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Barack Obama

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Barack Obama went from being a virtual unknown in 2004 to being the forerunning Democratic candidate for President in 2008.

He was the third African-American to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention when he took the stage at the 2004 convention in Boston, MA. A few months later, the former law professor at the University of Chicago became the fifth African-American US senator in history, winning with a landslide 70% of the vote.

Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, HI. His father, an economist, was born in Kenya and his mother was born in Kansas. At the time of Obama's birth, both his parents were students at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. When Obama was two years old, the couple was divorced and Ann Obama then married another East-West Center student from Indonesia. The family moved to Jakarta, where Obama's half-sister Maya was born (another half-sister, the daughter of Obama's father by a later marriage, lives in Nairobi).

Obama was raised, mostly in Hawaii, by his late mother and grandparents. He graduated from Columbia University in New York and received his law degree, graduating magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. He became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review and later worked as a civil rights lawyer and as a community organizer in New York and Chicago. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1997, where he served as chairman of the Public Health and Welfare Committee. He is married and the father of two daughters.

On February 10, 2007, Obama entered the race for President of the United States. The competition was narrowed down fairly quickly to be a race between Obama, the first serious African American candidate, and Hillary Clinton, the first serious woman candidate for US president.

Last updated: March 31, 2008.

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Who2 Biography: Barack Obama, U.S. Senator

Born: 4 August 1961
Birthplace: Honolulu, Hawaii
Best Known As: U.S. senator and 2008 Democratic candidate for president

Barack Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2008. Obama has spoken often of his multicultural background: his father was from Kenya, his mother from Kansas, and they met at the University of Hawaii. After his parents divorced and his father returned to Africa, Obama stayed with his mother and was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. He earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1983 and a law degree from Harvard in 1991. He then joined the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which specialized in civil rights legislation. He also lectured at the University of Chicago. He was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, and then to the U.S. Senate in 2004, beating Republican candidate Alan Keyes. Obama shot to national fame after delivering the keynote speech in support of John Kerry at the 2004 Democratic national convention. The speech established Obama as a rising star in the party. Obama announced in February of 2007 that he would run for president in 2008; he became the presumptive Democratic Party nominee in June of 2008 when his last opponent, Hillary Clinton, dropped from the race. He published the personal memoir Dreams from My Father in 1995, and published a second book, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006. The title of the latter book was also the title of his 2004 keynote speech, and both books won Grammys for best spoken word album.

Obama married the former Michelle Robinson in 1992. They have two daughters: Malia (b. 1999) and Sasha (b. 2001)... Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., was black; his mother, Ann Dunham, was white... Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles before completing his undergraduate degree at Columbia... Obama's Senate and campaign websites describe him as "the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review" and "the third African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate." The previous African-American senators elected by popular vote were Edward Brooke (1967-79, from Massachusetts) and Carol Moseley-Braun (1993-99, from Illinois). Two other African-Americans were chosen by state senates to become U.S. Senators: Hiram Revels (1870-71, from Mississippi) and Blanche Bruce (1875-81, also from Mississippi)... His 2008 Grammy for The Audacity of Hope won over Bill Clinton's Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World and Jimmy Carter's Sunday Mornings in Plains: Bringing Peace to a Changing World.

Black Biography: Barack Obama

politician; lawyer

Personal Information

Born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, HI; son of Barack Obama, a Kenyan government economist; raised by mother, a Kansas native; lived with mother in Indonesia as child; raised as teenager in Honolulu by maternal grandparents; married Michelle; children: Malia Ann and Natasha
Education: Columbia University, 1983; Harvard Law School, law degree, magna cum laude, 1991.
Religion: United Church of Christ.

Career

Community organizer, Chicago, 1983-86; civil rights attorney, Chicago, 1991-96; University of Chicago, lecturer, early 1990s-2004; Illinois State Senator, 1996-2005; U.S. Senator, 2005-.

Life's Work

Elected to represent Illinois in the United States Senate in November of 2004, Barack Obama had already become the subject of speculation as to his future on the national political stage. The speculation had grown exponentially in August of that year, when Obama delivered an electrifying keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. In that speech, Obama used the language of patriotism to frame an appeal to Americans to transcend their divisions. "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

Indeed, Barack Obama's story resonated with the durable narrative of the American melting pot. "Barack is the American dream," Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe told Ebony. Obama himself in his convention speech said that "in no other country on earth is my story even possible." Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was named after his father Barack, a Kenyan exchange student; the name is an African one and means "blessing" in his father's native Swahili. Obama's mother Ann was a white American born in Kansas who had moved to Honolulu with her parents.

