Backgrounder: Barack Obama -- U.S. president-elect

Source: Xinhua | 11-05-2008 08:55

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (Xinhua) -- Barack Hussein Obama was carrying remarkable numbers in nationwide and state polls as he headed toward election day on Nov. 4, hoping to win back the White House for Democrats.

The 47-year-old senator from Illinois promises to bring "changes we believe in," which could begin with being the first African American president in history.

EARLY LIFE

Obama's life tells a different story from previous presidential hopefuls. He was born on Aug. 14, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan father and a white mother from the state of Kansas, in the U.S. heartland.

However, his father left home only two years after his birth for a graduate degree in Harvard and then a post in the Kenyan government. The only time Obama met his father again was at the age of 10. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1982.

Obama's mother married an Indonesian oil executive when Obama was six. The whole family then moved to the southeast Asian country. He eventually returned to Hawaii for high school and stayed with his grandparents.

As he says in his book, Dreams From My Father, being rooted in both black culture and white culture, has helped him gain expansive vision he could bring to politics later. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Obama was "possessed with a crazy idea -- that I would work at a grassroots level to bring about change."

He moved from New York to Chicago, Illinois, in 1985 and worked as a community organizer in a poor African-American area for three years, when he realized involvement at a higher level was needed to bring true improvement to such communities.

Obama then attended Harvard Law School and was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation, he returned to Chicago where he practiced civil rights law and taught the Constitution at the University of Chicago.

POLITICAL CAREER

Obama decided to make his first run for public office in 1996, winning a seat in the Illinois state senate. Four years later, he sought a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, but without success.

In 2004, Obama beat six Democratic rivals to win the nomination in the congressional elections. His remarkable skills in oratory also impressed the party's presidential candidate, John Kerry, who named him the keynote speaker at the national convention, where Obama, for the first time, stepped on the national political stage.

That November, he overwhelmingly captured 70 percent of popular votes in the congressional elections to become a senator.

In the Senate, Obama's voting record coincided with those of the Democratic Party's liberal wing. He criticized the Iraq war from the beginning, worked on Congress ethical standards and increasing the use of renewable fuels. He also built his reputation as a new breed of politician by working without partisan and racial divides.