Obama: Trying to Take His Inspiring Vision to the White House

WASHINGTON — When Michelle Robinson felt herself falling for Barack Obama, she decided to test his character — on a basketball court.

This guy with the unusual name liked to talk trash about his hoops so she wanted her brother, Craig, to see if he had the game to back it up.

Craig had starred for Princeton and is now the coach at Brown University. Obama had played high school ball in Hawaii. The protective big brother came back with a positive report: The boyfriend passed off when he should have but wasn't scared to shoot when open, went up hard for rebounds, and protested with laughter — rather than whining or exploding — when flagrantly fouled in a game without refs.

That pick-up game showed "he's a leader and a team player," said Michelle Obama, describing the avid, 6'2" hoopster who became her husband in 1992 and is now a leading presidential candidate. "He can maintain his composure. He's a player who knows how to take the tough shots and he's not afraid to take them."

Now that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has ridden some soaring oratory into contention for his party's presidential nomination, voters are asking if he has the game needed for the White House.

"Obama is the most inspirational candidate on the Democratic side since John and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s. He proves that words matter and can make a difference," said political analyst Larry Sabato. "But he'll now have to do what JFK barely managed to do against Richard Nixon in 1960 — convince people that his promise is greater than the sum of his opponent's experiences."

After his win in the Iowa caucuses started what some pundits foresaw as a fast break toward the Democratic nomination, Obama was at least slowed by a loss in the New Hampshire primary last week to Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady. His qualifications are under attack by both this opponent and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

"Obama and Clinton will have to fight for each state and each delegate vote. It's Obama and not Clinton who needs to re-tool after New Hampshire. It's not enough to take a gauzy approach, while Clinton and her husband pound him for his inexperience and 'happy talk,'" said Sabato, author of "A More Perfect Constitution" and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "Obama is just now learning what observers who have studied the Clintons have known for some time: They are determined to win, and will do whatever it takes to win. They eat less ambitious opponents for lunch."

Evoking images of his native Hawaii, Obama continues to believe that he is riding a wave toward an historic election of the first African-American president.

"When we've been told that we're not ready or we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can," he promised in only temporarily conceding after the nation's first primary.

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Barack Hussein Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu. He was named for his black father, a former goat herder from Kenya who had won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii. His white mother, Ann Dunham, had grown up in Kansas but later moved to Hawaii with her parents. The couple met in college.

When his son was a toddler, the elder Barack Obama went to study at Harvard and then returned to Kenya. In his presidential campaign, the candidate has described his loss stemming from the subsequent divorce of his parents.

"My father left when I was 2. I only saw him once after that," Obama said in a radio ad in South Carolina. "It's hard to heal that hole in your heart."

The chubby lad called Barry Obama did have a doting grandfather, however. Stanley Dunham — "Gramps" to his grandson and his grandson's friends alike — "loved that little boy," Neil Abercrombie, then a family friend and now a Democratic congressman from Hawaii, told the Chicago Tribune. "In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man that Stanley Dunham."

Madelyn Dunham, the maternal grandmother "Barry" called "Tut," was equally devoted, if more reserved than "Gramps."

When Obama was 6, his mother married Lolo Soetoro, a foreign student at the University of Hawaii, and the newly formed family went to live in his homeland of Indonesia. During his four years there, the boy first attended a predominately Catholic school and then a predominately Muslim one. Four decades later, this period in his life would raise questions about the presidential candidate's religious roots.

"I was not raised in a particularly religious household. My father, who I didn't know, returned to Kenya when I was just 2. He was nominally a Muslim since there were a number of Muslims in the village where he was born. But by the time he was a young adult, he was an atheist," Obama said in a speech last year. "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. She had this enormous capacity for wonder, and lived by the Golden Rule. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I."

Obama said he was introduced to Jesus Christ in the mid-1980s by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side, and learned that his sins could be redeemed and to put his faith in God.

"It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith," he said. "It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany."

When Obama was 10, his mother took him back to Hawaii from Indonesia and they moved in again with his grandparents. On a scholarship, he entered the fifth grade of Punahou School, a private academy in Honolulu attended by children of the islands' elite families. When his mother returned to Indonesia to live with her husband during his high school years, Obama remained at the school and with his grandparents.

