A COMPLICATED BACKGROUND

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. He is the son of Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black African from Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas. Obama's parents separated when he was two and later divorced. His only memories of his father are drawn from a brief meeting when he was ten and occasional correspondence. Obama is noteworthy not only because he is biracial, but also because organized religion played no part in his childhood. His mother was an agnostic humanist, and the grandparents who helped raise him were not religious.

Obama's mother married an Indonesian man in 1967, and the family moved to Jakarta, where the young Obama attended local schools in which Indonesian was the language of instruction. In 1971, Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and attended the academically rigorous Punahou School from fifth grade through his graduation in 1979. He went on to study at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia University, where he majored in political science and graduated in 1983.

On the surface, the young Obama stood out for his intelligence and poise. Inwardly, he was troubled about the inconsistency between his black features and the remoteness from the life experience of most African Americans that resulted from his upbringing in a white family. As he later put it, “I was attempting to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant” (Obama Reference Obama1995, 76). During his coming-of-age years, Obama indulged in drugs and alcohol, but he also immersed himself in writings on philosophy, religion, and the African American experience. His reading included Saint Augustine, Nietzsche, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and works on the civil rights movement (Obama Reference Obama1995, 85–86; Mendell Reference Mendell2007, 58–61; on Obama's little-recognized erudition, see Kloppenberg Reference Kloppenberg2010).

As his graduation from Columbia approached, Obama decided that he wanted to become a community organizer. “There wasn't much detail in the idea,” he recalled:

Obama sent his résumé to every civil rights organization and progressive black politician he could think of, but there were no takers. He then sought a more conventional job to pay his student loans and found an editorial position with a firm that provided businesses with information about overseas markets. After a year, he resigned to devote himself to the search for a community organizing job. In 1985, he joined the staff of a church-based organization in Chicago that placed him in charge of establishing job training and tenants' rights programs in a predominately black public housing project, a position he held for three years.

In the course of his work, Obama became aware of the importance of churches in the African American community. He made a point of getting acquainted with many of Chicago's black ministers, including Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. He joined Wright's church, and Wright became his minister and occasional advisor. Being a church member had the practical effect of making Obama a more effective community organizer, but it also helped satisfy the growing spiritual needs that had previously led him to read philosophy and theology (Obama Reference Obama1995, 272–87; Obama Reference Obama2006, 202–08; see also Miller and Wolfe Reference Miller and Wolfe2008). Obama eventually concluded that he would be better able to serve the population with which he had been working if he became an attorney. He was accepted to Harvard Law School and entered in the fall of 1988. Before the start of the academic year, Obama acted on his longstanding desire to better understand his African roots and spent five weeks in Kenya, getting to know members of his father's family.

Obama proved to be an outstanding law student. In his second year at Harvard, he was elected president (the equivalent of editor-in-chief) of the Harvard Law Review. A noteworthy aspect of Obama's editorship was his success at working with both liberal and conservative members of the editorial board, foreshadowing the conciliatory leadership style he has often evinced in politics. Because he was the first African American to head that prestigious journal, Obama's selection was widely reported in the media (see, e.g., Butterfield Reference Butterfield1990).

One result of this attention was the contract he received for what became his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Obama graduated from law school magna cum laude in 1991 and returned to Chicago, where he directed a project that registered large numbers of African Americans to vote, joined a law firm that specialized in civil rights litigation, and taught a popular course in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. In 1992, he married Michelle Robinson, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, whose family is rooted in the Chicago African American community.

POLITICAL ASCENT

In 1996, a state senate seat representing Chicago's South Side became vacant when Alice Palmer resigned to seek the Democratic nomination (which, in Chicago, is tantamount to election) for the U.S. House of Representatives. Obama announced that he would enter the primary for her former seat, established a campaign organization, and began to raise funds. Palmer failed in her quest for the House nomination and made it known that she wanted to return to the state legislature. A number of influential Chicago Democrats urged Obama to make way for her, but he refused. Instead, he authorized his aides to scrutinize the signatures on the petitions required for a listing on the primary election ballot. All of his opponents were disqualified because they had too few petitions with valid signatures. Obama therefore ran unopposed. He alienated Palmer, but his career as an elected official was underway.