Obama's family unit dissolved when he was two, as his father won a scholarship to Harvard that wasn't large enough to support the whole family and went to Massachusetts alone. After finishing his degree, the elder Obama went home to Kenya and took a job as an economic planner for the country's government. He continued to write letters to his son, and visited him once when he was ten, but his marriage to Obama's mother ended. She married an Indonesian oil company executive, and Obama lived in Indonesia between the ages of six and ten. His half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng was born in Indonesia and later moved to Honolulu.

Conflicted Identities in Honolulu

Sent back to Hawaii to live with his mother's parents in a small Honolulu apartment, Obama had a tough adolescence. Considered black by the world of which he was learning to be a part, he was nevertheless shaped most directly by the values of his small-town, white, Midwestern-grown immediate family. Later, when he was running for the Senate in the farm belt of downstate Illinois, he found that this Midwestern background worked to his advantage. "I know these people," he told the New Yorker, referring to downstate voters. "The food they serve is the food my grandparents served when I was growing up. Their manners, their sensibility, their sense of right and wrong--it's all totally familiar to me."

As a teenager, though, Obama was a young man with a confused identity. He experimented with marijuana and cocaine, and though he had inherited a quick-study intelligence from his father and won admission to the top-flight Punahou School, his grades were inconsistent and his commitment to bodysurfing and basketball was bigger than his interest in school. One of seven or eight black students at Punahou, he found that whites had low expectations when they met him. "People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves," he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams of My Father. "Such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry."

Inside, Obama was worried about fitting in and was on the way to developing a classic example of W.E.B. DuBois's double consciousness. "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." Despite these feelings, Obama's innate charisma began to show itself as he left the Punahou campus to flirt with college-aged women at the nearby University of Hawaii.

That coherence was still hard to find at New York's Columbia University, where Obama transferred as a third-year student. Obama enjoyed New York but found that racial tension infected even "the stalls of Columbia's bathrooms ...," he wrote, "where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if all middle ground had collapsed."

Wrote Letters to Community Organizations

After earning his degree in 1983, however, Obama responded with activist commitment instead of hedonistic escapism. He wrote to community service organizations all over the United States asking what he could do to help, and he signed on with the one group that replied, a church-based Chicago group doing neighborhood work on the city's economically reeling South Side. For three years, Obama was a community organizer--a tough job, but one in which he notched accomplishments ranging from job-training programs to a successful attempt to improve city services at the Altgeld Gardens housing project. The biracial outsider gathered with black Chicagoans at a South Side barbershop that he continued to patronize even after he became famous.

Obama applied to Harvard Law School--"to learn power's currency," he wrote in his autobiography. His academic brilliance flowered fully and propelled him to the presidency of the prestigious Harvard Law Review in 1990, making him the first African American to hold the post, and to a magna cum laude graduation in 1991. One of his teachers was famed litigator Laurence Tribe, who told Time that "I've known Senators, Presidents. I've never known anyone with what seems to me more raw political talent." Back in Chicago for a summer internship, he met his wife Michelle, an attorney and South Side native who was assigned to supervise him. The couple has two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha).

Obama passed up job offers from Chicago's top law firms to practice civil rights law with a small public-interest law office and to lecture at the University of Chicago, holding the latter position until he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004. He jumped into politics by chairing a voter-registration drive that helped carry Illinois for Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992, and his political ambitions became clearer when he turned down a chance to apply for a tenure-rack University of Chicago professorship. When an Illinois state senate seat in his home South Side district came open in 1996, he ran and was elected. In the Illinois senate Obama was noted for legislation to curb racial profiling and for a bill that mandated the videotaping of police interrogations carried out in death-penalty cases.

Despite his varied background, Obama identified himself as black. "When I'm catching a cab in Manhattan they don't say, there's a mixed-race guy, I'll go pick him up," he pointed out to Ebony writer Joy Bennett Kinnon. "Or if I was an armed robber and they flashed my face on television, they'd have no problem labeling me as a black man. So if that's my identity when something bad happens, then that's my identity when something good happens as well." But when Obama ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2000 Democratic primary against entrenched South-Side congressman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther, he suffered from a perception that he was an exotic, elite outsider and was trounced by a two-to-one margin.

Triumphed in Crowded Primary

South Side residents (including Rush) rallied around Obama during his next try for higher office, however. Obama jumped into a primary race that pitted him against two formidable opponents (and several others): longtime Chicago politician Dan Hynes, who was favored by the city's vaunted Democratic Party "machine" political organization, and businessman Blair Hull, who spent a $29 million personal war chest on the campaign. Obama put together an unusual coalition of blacks, "lakefront liberal" white Chicago voters, and downstate supporters to win the primary with a convincing outright majority of 53 percent. His victory was partly attributable to a fervent corps of volunteers who worked on his campaign, many inspired by Obama's early and unequivocal opposition to the Iraq war and by other unrepentant liberal positions. "People call it drinking the juice," Obama political director Dan Sherman explained to the New Yorker. "People start drinking the Obama juice. You can't find enough for them to do."