In his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama wrote about inner turmoil over his racial identity at Punahou, where most of the other students were white or Asian. However, outwardly, he got along well with his classmates, most of whom were more affluent. He played varsity basketball — earning the nickname "Barry O'Bomber" because of his long-distance jump shots.

"He walks between worlds," Maya Soetoro-Ng, his half-sister, told the Associated Press. "That's what he's done his entire life."

Like many of his contemporaries, he has recalled drinking beer and smoking marijuana and snorting "maybe a little blow," or cocaine.

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed" before straightening up, Obama wrote his memoir.

After graduation from Punahou School, he entered Occidental College in Los Angeles. There "Barry" became "Barack" and the party boy and playground jock became a social activist. After two years, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he graduated with a degree in political science in 1983. He worked in private business in New York for a year before moving to Chicago and becoming director of a community development project for poor people on the South Side. He entered Harvard Law School in 1988.

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Two decades ago, Michelle Robinson was a fast-track associate at the Chicago branch of the law firm of Sidley Austin. Nearly six feet tall, she and her brother, Craig, had grown up amid high expectations in a loving, middle-class Chicago family. Their father was a city pump operator and Democratic precinct captain, their mother was a secretary. Michelle and Craig would both graduate from Princeton. Michelle then went on to Harvard Law School. For the summer of 1990, her law firm assigned her to mentor another Harvard law student named Barack Obama.

On his first day at the firm, she took him to lunch. He asked her out. She said no. He kept asking until she finally accepted. Their first date was to see Spike Lee's movie, "Do the Right Thing."

The attraction was mutual but she was wary of the relationship — aware of their very different backgrounds. She changed her opinion when he took her to a community training session in the Altgeld Gardens public housing project. She saw him helping grandparents raising grandchildren, families seeking better schools and safer neighborhoods, poor folks striving for a better life.

"What I saw in him on that day was authenticity and truth and principle," Michelle Obama tells audiences on the campaign trail. "That's who I fell in love with, that man."

A year or so later, "that man" had just taken his bar exam and the couple was celebrating at dinner. The waiter brought over a dessert tray. On it was an engagement ring.

They married in 1992 and settled in Hyde Park, an historic, affluent Chicago neighborhood. The Obamas have two daughters, Mailia, 9, and Sasha, 6.

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The Obama family first talked about a run for the presidency in the winter of 2006.

The couple talked about the way they look at life now — parents with young kids, not too far from having to worry about finances, not entrenched enough in politics to have forgotten the real world. In four or eight years, this perspective would be gone.

The mom was uncertain. But she recalls taking off her "selfish hat" — wanting the dad home with her — and trying on her "citizen hat" and "professional hat" and "mother hat" and deciding to "jump into the campaign with both feet."

Ironically, Obama had reached this juncture because of a political loss. In his second term as an Illinois state senator, he decided to take on Bobby Rush, an incumbent fellow Democrat, in a race for the former Black Panther's congressional seat. In the Democratic Primary, Rush got 61 percent of the vote, Obama got 30 percent.

"Is Obama dead?" asked a Chicago radio commentator.

Lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School and legislating in the state senate, Obama considered leaving politics but then began focusing on the 2004 campaign for U.S. senator. The incumbent Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, seemed vulnerable and was.

So Obama came to Washington as the high-profile, only African-American senator rather than as the back-bench congressman he would have been had he beaten Rush.

In a Congress that has been largely deadlocked since his arrival, however, Obama's opportunities have been limited.

"He is considered a serious legislator, one who looks to work with Republicans on issues that are not ideologically charged," said Thomas Mann, a congressional expert with the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank. "I think his most significant legislative achievements have been on ethics reform and greater transparency (via the Internet) of government spending/contracting. His first two years in the Senate, he was in the minority and Bush was in the White House. And last year filibusters and presidential vetoes limited opportunities for Democrats to legislate."

Talk about Obama as a presidential possibility began even before he came to Washington, when he made the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.

"Let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely," said Obama, not yet a senator but less than four years away from being a presidential contender.

"I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my precious daughters," he said. "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible."

This story contains material from The Chicago Tribune.