Barack Obama - A Political Profile

No one can deny that Barack Obama is a fresh breeze blowing though the political landscape. In a country where every President has been a Caucasian European, he is a mixed-race candidate. When most Presidents lately tend to be on the old side, he is young. He has an advantage of experience in foreign countries, a patch-work of cultures and places in his background. He can blend in anywhere, identify with anybody, and connect with both sides across almost any chasm. So what kind of President is he going to make?

Upon being sworn into office as Illinois Senator in 2005, his first move was to recruit Pete Rouse as his Chief of Staff. Since Rouse was the former chief of staff to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, this was hailed as a smart move. He has sat so far on the Foreign Relations Committee, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Veterans' Affairs Committee, as well as being a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

He has been a very live wire in his position, having sponsored 152 bills and resolutions brought before Congress, and cosponsored another 427. He has been at the forefront of issues relating to border security and immigration reform. He has sponsored the "Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act", which was introduced by Senator John McCain, demonstrating that he can work across party lines. He also partnered with two Republican Senators, Richard Lugar and Tom Coburn, on two bills which bear his name today.

As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has made official trips to Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, the Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. He is extremely good at diplomacy. After meeting with U.S. military members in Kuwait and Iraq in January 2006, he also visited Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. He has worked to encourage peace in the Middle East. He also made a special tour of South Africa, Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Chad, making speeches denouncing ethnic rivalries and corruption in Kenya.

He has also made some bold steps for campaign finance reform, especially denouncing situations in which a public servant would feel indebted to a lobbyist. In these times of grave concern over the increasing control that big corporations and monopolies have over our government, voters respond well to this message. He worked with other Democratic Senators after this to tighten regulations on what public officials can do on the taxpayer's dollar, and passed a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections.

He has also championed some environment and energy causes, passing a climate change bill to reduce greenhouse gasses, again with Senator John McCain, and promoting a bill for liquefied coal production. He has also introduced a bill, the "Iraq War De-Escalation Act," which proposes to cap troop levels in Iraq, begin phased redeployment, and remove all combat brigades from Iraq before April 2008. This is something he can point to, to say, "Look, all the candidates promise an end to the Iraq War, I actually did something about it." He has also introduced legislation to prevent nuclear terrorism, showing that he is still keeping national security in mind.

Obama has perhaps shined best in being progressively pro-Internet. Now, when it comes to technology, the United States has moved forward while its government seems to be stuck in the Stone Age. Amidst paranoia about "hackers" used by officials who don't even show a clear understanding of the definition of the word, the complete inability to manage the monopoly behemoth that Microsoft has become, meaningless and destructive software patents that are rubber-stamped without even being read, and such ignorant statements as when United States Senator Ted Stevens dismissed the Internet as nothing but a "series of tubes", the voters who are technology professionals and avid Internet users have a very good reason to believe that they might be members of some foreign country. It is no exaggeration to say that trying to get government officials to understand computing is like trying to explain rocket science to a cave man.

Enter stage left, Obama! He has met with executives at Google, has pledged to appoint a Chief Technology Officer to oversee the U.S. government's management of IT resources, has a commitment to net neutrality legislation, has said "once providers start to privilege some applications or web sites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and we all lose.", and to address the critical state of science education in America, he has put forward a plan for investments in early childhood education, math and science education, and expanded summer learning opportunities.

There is no doubt that Obama has the technology vote locked up. Any candidate who can actually mouth the words "open document format" will make IT professionals everywhere swoon. And likewise, he has some support from the non-white voter, and has captured the attention of the young voters like no other. He is a fresh thinker for a new generation of voters. Whether that's enough to get elected remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that he is in touch with today's issues.

Barack Obama - Democrat

Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His childhood is marked with extreme conflict and struggle. The son of a Caucasian mother from Wichita, Kansas and a Kenyan father from Nyanza Province, Kenya, his parents divorced when he was just two years old. His father was later to die in an automobile accident when he was 21 years old, and meanwhile his mother remarried and the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1967, where he attended public school. Then he returned to Hawaii Punahou School until his graduation in 1979. He has many times expressed his difficulty in dealing with his multi-cultural, multi-national, and broken-home upbringing. His mother was also later to die of cancer in 1995, compounding his feelings of social isolation.

He first attended Occidental College for two years before transferring to Columbia University. He majored in political science and specialized in international relations, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983. He eventually ended up in Chicago working as a community organizer, while also entering Harvard Law School by 1988. He graduated magna cum laude with a Juris Doctor degree in 1991.