Then came Obama's Democratic National Convention speech, which Time called "one of the best in convention history." The speech really put Obama on the national political radar, and the phone in his South Side home rang nonstop with interview requests in the days after the convention. "I didn't realize that the speech would strike the chord that it did," Obama told Ebony. "I think part of it is that people are hungry for a sense of authenticity. All I was really trying to do was describe what I was hearing on the campaign trail, the stories of the hopes, fears, and struggles of what ordinary people are going through every day."

On the campaign trail Obama shone as he showed an ability to connect with voters across class, racial, and geographic lines. "I just never heard anybody speak like him before," a downstate Democrat told the New Yorker. "It's like he's talking to you, and not to a crowd." One reason Illinois voters reacted to Obama this way was that the candidate, in meeting individual voters one on one, drew effectively on the various dialects of English he had absorbed as a result of his diverse background. Working-class black Chicagoans, highly educated professionals and academics, and small-town business owners all felt that they had encountered one of their own when Obama gave a speech in their neighborhoods.

The Illinois Republican party floundered as its anointed candidate, Jack Ryan, struggled with allegations that he had forced his ex-wife, television actress Jeri Ryan, to visit sex clubs with him against her will. Ryan eventually dropped out of the race and was replace by Alan Keyes, an ultraconservative black radio commentator from Maryland who had previously criticized New York Senator Hillary Clinton for moving to that state solely for the purpose of running for the Senate. Obama won in a landslide, garnering seventy percent of the vote and spending much of his time in the final phases of the campaign stumping for Democratic candidates in neighboring states.

Beginning with the Democratic convention speech, talk began to swirl around Obama suggesting that those who had heard him speak at this early stage in his career had been looking at the man who would become the first African-American president of the U.S. Obama contributed nothing to such speculation, and many of his early statements regarding his intentions for his Senate term focused on the problem of Illinois's declining job base. Yet few could doubt that the state that had produced Abraham Lincoln was now home to another figure able to exert a powerful healing force to the nation's still-gaping racial wounds.

Awards

Selected: Presidency of Harvard Law Review, 1990.

Barack Obama

Junior Senator from Illinois
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3 2005 Serving with Richard Durbin
Preceded by	Peter Fitzgerald
Member of the Illinois State Senate from the 13th district
In office 1997 – 2004
Succeeded by	Kwame Raoul

Born	August 4 1961 (1961--) (age 46) Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Michelle Obama
Alma mater	Columbia University, Harvard Law School
Religion	Christian (United Church of Christ)
Signature

Early life and career

See also: Dreams from My Father

Obama was born on August 4 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (born in Nyanza Province, Kenya, of Luo ethnicity) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas).^[9] Throughout his early years, he was commonly known at home and school as "Barry".^[10] Obama's parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student.^[11] They separated when he was two years old and later divorced.^[12] His father went to Harvard University to pursue Ph.D. studies, then returned to Kenya, where he died in an auto accident in 1982.^[13] His mother married another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967.^[14] Obama attended local schools in Jakarta from ages 6 to 10, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.^[15]^[16] He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade until his graduation in 1979.^[17] Obama's mother died of ovarian cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.^[18]

In the memoir, Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's American middle class family. His knowledge about his African father, who returned once for a brief visit in 1971, came mainly through family stories and photographs.^[13] Of his early childhood, Obama writes: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."^[19] The book describes his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.^[20] He wrote that he used alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".^[21]

After high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years.^[22] He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations.^[23] Obama received his B.A. degree in 1983, then worked at Business International Corporation and NYPIRG before moving to Chicago to take a job as a community organizer.^[24] As Director of the Developing Communities Project, he worked with low-income residents in Chicago's Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development.^[25] He entered Harvard Law School in 1988.^[26] In 1990, The New York Times reported his election as the Harvard Law Review's "first black president in its 104-year history".^[27] He completed his J.D. degree magna cum laude in 1991.^[28] On returning to Chicago, Obama directed a voter registration drive.^[28] As an associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland from 1993 to 1996, he represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights cases.^[29] He was a lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.^[30]

