Biography - Barack Obama
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 to a Kenyan father and an American mother. Obama’s parents, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham met while studying at the University of Hawaii.
Obama spent his early years in Honolulu before moving to Indonesia at the age of six.Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old. His mother later married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian. The family moved to Jakarta in 1967.
After staying for four years in Indonesia, Obama returned to Honolulu to study at the Punahou school. He studied at the Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before moving to the Columbia University in New York City. Obama graduated from the Columbia University in 1983 with a major in Political Science and a specialization in International Relations.
After his graduation, Obama worked at the Business International Corporation and the New York Public Interest Research Group. In 1985, he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer. Later, in 1988, Obama joined the Harvard Law School. He went on to become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated from the law school in 1991.
Barack Obama met Michelle Robinson in 1989, whom he married in 1992. Michelle and Barack have two daughters.
Obama played several roles professionally between 1993 and 2004. He worked as a lawyer for the law firm, David, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He also worked as a part-time lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 to 2004; he taught constitutional law at the law school. Obama also served as a board member at the Woods Fund of Chicago, a philanthropic organization.
In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois senate. He was elected again in 1998 and 2002. In 2000, he lost a primary for the United States House of Representatives.
In 2003, Obama was appointed the chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee. Obama became a United States Senator in late 2004 to become the fifth Afro-American Senator in history. He secured 70% votes.
In 1991, while being in-charge of a voter registration drive in Chicago, Obama began writing a book of memoirs that was later published in 1995 as Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Obama wrote another book later that was published in 2006. The book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream went on to become a part of the New York Times Best Seller list.
Once elected into the state Senate of Illinois, Obama took deep interest in reforms and policies, making and changing some consequently. He initiated the requirement of mandatorily videotaping interrogations in cases of homicide. He enthusiastically participated in creating the Earned Income Tax Credit program for state, meant for helping people in the low-income groups. He went on to initiate reforms in the fields of healthcare and childcare. An interesting law that came into being because of him was the law to monitor racial profiling. It became mandatory to note the race of the drivers that are detained by the state police.
Following his election into the United States Senate, Obama showed extreme interest in immigration reforms and border security improvements. He became a co-sponsor of the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act; the act was introduced by John McCain, his Republican rival who ran for the United States Presidential post. A year later, Obama also favored another security bill that later became the Secure Fence Act.
Obama, in association with Tom Coburn, brought the Coburn-Obama Transparency Act into being; the act made the government expenditure transparent via a website called the USAspending.gov. Also, in association with the Republican, Richard Lugar, a Lugar-Obama program went on to make additions to the existing Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction concept.
In 2007, Obama, in association with Senator Russ Feingold, brought into being the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. He later introduced the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007.
Last year in February, he declared that he will be running for the post of the President of the United States. He has showed his dislike to negative campaigning.
Obama has been advocating an end to the war in Iraq, a universal health care mechanism and increased energy independence as his most important agendas in his manifesto.
Obama has surprised his critics by raising enormous amount of money through his campaigns. In January this year, his campaign raised 36.8 million US dollars, the highest amount raised ever in the Democratic primaries. In the first six months of his campaign last year, 58 million US dollars were raised, breaking earlier records.
Following a series of hate mail sent to Obama, the US Secret Service instated special protection for Obama. “Fired up! Ready to go!” is a cry doing the rounds at Obama’s campaigns.
Barack Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton are now almost tied at the total estimated superdelegate votes.
Obama has been dubbed as the most liberal Senator in his political life. In his personal life, he plays basketball and claims to be a good poker player.
Parents of Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama is a man tied at his tether to the history sheets of US’s political evolution. A lot of drama has unfolded and a lot of water has flown under the bridge, but this democratic nominee for presidentship hasn’t come unhinged by the caustic attacks of history. For the uninitiated, Barack Obama is also a junior senator from Illinois. He is a calm face of a nation reeling under serious repercussions of recessionary phase. He has withstood the Hillary Clinton’s, the Sarah Palin’s and the John Mccain’s and is quintessentially made of the fabric called grit.
Let’s delve into Barack’s past and segregate his earlier development. Any such study would be trivial and frugal without understanding, the moral flux, psyche and the behavioral demeanor of his parents. It should also be worth noting who they were and what kind of zeal and wisdom they brought to life.