He began practicing law of a sort from 1993 to 1996, by directing a voter registration drive, and joining a law firm where he took on cases involving community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights. In 1996 he began lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School about constitutional law, and he was also elected in that same year to the Illinois State Senate, representing the 13th district of south Chicago. He was to be re-elected to this position in 1998 and 2002.

Barack Obama's work in the State Senate was diverse and active. He drafted or sponsored legislation on ethics and health care reform, a law enhancing tax credits for low-income workers, welfare reform, and increasing subsidies for child care. He also introduced legislation to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations, and a law to monitor racial profiling by police. He also got an endorsement from the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, for being immensely helpful in working with police organizations on death penalty reform.

He eventually dropped out of the State Senate to seek election to the United States Senate in 2003. He is well-known for a keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, in which he shared some background of his family, spoke on the government's role in citizen's lives, questioned the ethics of President Bush's war in Iraq, and ended with a plea for national unity. This speech earned him new fame, allowing his to make an early impression on many voters. From this speech, he launched his bid for U. S. Senate.

He won the position of the U. S. Senator from Illinois by a landslide vote that was the largest electoral victory in Illinois history. In the Senate, he sponsored 152 resolutions and bills brought before the 109th Congress in 2005 and 2006, and he co-sponsored another 427. A great deal of this had to do with immigration policy and reform, including the Secure Fence Act and the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act. Two more initiatives he introduced were one to regulating military weapons, and one to create a web access point run by the Office of Management and Budget, which lists all organizations receiving Federal funds. He also enacted the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act.

Barack Obama has announced his candidacy for United States President as of February of 2007. He bases much of his platform on duty to the American people as a public servant and the uniting of government co-operation across party lines. Being a younger candidate, he is the first Presidential candidate to focus on at least bringing some kind of regulation to the Internet, by making a stand for net neutrality and the right of all users to have democratic access to the Internet. He has demonstrated remarkable interest in technology issues, and has even met with companies like Google to discuss possible policy. He also has plans for early childhood education, math and science education.

Barack Obama is a revolutionary candidate in many ways. He is a rapid departure from the so-called "Good Old Boys" network of Caucasian oil billionaires and cronies. He is a centrist Democrat, taking a moderate-to-hard left Liberal stance while proposing that he can unite the government's two parties to work together. This means that he intends to pull the right wing over to his side, rather than try to please everybody by walking the line in between. Count on Barack Obama to also connect well with younger voters and "Generation Y".

Who is Barack Obama?

Who exactly is Barack Obama, and why does he deserve to be President? Obama is a Democratic senator from Illinois, who is sitting as only the fifth African American Senator in United States history. Couple that with the fact that he is currently the only African American serving in the Senate and you must concede that he is definitely determined.

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996 for the first time, and since has served 3 terms there, including this term. He tried a very unsuccessful run in 2000 for the United States House of Representatives. He lost by a margin of 61% to 30%, and lost to four term incumbent Bobby Rush, whom was a former Black Panther. It leads people to question, if he was unsuccessful at a House of Representatives bid, how is he going to be successful at a bid for the White House.

One major point which will likely help Obama is he won an endorsement from the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police for his support of gun control measures. Coming in the weeks and months following the tragic Virginia Tech massacre, this one point may really pull him ahead of some of the other candidates for the election since so many families are feeling the brutal pain and faced with burying their loved ones. Is this enough, will this one measure be enough to place Barack Obama in the White House?

At this point it looks as if not, but that’s not to say that Obama does not have his supporters, in fact he is in the lead as one of the 2008 Presidential hopefuls who has accumulated the most money so far. Will this success rate hold out, it is really enough and does he have enough supporters to win this election? At this point, Obama is leading the polls in the youth votes, with more young adults supporting him than any other democratic candidate.

Last polls showed that Obama lead the race with 35% of the 18 to 24 year-old crowd, with Hillary Clinton coming in at second place with 28% of the same age group. While these numbers may not seem high, they represent thousands of people in the difference. The 2006 midterm election saw a huge turnout of young voters, and analysts are wondering if 2008 will see another huge increase of youth voters coming out to express their opinion.

Obama is a relative newcomer to the political arena, especially the national arena which is a hard place to be successful, and battling Clinton is no small feat, especially since she has been a major political figure since her husband was elected President in 1992. But with all of Hillary’s experience, can Barack pull ahead and win? He has managed to pull in 104,000 donors for his election fund. Will all of those votes actually manage to pull through and pay off at election time?

Will his stand on guns and his place in the youth poles be enough to move him towards the White House in a successful bid? Time will tell as the Democratic hopefuls’ battle it out in the political arena. One thing has been clear, at this point Obama has made it clear he is not running for the number two slot on a ticket, he is running to win.