"'It's Been a Long Time Coming': a Profile on Barack Obama"
By: Alysia Powell
Barack Obama (not Osama) is a father, a brother, a husband, a son, a civil rights attorney, a lecturer, a senator and a best-selling author; although the race-driven media coverage would lead one to believe that he is just another Black man running to be the 44th President of the United States.
Obama was born to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. His father was African, originally from Kenya, and his mother, who grew up in small-town Kansas, was white. They met while studying at the University of Hawaii.
Obama came into the world during a time of racial unrest and oppression, when “miscegenation,” as Obama refers to his parents’ marriage in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, was a felony in the United States. This was also a time in which it was an unspeakable thought that there might one day be an African-American president.
Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, with a degree in political science. What was a recent Ivy League graduate to do? Many could easily land high-powered, insanely high-salaried jobs in influential corporations because of networking, nepotism and their prestigious degree, but Obama used his education to develop community improvement programs in the Far South Side of Chicago.
After about three years of community work, he went on to Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1991. Obama’s next move was to go back into the communities of Illinois and empower the citizens who had been ignored, but who needed the most help.
In 1993, Obama finally landed a prominent position at Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C., where he specialized in civil rights and voting rights law, employment law and representing not-for-profit community development organizations. He also became a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
Mr. Obama did not get too comfortable in his corporate and academic roles, as he soon realized that to make a real change in the communities which he cared so much about, legislation and politics needed to change.
Obama served in an Illinois State Senate seat for eight years, after which he went on to become only the third African-American to be elected to the United States Senate since the years of Reconstruction in the 1870s. In the U.S. Senate, Obama was on the Veterans Affairs committee, where he helped to improve and prepare VA Hospitals for the influx of injured Iraq War veterans among other initiatives for the benefit of all Americans. He was also on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which allowed him to work to keep America safe from terror.
Barack Obama is a different type of politician. His outlook on the American political system is one of unification and not partisanship because “divided, we are bound to fail,” Obama said in his February speech in which he announced his bid for the presidency.
“There's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America,” Obama said in his memorable keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention speech.
Although there have been other African-American presidential candidates over the years, the first of whom was Shirley Chisholm in 1972, many expect Barack Obama to come closer to victory than any other Black candidate has in the past.
The closer Obama gets to the White House, the more criticism he faces from the media and politicians alike. On January 1, 2007, CNN’s “The Situation Room” rang in the year with an “Obama” caption underneath a photo of al-Qaeda terrorist mastermind Osama Bin-Laden. Even this error created a subliminal link between terrorists and Barack Obama in the minds of impressionable American viewers.
Another incident occurred in an interview with the New York Observer on February 7, 2007, when fellow Democratic presidential candidate Senator Joseph Biden called Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright.” This comment adds to the suggestions that Obama is so successful because he is not perceived as radical or threatening to white voters.
“I didn’t take Senator Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate,” Obama said in response.
All of the criticism and skewed media coverage has diverted the public from the real issues that Barack Obama stands behind and against.
It is also likely that many African-Americans will vote for Obama simply because of the color of his skin. While the support for a man that could be our country’s first African-American president is great, it would not be any better than people who will not vote for him because of his race. All voters should make a decision based on the facts.
Barack Obama stands for removing our troops from Iraq by 2008 with a methodical exit strategy. He was against the war from the beginning and gave a speech in which he said, “I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.” Obama believed that the war was a convenient way to distract the American public from domestic issues.
Despite the exit strategy from the war in Iraq, Obama will strengthen homeland security by increasing transit security and implementing the suggestions of the 9/11 Committee. In addition, Obama will repair broken ties with the international community and work hard to have a positive influence on international crises, such as the genocide in the Darfur region. To minimize foreign conflicts, he will seek to free the United States from dependence on foreign oil and encourage alternative and environmentally-friendly fuels such as ethanol.
Obama also plans to help to end the poverty of 37 million citizens who are in the workforce but still struggle to make ends meet. He will improve the education system and increase the limit of Pell Grants to make college more affordable. Obama will reform the healthcare system and make sure that by the end of his first term in office that every American will have “quality, affordable healthcare,” according to Obama’s campaign Web site.
A recent issue in the U.S. has been about immigration. Barack Obama plans to secure the borders and improve the legal immigration system, to remove the incentives that people have to enter the country illegally.
In addition to his many major goals, Barack Obama has vowed to protect the right to vote, honor the nation’s veterans, rid Washington D.C. of its corrupt reputation (as much as he can) an strengthen the role of family in the country.
As lofty as these goals are, Obama makes them seem like an easy reality. He possesses the “Audacity of Hope” that his best-selling 2006 book proclaims. Barack Obama is approaching the people of the United States from a standpoint of a man who wants nothing more than he did when he left Columbia University to go to the inner-city of Chicago – a chance to improve the lives of the people who need it the most, to empower the powerless and to spark a flame of interest in citizens who were once possessed with cynicism and apathy.
“For that is our unyielding faith - that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it,” Obama said. “Out of this long political darkness, a brighter day will come.”
It’s been a long time coming.
Educate yourself further on Barack Obama and all of the other candidates. Vote in 2008.
