From unknown to nominee

Eight years ago, Barack Obama was a politician in need of clout. He had just been trounced in his bid for Congress. His credit card was rejected at the car rental counter.

His political future was uncertain.

But this year, Obama went on the stage to accept the Democratic nomination for president. He will be at the apex of American politics — a phenomenon who smashed every fundraising record, drew astounding crowds and made history.

Obama has a life story unlike that of any man ever nominated for the nation’s highest office. And while his unconventional experiences have made him an unconventional candidate, they also have helped fuel his extraordinary rise.

It’s not just his biracial roots and foreign-sounding name that set him apart.

It’s his youth spent wrestling with questions about his racial identity and an African father he barely knew. It’s his admission that he dabbled in drugs as a teen, the kind of revelation, made in his memoir, rarely divulged by politicians.

The first chapters of Obama’s life story are familiar now. The Kansas-born mother, Stanley (her father wanted a boy) Ann Dunham.

The Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama Sr. Their meeting at the University of Hawaii, their marriage, the birth of Barack — “blessed” in Arabic — on Aug. 4, 1961. The father’s departure two years later to study at Harvard, his return just once when his son was 10.

The exotic childhood in Indonesia, homeland of his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro; the exposure to poverty and beggars, crocodiles and roasted grasshopper.

And then, after his mother’s second marriage broke up, the return to Hawaii, where the young Obama — then known as Barry — enrolled in a prestigious private academy. Back then, there were no obvious signs that pointed to politics as his destiny.

When his mother’s anthropology projects took her back to Indonesia, Obama stayed behind for high school, living with his maternal grandparents. And he’s said those early years were difficult.

“I spent much of my childhood adrift,” he said in a recent speech. “Growing up I wasn’t always sure who I was or what I was doing.”

He struggled with questions about his race and identity, and in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he described how he turned to drugs to “push questions of who I was out of my mind”.

At Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama — who started using his given name, Barack — took his first plunge into politics, speaking at an anti-apartheid rally.

Obama soon transferred from the small liberal arts college to Columbia University in New York. He graduated with a political science degree and held a few jobs in New York.

After New York, Obama headed to Chicago where he knew no one, taking a low-paying job, facing a formidable challenge — motivating poor people to participate in a political system that had traditionally shut them out.

Starting out as a US$12,000-a-year community organizer, Obama walked the run-down streets of the South Side that had been decimated by the loss of steel mills and factory jobs.

Obama — who calls his organizing work “the best education I ever had” — became a skilled conciliator.

After three years as a community organizer, Obama made a giant leap from the gritty South Side to the heady atmosphere of Harvard Law School, the training ground for America’s elite. He made history there, as the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

After his first year, Obama was a summer associate at a corporate law firm in Chicago where his adviser was Michelle Robinson, a Harvard law graduate from a working-class family. They later married, and had two daughters, Malia, now 10, and Sasha, 7.

As Obama prepared to leave Harvard, job offers poured in. But he already had decided to return to Chicago for a political career. He joined a small, politically connected law firm that did civil rights litigation.

While organizing his political future, Obama became a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School where he taught constitutional law.

In 1996, Obama was elected to the state Senate, but as a member of the Democratic minority, his legislative proposals were consistently thwarted by Republicans. Some dismissed him as an ivory tower liberal.

Obama won over many lawmakers in Springfield, however. He played in weekly poker games, befriending suburban and white rural legislators.

He had several legislative successes, passing measures that limited lobbyists’ gifts to politicians, helped expand health care to poor children. He also changed laws governing racial profiling, the death penalty and the interrogation of murder suspects.

Though generally a liberal, he reached across party lines to Republicans.

In his next political step, Obama stumbled badly when he sought the Democratic nomination for Congress in 2000, challenging Rep. Bobby Rush, a former political radical with deep roots in the community. During that contest, Obama was dogged by the question raised by some pundits and black politicians — whether he was “black enough” for the district.

Obama says there never has been any question about his being black. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, he wrote about how race shaped his life, describing indignities such as security guards trailing him in stores or people mistaking him for a parking valet.

“I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger,” he wrote.

When Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy 18 months ago, he was still unknown to most Americans. A freshman senator, Obama had been in Washington just two years — not long enough to leave much of a footprint.

Obama proved to be an enormous draw on the campaign trail, packing arenas with overflow crowds as he promised an end to the Iraq war, a new era of bipartisanship in Washington and “change we can believe in”.

Though he did not focus on race, it inevitably became part of the campaign as he racked up huge support among black voters. His newcomer’s status and compelling biography have helped and hurt him on his way to the nomination.

On the downside, he has been forced to continually debunk bogus rumors — spread on the Internet — that he is a Muslim, refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and didn’t use a Bible at his Senate swearing-in. (sumber The Jakarta Pos edisi 15 September 2008)