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Oh. My. Goodness. I can’t believe that this is the final book (and president!) Little did I foresee two years ago that this would turn into such an interesting—and, yes, sometimes tedious—project and yet, here I am, wrapping it up. In fact, I’m a little stunned that I actually followed through with it all (I’m more of a starter than a finisher, if you know what I mean.) If you recall, two years and a half years ago I began my Presidential Reading Project as a means of making it through my Fiction Fast and of learning something in the process. Although the Fiction Fast has long since gone by the wayside, I really have enjoyed this time with my United States Presidents and all that I’ve learned about them and about American History in general. Whew--what a journey!
Now here we are with the 44th President of the United States and since he’s currently a sitting president, it was not exactly easy to find a comprehensive biography, which included all his most recent presidential moments. Making due, I read The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2010) and then consulted a couple web sites (www.barackobama.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama) to fill out the final years. What’s slightly ironic about the whole thing is that though Obama is our current president, I know very little about him personally. I look forward with relish to not only finishing my PRP, but also to discovering the person behind the president.
Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama Senior and Ann Dunham. What was interesting (and frowned upon at the time) about this particular union was that it was biracial. Barack Sr. was from Nairobi but currently studying at the University of Hawaii when he met and married Ann. Barack Sr. did not stick around long, however, leaving his
“Barack Obama’s family, broadly defined, is vast. It’s multi-confessional, multiracial, and multicontinental. He has a Kenyan step-grandmother in a village near Lake Victoria who speaks only Luo and Swahili; a biracial half brother who speaks fluent Mandarian and trades in southern China; a cousin-by-marriage who is an African-American rabbi in Chicago determined to forge closer relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians on the South Side. As Obama has put it, he has some relatives who look like Bernie Mac and some who look like Margaret Thatcher. He has relatives who have been educated in the finest universities in the world, others who live in remote Kenyan towns, another who has lived in a Nairobi slum, yet another, an African half sister, who would up in a Boston housing-project with immigration problems. The Obama family tree is as vast and intricate as one of those ancient banyan trees near the beach at Waikiki. As a politician, Obama would make use of that family, asking voters to imagine it—and him—as a metaphor for American diversity” (p. 69).
Meanwhile Ann was completely responsible for raising Barack Jr or “Barry”, as he was known as back then. She tried going to school at the University of Washington but soon moved back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend the college there. In 1965, she married another fellow University of Hawaii student, Lolo Soetro and because he was Indonesian, they moved to Jakarta two years later. “Just as Ann was Barry’s teacher in high-minded matters—liberal, humanist values; the need to remember that they, and not the Indonesians, were the ‘foreigners’; the beauty of Mahalia Jackson’s singing and Martin Luther King’s preaching—Lolo was his instructor in the rude and practical skills of middle-class Indonesian life. Lolo taught him how farm animals were killed for eating; how to box and defend himself, just in case; how to treat servants; how to ignore street beggars and keep enough for yourself; how the weak perish and the strong survive” (p. 59).
Due to the Dunham family influence, Barry was accepted at the most elite Hawaiian academy, Punahou, for the fifth grade. “Barry Obama was never the top student in his class or the hardest worker—a pattern that persisted from the fifth grade to the end of high school” (p. 75-6). However, Barry was pretty much a favorite on campus during these years. “Barry was known on campus as a smart, engaging, friendly kid, an obsessive basketball player, tight with the jocks, friendly with the artier types, able to negotiate just about any clique. Unlike some adolescents, he bore his confusions privately, without self-dramatizing. To most kids, he was cheerful—and game. He wrote poems for Ka Wai Ola, the campus literary magazine. He sang in the chorus” (p. 77).
