Chicago Area Local News

CHICAGO (CBS) ― In some respects, Barack Obama's path to the presidency has been comparable to others who have come before him, with a prestigious Harvard law degree, and an ascendance from state government through to the U.S. Senate before being elected to the nation's highest office.

But unlike many others with a similar background, Obama did not go to a Wall or LaSalle Street law firm to pull down six or seven figures, nor did he set his sights on the tenure track as a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School. But Obama instead found his calling among the people of Chicago, taking up the concerns of residents of a Far South Side public housing development, and registering people to vote.

Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack H. Obama Sr., a native of Kenya who became the first African student at the University of Hawaii, and Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansas native who met the senior Obama at the university.

After his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya, Obama's mother married a Muslim from Indonesia, named Lolo, whom Dunham also met at the University of Hawaii. They moved to Jakarta and for two years he attended a school with mandatory classes in the Koran. His younger sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, says he was a strong male presence in her life and that it was a happy time.

"Barack still speaks Indonesian, has a fondness for the country," Ng said in 2005.

Later returning to Hawaii, Obama attended Punahou High School in Hawaii, where he played on the 1979 state championship basketball team. Friends, among them Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, say Obama still plays a tough game of basketball.

Obama's journey next took him to New York City, where he received a bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University in 1983. It was at Columbia where he developed an interest in community organizations.

"I realized I was interested in how to address issues of poverty and high unemployment in urban areas. And I also became interested in political organizing in general; I was active in the anti-apartheid campaign that was very active on college campuses back in the early '80s," Obama told the Chicago Weekly News, a University of Chicago student newspaper, in February 2000. "I worked as a journalist for a year after college and then decided I wanted to become an organizer." 

In his book Dreams from My Father, Obama characterized his interest in organizing by describing a need for change, in terms similar to those used in his presidential campaign a quarter century later.

"When classmates in college asked me what a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly," Obama wrote. "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."

Obama began with an organizing position in Harlem, which in his book Dreams from My Father he characterized as a struggle.

"In six months I was broke, unemployed, eating soup from a can," Obama wrote in the 1995 book.

But Obama was inspired to continue on the community organizing path after receiving a call from Marty Kaufman, who was seeking a trainee for his group in Chicago. Obama wrote that Kaufman offered him $10,000 for the first year and a $2,000 travel allowance for a car, and he soon packed up his car and moved to Chicago.

"I started working right away with the churches," Obama told the Chicago Weekly News in 2000. "A lot of the steel plants had closed. There was a lot of racial transition in the community; basically the entire area had gone from white to black and Hispanic in a decade. For three and a half years, I worked to set up job training programs and addressed issues concerning school reform, public housing, public health programs and city services."

Obama worked with residents of the Altgeld Gardens public housing development, located near 130th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, where pushed for job training and public health programs and repairs in the deteriorating residential units.

In recounting his community organizing days in Dreams from My Father, Obama describes an admiration for Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor, whom he met briefly during an appearance in Roseland. In recent years, Obama's story has often been compared to that of Washington, who like Obama, was a Hyde Park resident and a champion of reform in government.

In 1988, Obama returned to the world of academia, where he received a law degree at Harvard and became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

He worked as a summer associate at the law firm Sidley & Austin in 1989, and a Chicago native named Michelle Robinson was assigned as his advisor. They would marry three years later.

After graduating magna cum laude in 1991, Obama penned his book, Dreams from My Father, which also recounts a visit to Kenya and the connection he established with his relatives overseas.

Back in Chicago, Obama became the Illinois director of Project Vote!, registering nearly 150,000 new voters for the 1992 presidential campaign, and began practicing law at the civil rights firm Miner, Barnhill and Galland. Obama took a post as a lecturer in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago in 1993, and was named one of the "40 under 40" outstanding Chicago leaders by Crain's Chicago Business.

Three years later, he threw his hat in the ring for Illinois State Senate, after State Sen. Alice Palmer left her seat to run for Congress in the 2nd Congressional District. He won the election, and served in Springfield for the next eight years.

During his time in Springfield, Obama concentrated on such issues as on changes mandated by the welfare reform of the 1990s, juvenile justice reform, campaign finance reform, and public health, he told the Chicago Weekly News.

But he also had his eye on a higher office.

The Path To Washington
Obama's first run for national office came in 2000, when he challenged U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) in the primary for the First Congressional District, along with State Sen. Donne Trotter (D-Chicago) and retired Chicago Police officer George Roby.

Obama was endorsed by both Hyde Park aldermen, Toni Preckwinkle (4th) and Leslie Hairston (5th), and gained name recognition within the broad South Side district, but ultimately lost to Rush.

Four years later, Obama tried again, this time for U.S. Senate. After Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) declined to seek reelection, Obama was one in a pool of several Democratic candidates, along with State Comptroller Dan Hynes, former Chicago School Board president Gery Chico, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, and attorney Blair Hull – who was the frontrunner until a domestic abuse scandal became public.

Obama won the primary and was set to go up against Republican challenger Jack Ryan, until prurient allegations from Ryan's divorce papers led him to drop out. The Illinois GOP replaced Ryan with conservative Republican Alan Keyes, who infamously said "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama" and took heat during his campaign for calling gays and lesbians "selfish hedonists."

Meanwhile, Obama was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where the theme of his speech centered upon unifying the country at a time in which the red state-blue state divide was more severe than ever before.

"There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America," Obama said in the speech. "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there's the United States of America."

The speech gave Obama national recognition for the first time, and he won the senate race in a landslide.

Obama sponsored his first legislation in March 2005, aimed at increasing Pell Grant awards that help lower-income students afford college. He was also a co-sponsor with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) of the Government Transparency Act of 2006, demanding full disclosure of all groups receiving federal funds, and the with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), a bill to fight nuclear proliferation.

He sat on the Senate foreign relations committee, making official trips to Eastern Europe in 2005, the Middle East in January 2006, and East Africa in 2006. CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery accompanied Obama on that trip, where he talked with leaders about government corruption and AIDS policy and encouraged many Africans to get HIV tests. He received a hero's welcome in his father's homeland of Kenya.

Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, was released in 2006.

But through that time, Obama said he did not plan to run for president in 2008. In a July 2005 Associated Press story, Obama said there was zero chance he would run.

But that all changed within a year and a half. On the steps of the old Illinois State Capitol, Obama invoked Abraham Lincoln in his run for president on Feb. 10, 2007.

"This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice – to push us forward when we're doing right, and to let us know when we're not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change," Obama said. "By ourselves, this change will not happen. Divided, we are bound to fail. But the life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible."

At the time, Obama was considered a longshot, up against Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who had been characterized as the "inevitable" Democratic presidential nominee. But following a victory in the Iowa caucuses, Obama rallied to win the Democratic primary.

The race was not without its controversies, among them a flap about remarks made from the pulpit by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But while the issue ultimately led Obama to censure Wright and leave his longtime spiritual home at Trinity United Church of Christ, it also led Obama to deliver a major speech on the need to heal racial wounds in America.

Obama accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and went on to challenge John McCain in the general election. As the campaign heated up, Obama crisscrossed the country and the world, addressing crowds that numbered in the hundreds of thousands in cities from St. Louis to Berlin.

And on Nov. 4, 2008, Obama made history as he was elected the 44th President of the United States. It was in Grant Park, where speakers from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Pope John Paul II addressed crowds before him, that Obama gave his victory speech.

"This is our moment," Obama concluded in his victory remarks. "This is our time to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids, to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace, to reclaim the American Dream."

His election, he said, was an opportunity to reaffirm "that out of many, we are one, that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can."

(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

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