Barack Obama: A profile of an unlikely president

“My presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” Barack Obama began.

“I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story … and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

It was the speech that launched him. Obama was an Illinois assembly member seeking his first term in the U.S. Senate, given a shot at the national stage when Sen. John Kerry asked him to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

He had those in the crowd on their feet, cheering wildly, even as many of them — even as many of us — wondered: Who is this guy?

A “skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too,” he told us then.

He talked about hope and brighter days and standing at a crossroads in our nation’s history — themes that would become the bedrock of his own unprecedented run for the White House. And he touched on the many chapters of his life, as familiar to us now as his rallying cry for change.

There was the black father, also named Barack, who grew up herding goats in Kenya. He traveled on scholarship to attend the University of Hawaii and there, in a Russian language class, met 18-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, the white daughter of Kansas-bred parents, christened after the father who worked on oil rigs and farms and served in World War II.

Barack (“blessed” in Arabic) was born on Aug. 4, 1961. But his parents’ marriage didn’t last, and his father would be absent for all but a month of the boy’s life. His mother, a free-spirited anthropologist passionate about helping women, raised him. Of her, Obama once wrote: “What is best in me I owe to her.”

We would learn of the international upbringing, four years spent living in Indonesia after his mother remarried and brought her son to a Third World country, at once exotic and enlightening. Young Barack had a pet monkey, but he also saw poverty and disease, and his eyes were opened to a new world view.

That world view didn’t ease Obama’s own struggle with his biracial identity. He was among the few black students at his Honolulu high school, where he was known as “Barry” and met with others for a weekly “ethnic corner” discussion. He lived then with his maternal grandparents, including Madelyn Dunham, the grandmother he called “Toot.”

In a remarkable dissertation on race earlier this year, a speech intended to rebuke the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks regarding the nation’s racial divide, Obama referred to his “white grandmother” as the woman who helped raise him, sacrificed for him and loved him, but who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street and “who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Dunham died Nov. 2 at age 86, two days before Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. His father died in a car crash in 1982, his mother of ovarian cancer in 1995. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, lives in Honolulu and teaches history.

Community organizer

The compelling life story that helped propel Obama from community organizer to celebrity politician emerged shortly after his graduation from Columbia University, with a political science degree, and Harvard Law School. In 1990, at the age of 28, he was elected the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

His election made headlines, even landing him his first book deal and, in a 1990 interview with the Associated Press, he professed a desire to stay “engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society.” He mentioned poverty and race, saying, “I really hope to be part of a transformation of this country.”

Afterward, Obama became a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project, a group aiming to help black residents of Chicago’s poverty-wracked South Side develop their own political voice.

If a political career was part of a grand plan, it wasn’t apparent while Obama was working on the streets of Chicago.

“As organizers, we were trained to be suspicious of politicians,” said David Kindler, who was based in Chicago’s southern suburbs for the same group that employed Obama. “Folks we worked with tended to be ill-served by political relationships. You wouldn’t go into a meeting to see how to get elected to office. They (community people) would have stoned you.”

Kindler remembers one day when Obama, who was leading a training session for Midwest community organizers, offered a personal story. Obama told about being an inexperienced organizer and arranging for public housing residents to meet with officials to complain about their living conditions. He rented a van and waited in a church parking lot, and as time passed, he became increasingly worried no one would show, Kindler recalled. Finally, a handful of people did and they attended the meeting.

“The heart of the story was him being terrified to take a group into action,” Kindler says. “He didn’t paint himself as a conquering hero. He told people about potential failure, his own fear that it was not easy to go out there and create change for the neighborhood. I always remember that. The organizers I knew were full of bravado — ‘We can’t be beat.’”

Obama also lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

And he married Michelle Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School grad who served as his adviser during a summer internship at a Chicago law firm. The couple have two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.

Obama the politician

The jump into politics came in 1996, when Obama won an Illinois Senate seat representing Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood that encompasses the prestigious university as well as pockets of deep inner-city poverty. Obama vaulted to victory in the crowded Democratic primary only after the multimillionaire front-runner imploded over personal problems.

Terry Link and Obama were elected to the state Senate the same day, became seat mates and fast friends. Link always joked Obama would move on before he did. He wasn’t thinking at the time that it would be to the White House.

Link and Obama bonded over golf and Wednesday night poker games as part of a group dubbed “The Committee” that gathered over beer and cigars in Springfield to while away the nights when the Legislature was in session.

Obama helped change laws governing the death penalty, ethics and racial profiling, and he won tax credits for the working poor. But he failed in his campaign for universal health care. He failed, too, in a 2000 bid for a U.S. House seat.

Then came 2004 and the opportunity to run for the U.S. Senate — and to introduce himself to his fellow Americans.

He won the election, becoming only the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. But it was “The Speech” that made him a rock star. Talk of a presidential run began even before his first day in Washington. At first, he demurred.

But on a blustery February day in 2007, Obama returned to Illinois to the steps of the Old Capitol to announce his candidacy for presidency.

The unlikely candidate

During his campaign, he drew colossal crowds, spurring comparisons to the Kennedys (both John and Bobby). He took on race. He overcame rumors about whether he was a Muslim when, in fact, he is a Christian, as well as accusations of consorting with a 1960s anti-war radical.

He toppled anointed Democratic front-runner New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a historic candidate in her own right whose political acclaim and eight years spent as first lady weren’t enough to win her party’s nomination. She is Obama’s pick for secretary of the State Department.

He deflected repeated condemnation of his lack of experience.

And he crossed party lines, earning the backing of former Republican governors and senators and retired Gen. Colin Powell, President George W. Bush’s first secretary of state who, echoing the young Obama of Harvard days, called the Democrat a “transformational figure” who displays “a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge and an approach to looking at problems.”

“I think that he has a definitive way of doing business,” Powell concluded, “that would serve us well.”

“Yes, we can!” all those legions of supporters chanted throughout the campaign.

And somehow, he did.

Mr. President

Loretta Augustine-Herron still remembers the October day in 1992 when she attended the Obamas’ wedding. Several years had passed since she had first met Obama when he came to Chicago to work as a community organizer for the group she co-founded.

On this momentous day, she approached the beaming groom as he mingled with guests. She had one request:

“When you become the first African-American president, I want to be at the inaugural ball,’” she says she told him. “He said, ‘You’ve got it.’”

Then he laughed.

Sixteen years later, Augustine-Herron took two of her grandsons to Grant Park for Obama’s victory celebration. Standing in the crowd that unusually warm November night, she remembered the young man who drank coffee and smoked cigarettes in her kitchen, worked 14-hour days and once boasted he could “burn” the floor with his dance moves — then proceeded to prove it.

She also remembered her long-ago prediction.

But when Obama recites the oath of the nation’s highest office today, Loretta Augustine-Herron will watch it on television with her special- education students at a South Side elementary school in Chicago.

“The children need to witness this, to talk about this,” she said. “You know what? I always thought I wanted to be at the inauguration. But I really want to be with my students.”

Today, the rock star is known the world over as Mr. President.

And the skinny kid takes his place in history, proving that unlikely as it may have all been — it was, indeed, possible.