Where did Obama’s parents grow up
Barack’s father was born of Luo lineage and was proud of his nativity. He carried the boots of his nativity to Nyanza province in Kenya. Barack Obama Sr. was an able servant to the British and fulfilled the duties accorded to him with great diligence. Barack’s childhood has this recurring theme of herding goats with his father. Barack’s father was groomed amidst Muslims but became an agnostic with due space of time.
Obama’s mother was shaped by the wind of Kansas. She grew up in Wichita, a province in Kansas. Ann Dunham’s father (maternal grandfather of Barack) worked in oil rigs during the great depression of 1930’s. After Japan’s intrusion of Pearl Harbor, he got enrolled in the American army to serve the nation to his fullest. World War II saw him holding fort as a soldier for Europe’s Patton Army. After the war, Ann’s family shifted to Hawaii, buying a home for their own through a federal housing program.
All along while this was happening in Obama’s mother’s life, his father meritoriously lapped up a scholarship. This resulted in his exodus from Kenyan shores and his emigration into Hawaii. At the time Hussein Obama got his fetus shaped, his parents were earning through student internship at the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Obama’s parents divorce
Then came the tough moment in Barack’s parent’s lives; they got detached and later divorced when Barack’s age was only two. Barack Obama Sr. went to Harvard to get one-up on his degree and thereafter returned to Kenya.
Barack’s mother walked down the aisle with Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student from the same university. In 1967, Lolo’s family moved to the Indonesian capital. This phase saw the birth of Maya Soetoru-Ng, Barack’s half-sister.
Barack plodded with a different language altogether while undergoing schooling at a Jakartan school. Later Barack returned to Hawaii to stay with his maternal grandparents and subsequently topped it by uniting with his mother. Barack’s mother was sacrificed to Ovarian Cancer in 1995.
In the fifth grade Obama got enrolled in the Punahou Academy where he drew sustenance from being one among the only three black students. This created quite a ripple but the issue subsided by the dint of Obama’s merit. This is also where Obama got his first taste of racism and the adverse effects of racial discrimination. Suddenly he grew up to the dictates of being an African-American. This was year 1979.
Barack clearly illustrates in his memoir how it took him a long time coping up with his more than unicultural lineage. The scars that the social flux created in his mind intensified the internal conflicts of such color bound heritage. Obama confessed to seeing his biological father only once prior to his death in a freak car accident in the year 1982.
For all the agony that the scar of African-Americanism piled on him, Barack has stood up ably vindicated by the fact that he has come up as the democratic nominee for world’s top nation.
All we can conjecture at this point in time is that somebody who was split open into two by the severe onslaught of multiracial heritage and found hard time coping with his parent’s troubled marriage must have amassed grit large enough to change the fortunes of world’s biggest nation. In this hope lies the American emancipation and also in this hope lies the fresh grooming of a race-less idealism across the global divide.
Top 10 Interesting Facts About Barack Obama
1.) He won a Grammy Award in 2006 for Best Spoken Word Recording. It was for the audio version of his book Dreams From My Father
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2.) He and his wife bought a house in Chicago in 2005. Back then it cost $1.65 million. The house has 4 fireplaces.
3.) He doesn’t like ice-cream. He worked in Baskin-Robbins as a teenager. That’s where his distaste for ice-cream comes from.
4.) He loves playing Scrabble. He never commented on how good he is, though.
5.) He is bi-racial. He was born to a Kenyan father and a white American mother. In his book Dreams From My Father he writes that he barely noticed the racial difference between his mum and dad in his young age.
6.) He experimented with drugs. Back in his early years he tried marijuana and cocaine. According to his own words he is not proud of it and considers it a mistake as a young man.
7.) He smokes but wants to quit. After all, there is a non-smoking policy in the White House.
8.) He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii but went to live in Indonesia with his mum when the parents divorced. There he was introduced to dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper.
9.) According to his wife Michelle he is very romantic. He is not a door opener but he remembers every anniversary and brings her flowers all the time.
10.) Every night when he is at home he reads the Harry Potter books to his oldest daughter Malia.
John McCain suspended his campaign activities today, saying that he wants to focus on the Wall Street crisis before campaigning again. The McCain camp said that this means he will not be participating in the long-awaited debate on Friday unless a solution is found by then.