Obama served in the legislature from 1997 to 2004. At first, he was viewed with skepticism by other legislators because of his Ivy League credentials and what one of his biographers describes as the “policy-heavy and overly intellectual” content of his speeches (Mendell Reference Mendell2007, 122). Obama soon mastered the politics of the state capital, however, even learning to play poker and golf so that he could be present in the informal settings in which political alliances are frequently formed. Obama also became a protégé of Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones and broadened his political base by establishing bonds with lawmakers outside his district.

For most of his time in Springfield, Obama was limited in what he could accomplish, because the state senate was under Republican control. In 2003, the Democrats came to power. Emil Jones became the senate leader and used his position to help Obama compile a substantial record. Obama played a central part in the passage of laws that tightened the ethical standards for public officials, provided tax credits for low-income workers, and increased child care subsidies. His signature law mandated the videotaping of police interrogations of homicide suspects, thus ending the practice of coercing confessions. To win support for this measure, Obama negotiated with party lawmakers, the governor, and police representatives. Despite initial opposition, the measure was passed by a unanimous vote (Peters Reference Peters2008; Scott Reference Scott2007).

Obama's soaring ambitions were not satisfied by serving at the state level. In January 2003, he entered the race for one of Illinois's seats in the U.S. Senate. His first hurdle was the March 2004 Democratic primary. In the weeks leading up to this event, he surged to the head of a large field of candidates with the help of a blizzard of television advertising that noted his endorsement by a number of the state's leading party leaders, labor unions, and newspapers. Obama won the nomination with more votes than all other candidates combined.

Between the time that Obama won the Senate nomination and the general election, he was invited to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in late July—an event that would transform his political career. Obama had come to the convention organizers' attention for the fluency of his speeches in the Illinois senate campaign. His convention address reflected what has been referred to as a “post-partisan, post-racial” political stance. He expressed his pride at his own mixed race heritage, deplored efforts to play up the nation's divisions, and stressed the importance of the ties that unite Americans. Then, in a rhetorical flourish that made him an instant political celebrity, Obama declared that that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America” and “there is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America.”

The convention was electrified. One further effect of Obama's address was that Dreams from My Father was reprinted and quickly became a bestseller. Another outcome was that Obama was soon in great demand as a speaker, drawing audiences that responded to him with the fervor usually reserved for entertainment celebrities. His election to the Illinois Senate became a virtual inevitability when a personal scandal forced his Republican opponent to drop out of the race and the GOP substituted the perennial office seeker Alan Keyes, whose highly conservative message had limited appeal in Illinois, as its candidate. Obama was elected with 70% of the vote—the record for an Illinois statewide election.

TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois, using the Old State Capitol in which Abraham Lincoln delivered his 1858 “house divided” speech as a backdrop (Heilemann and Halperin Reference Heilemann and Halperin2010). He was one of three frontrunners for the Democratic nomination, with the others being New York senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton and former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards. Clinton was widely viewed as the likely nominee. She had near-universal name recognition and the backing of many of the nation's most prominent Democratic leaders. Edwards adopted a populist tack in his campaign, stressing his background as the son of a millworker. Obama's strengths included the skill, organization, and discipline of his campaign staff and the extraordinary enthusiasm of his supporters. It also helped that he was an early opponent of the war in Iraq, whereas both Clinton and Edwards had voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the president to use force against Saddam Hussein's regime.

The race for the nomination officially began with the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008. Obama sought to give his campaign momentum through an unexpected success in that bellwether state. He achieved his goal, coming in first with 38% of the vote. Edwards was second with 30%, while Clinton trailed with 29%. However, she turned the tables by winning in New Hampshire on January 8. By the time of the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses early in February, Edwards had done so poorly that he suspended his campaign, and Obama held a modest lead over Clinton.

