Barack Obama

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
We are the change that we seek.

~Barack Obama

The winds of change are finally here! Barack Obama is the first African American to be elected as the President of the United States. If this is not news, then what is?

Some people see Obama as a great speaker; some see him as a good politician while others see him as an African American whose election win changed the face of America. But what is he really?

He didn’t win the election because he is a great speaker or a good politician but because he was able to connect to the people; he was able to look into their eyes and touch their heart! That’s the magic of Obama.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 04, 1961 to a white American mother with German, Irish, and English lineage and a Kenyan father, Obama has moved around the world a bit especially when his mother Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetero, an Indonesian.

A boy from the block

The great thing about Obama is that he feels like one of us – the local kid. He has experienced the ill-effects of cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol when he was in high school. Pretty much all of us enjoy such alcoholic high at that age and Obama was no different.

He went to Occidental College in Los Angeles after high school and after two years was transferred to Columbia University in New York City. He majored in Political Science with specialization in International Relations in 1983.

In 1988, Obama joined Harvard Law School after having worked with a church based community in a development project. He was selected as the Editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review in his first year and went on to be selected the president of the Law Review in the second year. This was only the start of the many firsts to his name.

Obama received a lot of publicity from the furor created after he was elected the Law Review’s president. This opened quite a few avenues for him. He was offered a publishing contract for a book on race relations.

Among his other achievements his term as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years from 1992-2004 is noticeable. In the meantime, he also joined a law firm called Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland and worked there from 1993-1996 as an associate and as counsel from 1996-2004.

The year 1996 was a remarkable year for Obama as he joined politics and was got elected to the Illinois senate. His success as a senator can be seen from the fact that he was re-elected in 1998 and 2002 and in 2003, he went on to become the chairman of Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee.

This was no mean feat and with him becoming the chairman, Democrats had reason to celebrate. The Democrats were back in majority after a very long spell of being a minority! Since then there has been no looking back for the “man with a charming smile!”

On February 10, 2007, he announced his candidacy for the President of the United States and on January 20, 2009, he will be sworn in as the 44th US President.

Martin Luther King had a dream, and now it seems that it has finally come true.