State legislature

In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate to serve the state's 13th District in the south-side Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park.^[31] In 2000, he made an unsuccessful Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat held by four-term incumbent candidate Bobby Rush.^[32] He was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998 and 2002, officially resigning in November 2004 following his election to the U.S. Senate.^[33] As a state legislator, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws.^[34] He sponsored a law enhancing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for child care.^[35] Obama also led the passage of legislation mandating videotaping of homicide interrogations, and a law to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they stopped.^[35] During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, he won the endorsement of the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, whose president credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms.^[36] He was criticized by rival pro-choice candidates in the Democratic primary and by his Republican pro-life opponent in the general election for a series of "present" or "no" votes on late-term abortion and parental notification issues.^[37]

Keynote address at 2004 Democratic National Convention

See also: 2004 Democratic National Convention

Obama wrote and delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, while still serving as a state legislator.^[38] After describing his maternal grandfather's experiences as a World War II veteran and a beneficiary of the New Deal's FHA and G.I. Bill programs, Obama said:

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.^[39]

Questioning the Bush administration's management of the Iraq War, Obama spoke of an enlisted Marine, Corporal Seamus Ahern from East Moline, Illinois, asking, "Are we serving Seamus as well as he is serving us?" He continued:

When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.^[39]

Finally, he spoke for national unity:

The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.^[39]

The speech was Obama's introduction to most of America. Its enthusiastic reception at the convention and widespread coverage by national media gave him instant celebrity status.^[40] Columnist Jimmy Breslin predicted Obama would run for President. ^[41]

Senate campaign

Main article: United States Senate election in Illinois, 2004

In 2003, Obama began his run for the U.S. Senate open seat vacated by Peter Fitzgerald. In early opinion polls leading up to the Democratic primary, Obama trailed multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes.^[42] However, Hull's popularity declined following allegations of domestic abuse.^[42] Obama's candidacy was boosted by an advertising campaign featuring images of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and the late U.S. Senator Paul Simon; the support of Simon's daughter; and political endorsements by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.^[43]^[44] Obama received over 52% of the vote in the March 2004 primary, emerging 29% ahead of his nearest Democratic rival.^[45] His opponent in the general election was expected to be Republican primary winner Jack Ryan. However, Ryan withdrew from the race in June 2004, following public disclosure of child custody divorce records containing sexual allegations by Ryan's ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan.^[46] In August 2004, with less than three months to go before election day, Alan Keyes accepted the Illinois Republican Party's nomination to replace Ryan.^[47] A long-time resident of Maryland, Keyes established legal residency in Illinois with the nomination.^[48] Through three televised debates, Obama and Keyes expressed opposing views on stem cell research, abortion, gun control, school vouchers, and tax cuts.^[49] In the November 2004 general election, Obama received 70% of the vote to Keyes's 27%, the largest electoral victory in Illinois history.^[50]

Senate career

Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 4 2005.^[51] Although a newcomer to Washington, he recruited a team of established, high-level advisers devoted to broad themes that exceeded the usual requirements of an incoming first-term senator.^[52] Obama hired Pete Rouse, a 30-year veteran of national politics and former chief of staff to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, as his chief of staff, and economist Karen Kornbluh, former deputy chief of staff to Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, as his policy director.^[53] His key foreign policy advisers include Samantha Power, author on human rights and genocide, and former Clinton administration officials Anthony Lake and Susan Rice.^[54] Obama holds assignments on the Senate Committees for Foreign Relations; Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; and Veterans' Affairs, and he is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.^[55] Obama has consistently opposed the Iraq War.

109th Congress

Senate bill sponsors Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Obama discuss the Coburn-Obama Transparency Act.^[56]

Obama took an active role in the Senate's drive for improved border security and immigration reform. In 2005, he co-sponsored the "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act" introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).^[57] He later added three amendments to the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act", which passed the Senate in May 2006, but failed to gain majority support in the U.S. House of Representatives.^[58] In September 2006, Obama supported a related bill, the Secure Fence Act, authorizing construction of fencing and other security improvements along the Mexico–United States border.^[59] President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law in October 2006, calling it "an important step toward immigration reform."^[60]

Partnering first with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), and then with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Obama successfully introduced two initiatives bearing his name. "Lugar-Obama" expands the Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction concept to conventional weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles and anti-personnel mines.^[61] The "Coburn-Obama Transparency Act" provides for a web site, managed by the Office of Management and Budget, listing all organizations receiving Federal funds from 2007 onward, and providing breakdowns by the agency allocating the funds, the dollar amount given, and the purpose of the grant or contract.^[62] In December 2006, President Bush signed into law the "Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act," marking the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor.^[63]

