WASHINGTON – Barack Obama, a two-year veteran of the U.S. Senate, created a committee Tuesday to explore whether his star power is strong enough to form the basis of a presidential campaign next year. He gave himself less than four weeks – until Feb. 10 – to announce his decision.
The Illinois Democrat, in a statement announcing his step, offered himself as someone who could draw the country together after six years of Republican control in Washington and special interest domination of the major issues facing the country.
“Running for the presidency,” Obama said, “is a profound decision – a decision no one should make on the basis of media hype or personal ambition alone – and so before I committed myself and my family to this race, I wanted to be sure that this was right for us and, more importantly, right for the country.”
Mark Mellman, a Democratic consultant who is allied with no presidential candidate, said the 45-year-old Obama might be able to turn his lack of experience to his advantage.
“People want something new and different,” Mellman said, “and there is nobody in this contest who can better lay claim to being authentically new and different than Barack Obama.” Obama is not only young and relatively inexperienced. Born in Hawaii, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, he would be the nation’s first black president.
Obama’s announcement puts pressure on a leading contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, to announce her own candidacy, as she is expected to do as early as this week.
Obama, in his statement announcing his exploratory committee, said that Washington – “mired in a tragic and costly war that should never have been waged” – had failed to address the rapidly changing economy, workers’ difficulties with health care and pensions and America’s dependence on foreign oil.
“But challenging as they are, it’s not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s the smallness of our politics. Our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions.”
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