In March, a disclosure threatened to derail Obama's candidacy. ABC News publicized excerpts from angry sermons given by Obama's minister, Jeremiah Wright. In one, Wright seemed to be justifying the September 11, 2001, bombing of the World Trade Center on the grounds that the United States had committed such crimes as bombing Japan with nuclear weapons in World War II. In another, he recited a litany of alleged misconduct by the American government and said that rather than singing “God Bless America,” his parishioners should sing “God Damn America.” Obama's response was to deliver a closely reasoned speech about race relations in the United States from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the present. He also reiterated his commitment to bringing Americans of all colors and creeds together and declared that he disagreed with Wright's “divisive” statements, adding that he expected Wright to continue to be his pastor. With his characteristic attention to symbolism, Obama delivered the address at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, not far from Independence Hall. Wright persisted in making inflammatory statements, however, and Obama formally broke with him.

Despite the Jeremiah Wright affair, Obama's delegate lead widened. He was helped by his campaign's innovative use of the Internet to raise funds and its pursuit of delegates in a group of states that the Clinton forces tended to ignore—those that select delegates in caucuses composed of local party members. The contest continued until June, when Clinton conceded. Obama's Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona, in contrast, had become his party's presumptive nominee three months earlier. However, it was to Obama's advantage that the Democratic nominating process continued for as long as it did. The campaign's duration gave his organization time to build a network of experienced workers and made Obama newsworthy during a period when the media had little reason to be attentive to McCain. In August, the presidential candidates selected their vice presidential running mates. Obama chose the six-term Delaware senator Joseph Biden, and McCain picked the politically inexperienced Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Neither appears to have had a decisive effect on the election outcome.

Two factors were important—the unpopularity of President George W. Bush and the deep economic downturn that was enveloping the nation that autumn. Such matters typically hurt the candidate of the party holding the White House, and that was true for McCain, who attempted, with limited success, to distance himself from Bush. By late September, Obama had begun to lead McCain in the pre-election polls, an advantage that continued until Election Day. He was elected with 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173. The Democrats also won control of Congress, with a 79-seat margin in the House and a 16-seat margin in the Senate.

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY

Obama's inaugural address included the inspirational rhetoric that is customary for such occasions, but much of his speech was devoted to a recitation of the nation's problems and his administration's plans to address them. Obama began making policy in his first week in office by issuing executive orders. He froze the pay of members of the White House staff earning more than $100,000 a year, ordered the closing of the controversial Guantanamo detention camp within the year (an order on which he was eventually unable to act), banned the use of torture in the interrogation of terror suspects, and cancelled the previous administration's ban on funding groups providing abortion services. In a later executive order, Obama reversed the Bush administration's policy of barring the use of federal funds for human embryonic stem cell research.

On January 29, the new Congress's first piece of legislation in Obama's program reached the White House for his signature—an act that extends the period in which employees can file lawsuits alleging discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or age. On February 4, Obama signed a bill expanding the number of children who can receive federally funded health insurance from 7 million to 11 million. On February 17, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion measure designed to stimulate the economy. Included in this act are tax cuts; unemployment benefits; and appropriations for education, health care, and infrastructure. By the final months of 2009, there was evidence that the stimulus program had contributed to an economic upturn. However, high unemployment persisted, and the rapidity and robustness of any recovery continued to be uncertain (Irwin Reference Irwin2009).

The proposal in Obama's first-year legislative program that had the greatest potential for placing him on the short list of chief executives who have presided over major policy breakthroughs relates to health care. As Obama pointed out in a September 10 address to a joint session of Congress, the United States has long been the only wealthy nation that does not guarantee its citizens health care. In seeking to eliminate that discrepancy, Obama chose to state the goals he favored in general terms and leave Congress the task of filling in the specifics. These particulars included a major expansion in the ranks of the insured, an end to the practice of denying health insurance to people with preexisting medical conditions, and a ban on lifetime limits on health insurance. Obama's decision to leave these specifics to Congress was a calculated move to avoid the fate of President Clinton's health insurance bill, which was drafted by the White House with little congressional input and failed to be enacted.

