2004 Election: Obama's Ascent

• Share

(3 of 5)

In 2003 Obama pushed through a bill requiring police to videotape homicide confessions. Similar bills had failed before. But Obama won over police and lawmakers because he didn't just talk about injustice. He talked about efficient policing, and he noted that videos could also serve as a "powerful tool to convict the guilty." Says New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine: "There's an optimism and lack of anger. There is a reach for a positive framing of even negative issues."

Obama walks a careful line on every issue, not just race. He delivers crowd-pleasing attacks on George W. Bush, the outsourcing of jobs and the Iraq war (which he unequivocally opposed from the beginning), but he always accessorizes with a reasonable caveat. His stump speeches call for more federal dollars for Illinois highways and schools. But he disarms critics by talking early and often about the limits of government. "When you've traveled across the state, what you consistently find is a common set of values: hard work, self-respect, delayed gratification," he says. "We all have to acknowledge that government cannot transmit those values. They come from the bottom up."

Luckily for us, when Obama wrote Dreams from My Father, his autobiography, nine years ago, his political radar was less refined. In Dreams, we are introduced to another, even more interesting Obama. Far from "wrapping himself in the American flag," as Walters and others have accused him of doing in his convention speech, this Obama railed against the suffocating strictures of race. At the élite Punahou prep school in Honolulu, he was one of only seven or eight black students. He found himself filled with a creeping rage for the assumptions his classmates made about him. At the same time, he was terrified by a sense of not belonging. "I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds," he wrote, "convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere."

He spent his afternoons on the basketball court, scraping and searching for an identity. He used marijuana and tried cocaine. His grades slipped. He was acutely aware of the low expectations some white people had for him. "People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves," he wrote. "Such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry."

Even then, though, "he had powers," remembers his half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. "He was charismatic. He had lots of friends." In high school, he used to stroll over to the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii to "meet university ladies," says Soetoro-Ng, who still lives in Honolulu.

As he grew older, Obama wove in and out of the Establishment. After graduating from Columbia University in New York City, he moved to Chicago to be a community organizer--probably the most thankless job in activism, and that's saying something. He pleaded with people at the Altgeld Gardens public-housing project to come to meetings and listen to him patter on about community coalitions.