, often unwinding before bed by watching ESPN’s “SportsCenter” or that night’s big game. (Mr. Obama sometimes flosses his teeth to ESPN while lying down.)

What a body man does depends on the politician. Senator John Kerry’s aide for his presidential race in 2004 was dubbed “part butler, part buddy.” Bill Clinton’s aide when he was president said their relationship sometimes felt more like that of an old married couple. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has a body woman, the efficient and glamorous Huma Abedin. On NBC’s “The West Wing,” President Josiah Bartlet treated his body man, Charlie Young, like a son.

Mr. Obama said he regarded “my guy, Reggie,” as the kid brother he never had. “But maybe I’m saying that just because he technically could be my son,” the Illinois senator said. “I don’t want to admit my age.”

Mr. Love said he had been hired with “no job description whatsoever.”

“It was just like, ‘You just go out there and — Take. Care. Of. Stuff,’ ” Mr. Love said, taking his time with each word.

Some of the “stuff” Mr. Love takes care of: When Mr. Obama makes calls to woo superdelegates, Mr. Love is at his side with a briefing book, dialing the numbers. When an outdoor speech ended on a windy day in Noblesville, Ind., he appeared behind Mr. Obama as he shook hands on the rope line. “Jacket?” he asked, a coat draped at the ready over his arm.

When Mr. Obama dropped food on his tie while eating in the car between stops, Mr. Love was ready with a Tide pen. He always carries one, along with ballpoint pens, and has turned himself into a walking dispensary of Sharpies, stationery, protein bars, throat lozenges, water, tea, Advil, Tylenol, Purell and emergency Nicorette, not to mention his ever-present iPhone, BlackBerry and Canon Rebel XT digital camera. (Mr. Love keeps a photo journal of the campaign, and has more than 10,000 pictures so far.)

Compared with the even-tempered and self-controlled Mr. Obama, Mr. Love is raffish, always joking with the Secret Service, offering closed-fist high-fives to members of the news media and making frequent appearances in the daily pool reports. At a V.F.W. hall in Indiana, he helped out when the senator did not want a second Budweiser, taking it off Mr. Obama’s hands.

Mr. Obama often mentions that Mr. Love was a wide receiver on a football scholarship at Duke who also walked onto the basketball team. At a rally a few weeks ago in Mr. Love’s hometown, Charlotte, N.C., the candidate led the crowd in a chant of “Reggie, Reggie, Reggie!”

After the Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia in April, Mr. Obama borrowed a move from the rapper Jay-Z and mimed brushing off his shoulders, but it was Mr. Love who had uploaded his music to the senator’s iPod in the first place — a silver Nano that he bought the senator for his 46th birthday.

“So I’ve gotten pretty fond of Jay-Z,” Mr. Obama said. “He’s broadened my horizons in the hip-hop world.”

In turn, Mr. Obama said he had gotten Mr. Love into “everything from John Coltrane to Frank Sinatra.”

“I think he’s got the most eclectic music of any 26-year-old,” the senator said.

Along the way, some unofficial rules have emerged between the candidate and his aide. From Mr. Obama: “One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch ‘SportsCenter’ and argue about that.”

And from Mr. Love: Expect to be grilled about everything as if you were a first-year law student.

When Mr. Obama hits a rough patch in the campaign, Mr. Love is sympathetic. In college, embarrassing pictures of an inebriated Mr. Love from a fraternity house party surfaced on the Internet. “You make mistakes and you learn from them, and you try to use them to make you a better person,” he said. After graduating with a degree in political science and public policy, Mr. Love had summer try-outs with the Green Bay Packers in 2004 and the Dallas Cowboys in 2005 before being cut.

Which is how, in 2006, after applying for an internship on Capitol Hill, Mr. Love ended up interviewing with Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s communications director, for a position in Mr. Obama’s Senate office. “It’s the only time I’ve ever interviewed somebody whose work experience included the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Sports these days, for the candidate and his aide, are limited to morning workouts. And, of course, the primary day basketball games.

“He’s quick and he’s strong,” Mr. Love said of Mr. Obama. “A lot of people still don’t know that he’s left-handed, so he can get to the basket and get his shot off, even though he’s not the most explosive or tallest player on the court.”

If Mr. Obama thinks Mr. Love is dogging it on the court, he can come down hard, shouting at him to hustle, said someone who has played basketball with the two of them.

But on the day of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Mr. Love and Mr. Obama played at noon and kept up an easy rhythm. “Sorry, Reg, I missed you,” the senator said after a pass to Mr. Love was intercepted. Later, on a fast-break, Mr. Obama dribbled up the right side of the court and passed the ball ahead to Mr. Love, who slam-dunked it.

Later that night, after the senator gave his victory speech in Raleigh after winning the North Carolina primary, Mr. Love rode to the airport with Mr. Obama, who was flying to Chicago. Mr. Love was staying behind in his home state to catch up with friends. (His parents now live in California, and Mr. Love managed to squeeze in a visit there last weekend.)

“Michelle was like: ‘Where are you staying? Don’t get into too much trouble,’ ” Mr. Love said of Mr. Obama’s wife.

Waiting ahead, after all, were more early mornings in the gym and more long days on the road.