By late 2009, the House and Senate had passed health insurance bills that were broadly consistent with Obama's guidelines. Before the chambers reached an agreement on a compromise bill, a political bombshell dropped: on January 12, 2010, Massachusetts elected a Republican to the Senate seat that had been held by the late Edward Kennedy. No longer did the Democrats have the 60 votes needed to defeat a Senate filibuster. Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership concluded that the best way to proceed was for the House of Representatives to accept the Senate bill, making it unnecessary for the Senate to hold another vote. Differences between the two chambers could then be resolved by a parliamentary procedure that required only a majority vote.

The new strategy bore fruit on March 21, 2010, when the House of Representatives voted to accept the Senate bill, but it was not executed without difficulties. A number of anti-abortion House members had been balking at wording in the Senate measure that they believed would permit government funding of abortions. Obama broke the impasse by promising to issue an executive order affirming that nothing in the new bill would authorize federal payment for the termination of pregnancies. (As in the past, exceptions would be made for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or situations when the mother's life was in danger.) On March 23, Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the East Room of the White House. The importance of this addition to the social safety net available to Americans is comparable to that of the enactment of Medicare in 1965 and Social Security in 1935 (Pear and Herszenhorn Reference Pear and Herszenhorn2010; Wilson, Montgomery, and Branigin Reference Wilson, Montgomery and Branigin2010).

As 2010 proceeded, public opinion polling revealed a paradox. The new health insurance law was opposed by substantial numbers of respondents when they were asked about it in general terms, but high levels of approval were expressed for such provisions of the law as the ban on cancellation of insurance for people incurring high medical expenses or with pre-existing medical conditions (Brodie et al. Reference Brodie2010).

The final major legislative enactment of the first two years of Obama's presidency was the most sweeping reform of the nation's financial industry since the Great Depression, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This measure seeks to eliminate or reduce the likelihood of the kind of meltdown of the banking system that produced the financial crisis of 2008 through the regulation of risky banking practices and better monitoring of the banking system. Obama signed this bill into law on July 21, 2010.

Obama's ambitious domestic program did not prevent him from being active in the international sphere. By the end of his first presidential year, he had exceeded all previous presidents in first-year visits to other nations. In what was interpreted as a departure from the unilateralism of the Bush years, Obama indicated that his administration would seek to improve relations with friendly nations and win over those nations that have been less than friendly. He placed a particular priority on improving relations with the Islamic world. Obama signaled this intention in a June 4 address at Cairo University in which he called for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world” and declared “the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”

Obama's response to each of the two wars he inherited differed noticeably. In the case of Iraq, he announced that the United States would not engage in combat after August 2010. In the case of Afghanistan, he presided over a late 2009 policy review of unusual length and rigor that resulted in a two-stage policy. First, the United States was to increase its troop commitment with the goal of strengthening that nation's military and political institutions. Then, in July 2011, it would begin to withdraw its troops. Under this plan, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan would be abandoned, but they would no longer be defended by American troops.

This account concludes with some brief remarks on the 2010 congressional election, in which the Democrats experienced the greatest midterm seat loss by a president's party since 1938 and reduced their Senate majoirty by six seats. When the results were in, a chagrined Obama acknowledged that he and the Democratic Party had received a “shellacking.” His critics and many of his defenders were quick to describe the election as a rejection by the electorate of Obama's policies and perhaps Obama himself.

It has not been widely recognized that a significant part of such a seat loss was to be expected, given the state of the economy and the many congressional Democrats from normally Republican districts who came in on Obama's coattails in 2008 (McGhee, Nyhan, and Sides Reference McGhee, Nyhan and Sides2010). Sensing Obama's vulnerability, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell declared that the Republicans' highest priority would be holding Obama to one term. Assertions that Obama will be a one-term president are plainly premature. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were in the political doghouse at the same point in their presidencies, and both rallied to win reelection with strong majorities. President George H. W. Bush was enormously popular in the third year of his presidency, only to be denied reelection a year later. President George W. Bush was immensely popular immediately after September 11, but his re-election margin was modest. In short, it is too early to count Obama in or out for a second term, and it is premature to expect the worst because of the change in the party balance in Congress. Obama, as we have seen, worked effectively across party lines in the Illinois legislature.

LEADERSHIP QUALITIES