The move has Obama and his supporters very mad, as they claim he is just trying to get out of the debate. Obama added that this is the best time to have a debate because it will show the American people how each candidate will deal with what is the worst American economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Of course both candidates disagree on the matter and no one can be proved to be right. There is speculation that McCain did this to stop dropping poll numbers due to the recent blame the GOP has taken due to the economy, but that is not certain. We are really at an interesting point in American history and it will be interesting to see the effect on the 2008 election.
With the recent troubles on Wall Street, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have finally gotten back to attacking McCain and the GOP. With the fall of three major investment banks this year, the Bush administration is taking a lot of heat, which in turn is having a negative effect on the Republican campaign.
The McCain campaign is not taking it sitting back though, as they continue to push the idea that he will bring the most change to the system. Obama, of course, disagrees. The Democratic candidate attacked McCain again on Monday as he spoke in front of an audience in Pueblo, Colorado. He has received a lot of scrutiny lately for not being aggressive enough, which many analysts believe is why McCain has caught up to Obama in the polls.
Obama is still trying to run a clean campaign, but at times he has to attack and it is very understandable why. The race is close and the attacks may be the best way to get an edge over the opposition at this point in the game.
Obama raises $66 million in August
With each passing month it seems like Obama’s fundraisers are getting better and better. In August, The young Senator broke his previous record with $66 million raised. His previous best was $55 million, which he raised in the midst of battle with Hilary Clinton in February. His main opponent may have changed, but the cash flow still hasn’t.
The campaign reported that more than have of the total came from new donors, which is always a good sign. It shows that his following is growing and more people are starting to believe in him. Of course this is partly predictable, since only two candidates remain now and the people who supported other candidates in the primaries often change their minds, but it is still a good thing to see.
At the end of August the campaign had $77 million on hand opposed to $66 million in July. Once more, Obama was able to raise more than McCain, but he will definitely need that since he has vowed to not use public funding like the Republican candidate is. Obama doesn’t want to use public funds because he feels that it is part of a broken system, one which he hopes to fix if he becomes president.
From the get-go, Senator Barack Obama has believed that he could make Virginia to a blue state and he continues to pursue that goal as his campaign moves forward. He visited Norfork on Tuesday, where he spoke about education reform. Norfork has a large military population, which Obama definitely wants to attract.
The day before his Norfork visit, the Democrat visited southwest Virginia, which is perhaps the key to victory if he really wants to win the state. The region overwhelmingly voted for George Bush in 2004 and Obama will certainly need to get some of those votes in order to win the state.
Obama’s speech in the southwest focused on the coal industry, which many of the people in the area are a part of (as current or previous workers.) The candidate is trying diligently to win over the state, which would be a huge victory for his party in December.
McCain passes Obama in polls, not in electoral votes
In the most recent national polls, John McCain is showing a slight advantage over Senator Barack Obama, but the Democrat still holds the lead in Electoral College estimates. McCain currently has a lead of two points over Obama with 47 percent and the Illinois Senator is leading in electoral votes with 243 leaning towards him opposed to only 189 for his opponent.
The McCain campaign has picked up a lot of steam recently after a very successful convention and a lot of media coverage of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The lead is the first time the Republican campaign has polled higher than Obama.
Even though he currently seems to have the upper hand in the Electoral College, Obama knows that they will have to continue campaigning hard if they want to hold back McCain. It is turning into a really close race and we may be in store for quite a battle come November.
Obama and Clinton to have lunch
Senator Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton are scheduled to have a private lunch with each other on September 11th. Clinton invited the Democrat candidate after realizing that Obama would be in New York on Thursday for a joint appearance with his opponent, John McCain. The two candidates will be speaking about the September 11th attacks as the attacks are remembered on the 7th anniversary.
Democrats are hoping that the lunch shows another step towards unity between the Obama and Clinton camps. Both sides have already stated that they stand together, but many of Hilary Clinton’s supporters are still reluctant on following the Illinois Senator. Both Clintons spoke at the Democratic National Convention where they told voters that Obama was the real deal.
The Clintons continue to support Obama and along with this lunch they also have a few scheduled campaigning events coming up including an appearance by Hilary in Florida on Monday.
Barack Obama may want to run a clean campaign, but his opponents certainly don’t care about that. Sarah Palin, who Obama just recently refrained from attacking, is reportedly attacking the Democratic candidate a lot in her latest speech at the Republican National Convention.