In 1971, Barack Sr finally visited Hawaii but his sporadic appearance severely disappointed his son. “By now, he [Barry] was aware that he could expect nothing from his father. He was there to check in, to salve his conscience, perhaps, but soon he was gone. He never saw his son again” (p. 74). Barack Sr died eleven years later. “On the night of November 24, 1982, during Obama’s first semester of his senior year at Columbia, his father got behind the wheel of his car after a night of drinking at an old colonial bar in Nairobi, ran off the road, and crashed into the stump of a gum tree. He died instantly” (p. 115).
In 1979, Barry was accepted to Occidential College near Los Angeles. He only stayed a few years, just enough to transfer to Columbia University in New York. Obama stated that, “When I transferred, I decided to buckle down and get serious” (p. 113) which is exactly what he did. He studied hard, got decent grades and did not go out much. “At Columbia, Obama was a serious, if unspectacular, student. He majored in political science with a concentration in international relations and the Soviet Union” (p. 116).
After graduation, Barack (he went by Barack now) was a little at a loss of what to do. He wanted to engage in a selfless occupation but he didn’t really know where to start so he took a job at Business International Corporation in NYC. “Frustrated and broke, he interviewed for a job, in late summer of 1983, with Business International Corporation, a publishing and consulting group that collected data on international business and finance and issued various newsletters and reports for its corporate clients and organized government roundtables on trade” (p. 118). He only stayed at this job one year before he became employed at NY Public Interest Research Group, which “promotes consumer, environmental, and government reform” (p.121). But even this was not what he was looking for in a career. That’s when he stumbled upon an available community organizer position. He moved to Chicago in June, 1985.
“Most of Obama’s days were pure frustration. It was the norm to work for years on a project—a battle against the expansion of dangerous toxic-waste dumps, for example—and head toward a seeming victory, only to have it all be forgotten on some bureaucrat’s desk downtown. But Obama was getting an education: political, racial, sentimental. He met all kinds of people he had never encountered in Hawaii or in college: young black nationalists, full of pride, but also too willing to listen to conspiracy theories about Koreans funding the Klan and Jewish doctors injected black babies with AIDS. He met teachers full of idealism and compassion, but also exhausted by the chaos of their classrooms. He met government officials, preachers, single mothers and their children, school principals, small-business people, all of them telling Obama their fears and frustrations. He had learned a lot from books, but there was something far more immediate, visceral, and lasting about the education he was getting now” (p. 163).
This job, to be honest, was not quite what he expected either and he knew that he needed to continue to move forward with his life. With this goal in mind, he applied to and was accepted at his father’s alma mater, Harvard Law School. In 1988, Barack moved to Massachusetts and began to settle into the world of academia once more. He was elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review (editing Vol. 104) and during the summers, worked on internships at law offices in various cities. In the summer of 1989, as he was interning at the law firm of Sidley-Austin in Chicago, he met a fellow co-worker, named Michelle Robinson. They began to date (soon they were engaged) and it was just another reason why he would return to Chicago after he graduated from Harvard.
In 1991, he took a job at Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland, a firm which specialized in civil rights law. “The firm, with around a dozen lawyers, had its offices in a brick town house on West Erie Street, north of the Loop; the concentration was on voting rights, tenant rights, employment rights, anti-trust, whistleblower cases—a classic liberal ‘good guy’ firm” (p. 219). Obama also worked part-time at the University of Chicago’s law school teaching basic law classes. On top of all that, he headed Project Vote, which was a huge success, and worked on writing a book, eventually known as Dreams of My Father. “Obama’s memoir is a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping” (p. 231).
On October 3, 1992 Barack and Michelle were married and Barack’s social world considerably expanded.
In 1995, his mother passed away from cancer and it was also around this time that Barack decided to get more involved with politics. He ran for the state senate and won in 1996. Soon he was playing an increasingly important role in the state senate, sponsoring bills and reforming laws. “’We attained the majority in the seventh year and I passed twenty-six bills in a row,’ Obama told me [Remnick]. ‘In one year, we reformed the death penalty in Illinois, expanded health care for kids, set up a state earned-income tax credit’” (p. 350).