As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In August 2005, he traveled to Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. The trip focused on strategies to control the world's supply of conventional weapons, biological weapons, and weapons of mass destruction as a first defense against potential terrorist attacks.^[64] Following meetings with U.S. military in Kuwait and Iraq in January 2006, Obama visited Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. At a meeting with Palestinian students two weeks before Hamas won the legislative election, Obama warned that "the U.S. will never recognize winning Hamas candidates unless the group renounces its fundamental mission to eliminate Israel."^[65] He left for his third official trip in August 2006, traveling to South Africa, Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Chad. In a nationally televised speech at the University of Nairobi, he spoke forcefully on the influence of ethnic rivalries and corruption in Kenya.^[66] The speech touched off a public debate among rival leaders, some formally challenging Obama's remarks as unfair and improper, others defending his positions.^[67]

110th Congress

In the first month of the newly Democratic-controlled 110th Congress, Obama worked with Russ Feingold (D–WI) to eliminate gifts of travel on corporate jets by lobbyists to members of Congress and require disclosure of bundled campaign contributions under the "Honest Leadership and Open Government Act", which was signed into law in September 2007.^[68] He joined Charles Schumer (D-NY) in sponsoring S. 453, a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections, including fraudulent flyers and automated phone calls, as witnessed in the 2006 midterm elections.^[69] Obama's energy initiatives scored pluses and minuses with environmentalists, who welcomed his sponsorship with John McCain (R-AZ) of a climate change bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds by 2050, but were skeptical of his support for a bill promoting liquefied coal production.^[70] Obama also introduced the "Iraq War De-Escalation Act", a bill to cap troop levels in Iraq, begin phased redeployment, and remove all combat brigades from Iraq before April 2008.^[71]

Later in 2007, Obama sponsored with Kit Bond (R-MO) an amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Act adding safeguards for personality disorder military discharges, and calling for a review by the Government Accountability Office following reports that the procedure had been used inappropriately to reduce government costs.^[72] He sponsored the "Iran Sanctions Enabling Act" supporting divestment of state pension funds from Iran's oil and gas industry,^[73] and joined Chuck Hagel (R-NE) in introducing legislation to reduce risks of nuclear terrorism. A provision from the Obama-Hagel bill was passed by Congress in December 2007 as an amendment to the State-Foreign Operations appropriations bill.^[74] Obama also sponsored a Senate amendment to the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to provide one year of job protection for family members caring for soldiers with combat-related injuries.^[75] After passing both houses of Congress with bipartisan majorities, SCHIP was vetoed by President Bush in early October 2007, a move Obama said "shows a callousness of priorities that is offensive to the ideals we hold as Americans."^[76]

Presidential campaign

Main article: Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008

This article or section contains information about one or more candidates in an upcoming or ongoing election.
Content may change as the election approaches.

Obama on stage with his wife and two daughters just before announcing his presidential campaign on February 10, 2007.^[77]

In February 2007, standing before the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 U.S. presidential election.^[2] Describing his working life in Illinois, and symbolically linking his presidential campaign to Abraham Lincoln's 1858 House Divided speech, Obama said: "That is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a house divided to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America."^[78] Speaking at a Democratic National Committee meeting one week before the February announcement, Obama called for putting an end to negative campaigning. "This can't be about who digs up more skeletons on who, who makes the fewest slip-ups on the campaign trail," he said. "We owe it to the American people to do more than that."^[79]

Obama's campaign raised US$58 million during the first half of 2007, topping all other candidates and exceeding previous records for the first six months of any year before an election year.^[80] Small donors, those contributing in increments of less than $200, accounted for $16.4 million of Obama's record-breaking total, more than for any other Democratic candidate.^[81] His campaign reported adding 108,000 new donors through third quarter fundraising, for a total of 365,000 individual contributors in the first nine months.^[82] Amid concerns for his safety as the first black candidate seen as having a viable chance of being elected president, the U.S. government assigned Secret Service protection to Obama 18 months before the general election.^[83]

With two months remaining before the Iowa Democratic caucuses and New Hampshire Democratic primary, 2008, and national opinion polls showing him trailing Hillary Clinton, Obama began directly charging his top rival with failing to clearly state her political positions.^[84] Campaigning in Iowa, he told the Washington Post that as the Democratic nominee he would draw more support than Clinton from independent and Republican voters in the general election.^[85] At Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner in November 2007, he expanded the theme, saying that his presidency would "bring the country together in a new majority" to seek solutions to long-standing problems.^[86] In January 2008, Obama won the Iowa caucus with 37.58% support, ahead of 29.75% for John Edwards and 29.47% for Clinton.^[87] His Iowa lead was boosted by majority support from a record turnout of voters under 30 years old, most of them first-time caucus goers.^[88]

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