The speech has not been given yet, but excerpts have been released by the McCain campaign. She will be criticizing Obama’s lack of experience, while at the same time comparing it with her resume. One of the excerpts was of Palin comparing her job as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska to Obama as a community organizer back in the 80s.
It may seem like an unfair and not really important comparison, but the Republican campaign has showed that they are running a very aggressive campaign. Obama has received some scrutiny lately for not attacking more, but he is still staying away from the dirty game other than in brief attacks directed solely at McCain.
The Palin Debate: What It Means For Obama
Days after Sarah Palin was named as McCain’s running mate, news has spread that her 17-year-old, single daughter is pregnant. The news has had mixed reactions and the outcome of it is currently unknown, but it will certainly have an impact on the upcoming election in one way or another.
On one hand the evangelicals seem to be happy about the decision because Palin’s daughter is keeping the baby, showing that they are truly pro-life. Others claim that it shows Palin is a bad parent who can’t even look after her own kids, bringing up the question of how she could be the vice president of the country.
Some have gone as far as to suggest that Palin will be forced to withdraw and McCain will select another running mate. Of course such a move would prove very beneficial for Obama because the opposition would be in utter chaos. That possibility exists, but it is rare and most likely she won’t drop out. She may lose the Republicans votes, but she may also help them, it is really unclear at the moment.
Obama Continues to Focus on McCain
Barack Obama has continued to focus his attacks on John McCain even after Sarah Palin was announced as the Republican vice presidential candidate. At first the campaign did seem aggressive towards the new target, but in the latest advertisement Palin is shown, but never mentioned. Instead, the ads continue to focus on McCain and the similarities between him and Bush.
The announcer in the commercial speaks of how McCain stands for “no change”, voting with Bush 90 percent of the time. It also talks about how the Republican thinks the economy is currently strong and criticizes him for wanting to continue to spend $10 billion a month in Iraq.
Initially, a member of the Obama campaign did attack Palin (on her lack of experience), but Obama quickly quelled the movement as he continued to focus on his main opponent. In fact, Obama later went on to say a few good things about Palin as well.
Moments after accepting the vice president nomination, Joe Biden went on to praise Obama and attack their opponent. He told delegates that Obama would bring about affordable health care, equal pay for women, and an improved social security system. He then compared that to what he believes McCain would do, stressing that it would be the same things that the Bush administration has done all along.
Democrats have recently centered their attacks on comparing the failed policies of Bush and what McCain proposes to do. Biden also compared Obama and McCain’s positions on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as the economy.
The Democrats have begun to attack the opposition more after McCain moved closer in the polls earlier this week. The Democratic National Convention has seen many attacks on the Republicans and similar attacks can be expected in next week’s Republican National Convention.
The Story of Barack Obama's Mother
Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible. "When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box."
Obama's mother was a dreamer. She made risky bets that paid off only some of the time, choices that her children had to live with. She fell in love—twice—with fellow students from distant countries she knew nothing about. Both marriages failed, and she leaned on her parents and friends to help raise her two children.
"She cried a lot," says her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, "if she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn't being understood in a conversation." And yet she was fearless, says Soetoro-Ng. "She was very capable. She went out on the back of a motorcycle and did rigorous fieldwork. Her research was responsible and penetrating. She saw the heart of a problem, and she knew whom to hold accountable."
Today Obama is partly a product of what his mother was not. Whereas she swept her children off to unfamiliar lands and even lived apart from her son when he was a teenager, Obama has tried to ground his children in the Midwest. "We've created stability for our kids in a way that my mom didn't do for us," he says. "My choosing to put down roots in Chicago and marry a woman who is very rooted in one place probably indicates a desire for stability that maybe I was missing."
Ironically, the person who mattered most in Obama's life is the one we know the least about—maybe because being partly African in America is still seen as being simply black and color is still a preoccupation above almost all else. There is not enough room in the conversation for the rest of a man's story.
But Obama is his mother's son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother's credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they're responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.
It turns out that Obama's nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.
In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.
She spent her high school years on a small island in Washington, taking advanced classes in philosophy and visiting coffee shops in Seattle. "She was a very intelligent, quiet girl, interested in her friendships and current events," remembers Maxine Box, a close high school friend. Both girls assumed they would go to college and pursue careers. "She wasn't particularly interested in children or in getting married," Box says. Although Stanley was accepted early by the University of Chicago, her father wouldn't let her go. She was too young to be off on her own, he said, unaware, as fathers tend to be, of what could happen when she lived in his house.