2004 was a key year for Obama. Not only did he run, and win, a seat in the US Senate but he was asked to give the keynote address at the Democratic Convention. Obama did such a good job with this speech that it single-handedly propelled him into national recognition. “The cable anchors all praised Obama and the networks scurried to get video for their late broadcasts and morning shows. Almost instantly, Obama’s team was getting invitations to appear on network television…For the rest of the week in Boston, as Obama went from the Convention floor to various interview appointments, people circled around him asking for autographs, urging him to run for President” (p. 401). He then signed a 3-book deal with Crown Publishing.
Barack was an instant celebrity as he arrived in Washington DC to take up his new Senate position. Though a rookie senator, Obama was placed on loads of awesome committees: Committee for the Environment, Public Works, Veterans Affairs, Foreign Relations. He butted heads with John McCain over lobbyist reform and he even got to travel: “In August 2005, as a member of a congressional delegation that also included Lugar, Obama went to Russian, Ukraine and Azerbaijan to meet with officials and inspect various weapons-storage facilities” (p. 428). He also visited New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and he went back to Africa. “Obama could justify the trip—to Kenya, Djibouti, Chad and South Africa—as an important fact-finding mission for a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of the subcommittee on Africa…Obama knew that the two-week journey would provoke an emotional reaction in Kenya and in the American press, not least among African-Americans who had not yet learned much about Obama. They did not realize the extent of the reaction: the huge crowds, people watching from balconies, children perched in the branches of trees” (p. 446).
His second book, The Audacity of Hope, appeared in 2006 and was pretty-much the soap box for his yet-unannounced presidential campaign. But primary season was just around the corner and there was no doubt that it was a good time to be a Democrat. “Events like the insurgency in Iraq and the revelations of torture in Abu Ghraib prison, the faltering economy, and the mismanagement of the rescue and reconstruction efforts on the Gulf Coast would make life very difficult for any Republican in 2008; what was more, although Hilary Clinton would enter a primary season bolstered by a well-financed, experienced campaign machine, she would be weighed down by the voters’ overall weariness with familiar politicians. Clinton was far from a sure thing” (p. 443).
“Still, for an African-American, no matter how skilled, no matter how intelligent and popular, a run for the Presidency was a weighty thing to consider” (p. 452). On February 10, 2007, Barack announced his candidacy and immediately moved into the thick of the primary season, defeating Edwards and then Clinton. He was proclaimed the Democratic nominee, moving on to face McCain in the general election of 2008 and won that too! Obama hit the presidency with an avalanche of support and goodwill, sweeping along all in its path. That is…until… “It was hard to imagine that any President would have remained as popular for long in a time of terrible unemployment, record deficits, and political rancor” (p. 581-82).
Although, domestically, the United States seemed to be in a shambles, Obama began his term well by winning the Nobel Peace Prize. “’It was not helpful to us politically,’ Obama told me [Remnick] in an interview at the Oval Office in mid-January, 2010. ‘Although Axelrod and I joke about it, the one thing we didn’t anticipate this year was having to apologize for having won the Nobel Peace Prize” (p. 583). [I really couldn’t remember hearing a good reason for Obama having won this prestigious prize so I looked it up on www.nobelprize.org. Here’s what they say about it: The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 was awarded to Barack H. Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".]
He then proceeded to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” while trying to stimulate the economy and lessen unemployment through a $787 billion stimulus package. He bailed out the automobile industry and passed the Budget Control Act of 2011 to aid in limiting the national debt. Obamacare, otherwise known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, was passed in 2009 which I think was an effort to give more Americans a chance at affordable healthcare but, in some people’s minds, was too close to socialization. Most recently he had to deal with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the resulting legislation. On the foreign front, Osama bin Laden was finally found and killed by Navy Seals on May 2, 2011. Obama also committed US troops to aid in the Libya revolt against Gaddafi and he ended the War in Iraq on December 15, 2011 (although he increased troops to Afghanistan).
He has announced his decision to seek a second term as president of the United States.
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