After she finished high school, her father whisked the family away again—this time to Honolulu, after he heard about a big new furniture store there. Hawaii had just become a state, and it was the new frontier. Stanley grudgingly went along yet again, enrolling in the University of Hawaii as a freshman.
By college, Stanley had started introducing herself as Ann. She met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian-language class. He was one of the first Africans to attend the University of Hawaii and a focus of great curiosity. He spoke at church groups and was interviewed for several local-newspaper stories. "He had this magnetic personality," remembers Neil Abercrombie, a member of Congress from Hawaii who was friends with Obama Sr. in college. "Everything was oratory from him, even the most commonplace observation."
Obama's father quickly drew a crowd of friends at the university. "We would drink beer, eat pizza and play records," Abercrombie says. They talked about Vietnam and politics. "Everyone had an opinion about everything, and everyone was of the opinion that everyone wanted to hear their opinion—no one more so than Barack."
The exception was Ann, the quiet young woman in the corner who began to hang out with Obama and his friends that fall. "She was scarcely out of high school. She was mostly kind of an observer," says Abercrombie. Obama Sr.'s friends knew he was dating a white woman, but they made a point of treating it as a nonissue. This was Hawaii, after all, a place enamored of its reputation as a melting pot. But when people called Hawaii a "melting pot" in the early 1960s, they meant a place where white people blended with Asians. At the time, 19% of white women in Hawaii married Chinese men, and that was considered radical by the rest of the nation. Black people made up less than 1% of the state's population. And while interracial marriage was legal there, it was banned in half the other states.
When Ann told her parents about the African student at school, they invited him over for dinner. Her father didn't notice when his daughter reached out to hold the man's hand, according to Obama's book. Her mother thought it best not to cause a scene. As Obama would write, "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people playing in her head."
On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama's parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records. It was a Thursday. At that point, Ann was three months pregnant with Barack Obama II. Friends did not learn of the wedding until afterward. "Nobody was invited," says Abercrombie. The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. "I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?" Obama wonders. "I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more."
Even by the standards of 1961, she was young to be married. At 18, she dropped out of college after one semester, according to University of Hawaii records. When her friends back in Washington heard the news, "we were very shocked," says Box, her high school friend.
Then, when Obama was almost 1, his father left for Harvard to get a Ph.D. in economics. He had also been accepted to the New School in New York City, with a more generous scholarship that would have allowed his family to join him. But he decided to go to Harvard. "How can I refuse the best education?" he told Ann, according to Obama's book.
Obama's father had an agenda: to return to his home country and help reinvent Kenya. He wanted to take his new family with him. But he also had a wife from a previous marriage there—a marriage that may or may not have been legal. In the end, Ann decided not to follow him. "She was under no illusions," says Abercrombie. "He was a man of his time, from a very patriarchal society." Ann filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964, citing "grievous mental suffering"—the reason given in most divorces at the time. Obama Sr. signed for the papers in Cambridge, Mass., and did not contest the divorce.
Ann had already done things most women of her generation had not: she had married an African, had their baby and gotten divorced. At this juncture, her life could have become narrower—a young, marginalized woman focused on paying the rent and raising a child on her own. She could have filled her son's head with well-founded resentment for his absent father. But that is not what happened.
Lolo's house, on the outskirts of Jakarta, was a long way from the high-rises of Honolulu. There was no electricity, and the streets were not paved. The country was transitioning to the rule of General Suharto. Inflation was running at more than 600%, and everything was scarce. Ann and her son were the first foreigners to live in the neighborhood, according to locals who remember them. Two baby crocodiles, along with chickens and birds of paradise, occupied the backyard. To get to know the kids next door, Obama sat on the wall between their houses and flapped his arms like a great, big bird, making cawing noises, remembers Kay Ikranagara, a friend. "That got the kids laughing, and then they all played together," she says.
Obama attended a Catholic school called Franciscus Assisi Primary School. He attracted attention since he was not only a foreigner but also chubbier than the locals. But he seemed to shrug off the teasing, eating tofu and tempeh like all the other kids, playing soccer and picking guavas from the trees. He didn't seem to mind that the other children called him "Negro," remembers Bambang Sukoco, a former neighbor.
At first, Obama's mother gave money to every beggar who stopped at their door. But the caravan of misery—children without limbs, men with leprosy—churned on forever, and she was forced to be more selective. Her husband mocked her calculations of relative suffering. "Your mother has a soft heart," he told Obama.
As Ann became more intrigued by Indonesia, her husband became more Western. He rose through the ranks of an American oil company and moved the family to a nicer neighborhood. She was bored by the dinner parties he took her to, where men boasted about golf scores and wives complained about their Indonesian servants. The couple fought rarely but had less and less in common. "She wasn't prepared for the loneliness," Obama wrote in Dreams. "It was constant, like a shortness of breath."
Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son's room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn't afford the élite international school and worried he wasn't challenged enough. After two years at the Catholic school, Obama moved to a state-run elementary school closer to the new house. He was the only foreigner, says Ati Kisjanto, a classmate, but he spoke some Indonesian and made new friends.
Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, but Obama's household was not religious. "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew," Obama said in a 2007 speech. "But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I." In her own way, Ann tried to compensate for the absence of black people in her son's life. At night, she came home from work with books on the civil rights movement and recordings of Mahalia Jackson. Her aspirations for racial harmony were simplistic. "She was very much of the early Dr. [Martin Luther] King era," Obama says. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals." Ann gave her daughter, who was born in 1970, dolls of every hue: "A pretty black girl with braids, an Inuit, Sacagawea, a little Dutch boy with clogs," says Soetoro-Ng, laughing. "It was like the United Nations."
In 1971, when Obama was 10, Ann sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend Punahou, an élite prep school that he'd gotten into on a scholarship with his grandparents' help. This wrenching decision seemed to reflect how much she valued education. Ann's friends say it was hard on her, and Obama, in his book, describes an adolescence shadowed by a sense of alienation. "I didn't feel [her absence] as a deprivation," Obama told me. "But when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know."
A year later, Ann followed Obama back to Hawaii, as promised, taking her daughter but leaving her husband behind. She enrolled in a master's program at the University of Hawaii to study the anthropology of Indonesia.
Indonesia is an anthropologist's fantasyland. It is made up of 17,500 islands, on which 230 million people speak more than 300 languages. The archipelago's culture is colored by Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Dutch traditions. Indonesia "sucks a lot of us in," says fellow anthropologist and friend Alice Dewey. "It's delightful."
Around this time, Ann began to find her voice. People who knew her before describe her as quiet and smart; those who met her afterward use words like forthrightand passionate. The timing of her graduate work was perfect. "The whole face of the earth was changing," Dewey says. "Colonial powers were collapsing, countries needed help, and development work was beginning to interest anthropologists."
Ann's husband visited Hawaii frequently, but they never lived together again. Ann filed for divorce in 1980. As with Obama's father, she kept in regular contact with Lolo and did not pursue alimony or child support, according to divorce records.
"She was no Pollyanna. There have certainly been moments when she complained to us," says her daughter Soetoro-Ng. "But she was not someone who would take the detritus of those divorces and make judgments about men in general or love or allow herself to grow pessimistic." With each failed marriage, Ann gained a child and, in one case, a country as well.
Her home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers, musicians and labor organizers. "She had, compared with other foundation colleagues, a much more eclectic circle," Zurbuchen says. "She brought unlikely conversation partners together."
Obama's mother cared deeply about helping poor women, and she had two biracial children. But neither of them remembers her talking about sexism or racism. "She spoke mostly in positive terms: what we are trying to do and what we can do," says Soetoro-Ng, who is now a history teacher at a girls' high school in Honolulu. "She wasn't ideological," notes Obama. "I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant." He remembers her joking that she wanted to get paid as much as a man, but it didn't mean she would stop shaving her legs. In his recent Philadelphia speech on race, in which he acknowledged the grievances of blacks and whites, Obama was consciously channeling his mother. "When I was writing that speech," he told nbc News, "her memory loomed over me. Is this something that she would trust?" When it came to race, Obama told me, "I don't think she was entirely comfortable with the more aggressive or militant approaches to African-American politics."
In the expat community of Asia in the 1980s, single mothers were rare, and Ann stood out. She was by then a rather large woman with frizzy black hair. But Indonesia was an uncommonly tolerant place. "For someone like Ann, who had a big personality and was a big presence," says Zurbuchen, "Indonesia was very accepting. It gave her a sense of fitting in." At home, Ann wore the traditional housecoat, the batik daster. She loved simple, traditional restaurants. Friends remember sharingbakso bola tenis, or noodles with tennis-ball-size meatballs, from a roadside stand.
Today Ann would not be so unusual in the U.S. A single mother of biracial children pursuing a career, she foreshadowed, in some ways, what more of America would look like. But she did so without comment, her friends say. "She wasn't stereotypical at all," says Nancy Peluso, a friend and an environmental sociologist. "But she didn't make a big deal out of it."
Ann's most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to '92—before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. "I would say her work had a lot to do with the success of the program," he says. Today Indonesia's microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit. While his mother was helping poor people in Indonesia, Obama was trying to do something similar 7,000 miles (about 11,300 km) away in Chicago, as a community organizer. Ann's friends say she was delighted by his career move and started every conversation with an update of her children's lives. "All of us knew where Barack was going to school. All of us knew how brilliant he was," remembers Ann's friend Georgia McCauley.
Every so often, Ann would leave Indonesia to live in Hawaii—or New York or even, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan, for a microfinance job. She and her daughter sometimes lived in garage apartments and spare rooms of friends. She collected treasures from her travels—exquisite things with stories she understood. Antique daggers with an odd number of curves, as required by Javanese tradition; unusual batiks; rice-paddy hats. Before returning to Hawaii in 1984, Ann wrote her friend Dewey that she and her daughter would "probably need a camel caravan and an elephant or two to load all our bags on the plane, and I'm sure you don't want to see all those airline agents weeping and rending their garments." At his house in Chicago, Obama says, he has his mother's arrowhead collection from Kansas—along with "trunks full of batiks that we don't really know what to do with."
In 1992, Obama's mother finally finished her Ph.D. dissertation, which she had worked on, between jobs, for almost two decades. The thesis is 1,000 pages, a meticulous analysis of peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia. The glossary, which she describes as "far from complete," is 24 pages. She dedicated the tome to her mother; to Dewey, her adviser; "and to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field."
In the fall of 1994, Ann was having dinner at her friend Patten's house in Jakarta when she felt a pain in her stomach. A local doctor diagnosed indigestion. When Ann returned to Hawaii several months later, she learned it was ovarian and uterine cancer. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, at 52.
Before her death, Ann read a draft of her son's memoir, which is almost entirely about his father. Some of her friends were surprised at the focus, but she didn't seem obviously bothered. "She never complained about it," says Peluso. "She just said it was something he had to work out." Neither Ann nor her son knew how little time they had left.
Obama has said his biggest mistake was not being at his mother's side when she died. He went to Hawaii to help the family scatter the ashes over the Pacific. And he carries on her spirit in his campaign. "When Barack smiles," says Peluso, "there's just a certain Ann look. He lights up in a particular way that she did."
After Ann's death, her daughter dug through her artifacts, searching for Ann's story. "She always did want to write a memoir," Soetoro-Ng says. Finally, she discovered the start of a life story, but it was less than two pages. She never found anything more. Maybe Ann had run out of time, or maybe the chemotherapy had worn her out. "I don't know. Maybe she felt overwhelmed," says Soetoro-Ng, "because there was so much to tell."
Barack and Michelle Obama Marriage Profile
What You Can Learn From the Marriage of Michelle and Barack Obama:
Barack and Michelle understand the importance of putting a priority on their time together. Even with both of their busy schedules, Barack and Michelle make time for one another.
In an ABC interview, Michelle said that "Barack didn't pledge riches, only a life that would be interesting. On that promise he's delivered." She also said as part of the division of labor in their house, Barack did the grocery shopping. Read more about their marriage in the spotlight.
01/20/09: Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States.
Born:
Barack "Barry" Hussein Obama, Jr.: August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His name Barack means "one who is blessed" in Swahili. He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia.
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson: January 17, 1964 in Chicago, Illinois.
How Barack and Michelle Met:
In 1989, Michelle was working at a downtown law firm and assigned the role of advisor to a summer associate from Harvard, Barack Obama. He reportedly didn't have much interest in corporate law, but did have a lot of interest in Michelle.
She said "she fell in love with him for the same reason many other people respect him; his connection with people."
After refusing to go out with Barack for a month, Michelle agreed to spend the day with him. They went to the art institute, had lunch at an outdoor cafe, walked and talked, saw the movie Do the Right Thing, and had a drink on the 99th floor of the John Hancock building.
In a CNN interview with Suzanne Malveau, Michelle said "We clicked right away ... by the end of that date it was over ... I was sold."
Wedding Date:
Michelle and Barack's wedding ceremony was performed on October 3, 1992 by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois. Some web sites list their wedding date as October 18, 1992.
Children:
Barack and Michelle have two daughters.
Malia Ann Obama: Born in 1998.
Natasha Obama: Born in 2001.
Residence:
While their official residence is the White House, Barack and Michelle own a historic, $1.6 million Georgian revival home on Chicago's South Side with lots of play space for their girls. The home was purchased in 2005.
While in the Senate, Barack tried to make it a priority to be home every weekend from Thursday to Sunday.
Religion:
Barack: In a letter written 5/30/08 by Barack and Michelle, the couple resigned their membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. Barack had been a member of the Chicago church for twenty years. More Info
Trivia:
Barack and Michelle return most every Christmas to Hawaii where his grandmother and sister still live.
Occupations:
Barack: President of the U.S.; elected in November 2004 as U.S. Senator representing Illinois; community organizer; civil rights lawyer; in 1997 elected as Illinois State Senator representing the 13th Senate District on Chicago's South Side; senior lecturer specializing in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. Barack has served on the boards of several civic and philanthropic organizations.
Obama Receives Hero's Welcome at His Family's Ancestral Village in Kenya
U.S. Senator Barack Obama delighted crowds with a homecoming speech Saturday in his family's ancestral village of Nyangoma Kogelo, Nyanza province, in western Kenya. The Senator made time to visit his grandmother and other family members, while on an unofficial six-day tour of regional development and AIDS projects in Kenya.
The Illinois Senator began his tour of western Kenya on Saturday morning by taking a voluntary HIV test in Nyanza General Hospital to encourage an AIDS prevention campaign in the highly affected region. He then received a joyous reception from thousands of people at a primary school in his late father's village.
Senator Obama, who grew up in the United States, traces his father's origins to the small and humble village close to the shores of Lake Victoria in Eastern Africa.
In his speech to well-wishers, Obama expressed a deep sense of solidarity with this small community and the Kenyan people. He said his father's remarkable life is the story of what is possible when a community comes together to support its children.
"He grew up around here. He was taking care of goats for my grandfather, and, maybe, sometimes, he would go to a school not so different from the Senator Barack Obama School," he said. "Except, maybe, it was smaller, and had even less in terms of equipment and books, the teachers were paid even less, and, sometimes, there wasn't enough money to go to school full time. Yet, despite all that, the community lifted him up, and gave him the opportunity to go to secondary school, then go to university in America, then get a Ph. D. in Harvard..."
Obama is only the fifth African-American to ever sit in the U.S. Senate, and his trip to Kenya has been highly anticipated by his relatives, the community and local politicians.
He has also used his personal connection to Kenya to challenge the country's leaders about good governance and fighting corruption. He warned that aid packages alone will not deliver development, and said the key to Kenya's success will come from its own people.
The Senator's wife and children were by his side, as he gave his commitment to help make sure that children around the world will have an equal chance for higher education and wider opportunities.
"That's why I'm so dedicated to trying to make sure that our young people, in Kenya, in the United States, in the Congo, all children can be well, all children can get the medicines that they need, all children have the opportunity to study, and, ultimately, get employment, so that they in turn can support a family, that all children have that same opportunity," continued Obama. "There is no reason why we can't do that. We have enough resources. We have the knowledge. We have the technology. What we lack is the commitment and will."
Obama has been on a five-nation tour of Africa, taking time to visit his father's home and relatives in western Kenya. This is his third visit to Kenya since the death of his father, Hussein Obama. All of Nyanza province helped prepare the heroes welcome that included T-shirts, baseball caps and even a local drink named after the celebrated senator.
Senator Obama is devoted to fighting HIV/AIDS and has made a personal donation of $14,000 to an AIDS orphan care facility in Kenya. He is also committed to making Africa a top priority in American foreign policy.
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