Politicsforher.com  

            I am a psychology major so I believe a individuals rearing and up-bringing will tell a lot about that persons outlook and viewpoints also you can tell by where a persons been where they might be headed and why, and as always past behavior is always a good predictor of future behavior. So what I plan to do with Mr. Obama is delve into his past and than come up with my personal opinion on whether he will make a good president or not.

            Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a white women that grew up in a small town in Kansas. When Stanley Ann was born, her father, also Stanley, wanted a son. Her father (Barack Obama’s grandfather) being a very stubborn man named his daughter Stanley Ann anyway. Stanley Ann got teased relentlessly about her name growing up so eventually she just settled in to be called Ann. Ann’s  father also had a very restless soul and Ann was moved around a lot as she was growing up. Ann was born in the Midwest, then the family moved to Texas and then to Seattle, Washington. After Ann finished high school in Seattle, the family left for Hawaii. Once settled, Ann’s parents set out to find other freethinkers like themselves. The city in Hawaii called Honolulu offered this, it was comprised of a mix of people from nation throughout the Pacific Ocean. No one ethnic group claimed a majority of the population. Honolulu encouraged the mix of people. The city name means “a joining together,” hono, and “shelter from the wind”, lulu. Government leaders nicknamed their home-town the Gathering Place.

            Ann enrolled in the University of Hawaii. During her first year, she took a class in Russian language, in this class is where eighteen-year-old girl met a tall, dark foreign student named Barack Obama and they soon fell in love.

            Obama Sr was born into the Luo people of Kenya .The tribe was known for its smart people who often entered politics. Oabama Sr spent most of his early life in a poor village along Lake Victoria. The British ran Kenya as a colony at the time, so once Obama Sr was old enough he attended an English-speaking school in a tin-roof shack. The colonial government had set up these schools around the country. From the beginning it was said his sharp mind stood out in class, eventually he earned a scholarship to a better school in Nairobi. While Obama Sr studied in Nairobi, Kenya gained independence from Great Britain. Kenyan leaders established a joint education program with America.

The Kenyan government sent the nation’s most promising students to U.S. universities. The students were contracted to return to Africa to return to Africa with the latest information.. The Kenyan government wanted this to be a way to help Kenya become a great modern nation. So at the age of twenty three Obama Sr chose the University of Hawaii. In 1959 he became the school’s first African student.

            So while both of these two very different people attended Russian class together this is where the spark in the eyes of both of them began to give us today this great man and leader we call Barack Obama. While they were dating they would talk about many different things one being the terrible clashes over race in America. Ann would tell Obama Sr how southern whites expected blacks to sit in the back of buses and use separate bathrooms. And how many towns stopped blacks from voting and blacks and whites from dating each other. Obama Sr never understood the inequality in such a great nation. He would tell her even Kenyans had earned the right to walk with whom they wanted and go where they pleased. Ann and Obama Sr married in1960, Ann’s parents being the free thinkers that they were didn’t have a problem with this, but this was a very bold move, half of the states in the country banned mixed marriages. In much of the South, if the couple traveled together as husband and wife, Obama Sr could be hung. But Barack Obama’s parents adopted the color-blind model that Hawaii represented.

                        Within a year of their marriage Barack Obama was born affectionately nicknamed “Barry”. Two years later however Barry’s father got his four-year degree in three years and Harvard University gave him a scholarship to continue his education but the hitch was it was only enough for one person, so Barack Obama and his mother behind. After Harvard Barack’s father returned to Kenya and took on another wife and children as with Luo custom he could marry more than one woman as long as he cared for them and their children. So Barack’s mother divorced him, I guess she wasn’t that free-thinking.

            Barack Obama spent the first six years of his life living like and all American Hawaiian boy, that is until his mom met his step-father Lolo at the university as well. Lolo was from Indonesia and when he married Ann Barack’s mom he took them both to live in Jakarta, the capitol of Indonesia to live with him. Little Barack Obama went from a big city home in Hawaii to a small, open red stucco-and-tile house that boarded the jungle. Being very young at the time this seemed like a great adventure to him he remembers thinking “he could hardly believe his good fortune.’

            Lolo treated Barack as his own son, although it was very different from Hawaii they had no hot water and no indoor plumbing, he used the bathroom outside in a hole in the ground. He says he remembers now how poverty, disease, and signs of deep divisions between rich and poor showed everywhere. Barack,s parents couldn’t afford private school so he attended local schools and within six months mastered the Indonesian language. Barack’s mom not happy with the education system in Indonesia she would wake Barack up three hours before school every morning and tutor him herself, but after four years she and Lolo separated and they returned to Honolulu to be with her parents now with Barack’s little sister in tow.

            Barack Obama had many questions about his biological father who he barely remembered, and his grandparents would always tell him of his father’s brilliance and commitment to better the world and his mother would reassure him his brains came from his father, I would dare to say was tis when a spark started to happen in him. He also got the chance to attend one of the largest and most respected private schools in the nation at the time his teachers remember him as a good student. His father Barack Sr sent him a basketball present as a gift and basketball fever hit him he known as a gym rat..

            Despite basketball and a good family and school, Barack Obama’s confusion over his own race stalked him. He says “Bottled-up feelings” and high school experimenting led him to try drugs. It was only experimenting and his schoolwork never suffered.

            Barack says he wasn’t particularly interested in college but he chose Occidental College in Los Angeles because he had met a girl from there during the summer. Occidental was where Barack tasted politics. Students there spoke out against the mistreatment of blacks in South Africa. At Occidental Barack gave a speech for a program to drum up interest in the cause, for the first time, he says he felt the power of his words to change minds. It is then he claimed his voice and black identity. After two years he became restless and took advantage of an exchange program between Occidental and Columbia University so in the fall 1981 he transferred. Two years later he graduated with a degree in Political Science. After college Obama looked for a job as a community organizer. He already wanted to promote civil rights at the grass roots neighborhood level, but nothing opened up for him for two years and that was in 1985 in Chicago. This is where I believe he begin to tweak his natural ability for Organizational Leadership, even though it was much harder than he had expected it to be. He realized that people living in projects or poverty could barely scrape enough money to fix their next meal, they didn’t have time or energy to tackle broader social issues. But Barack refused to give up, he was determined, he turned to churches, he went from church to church, beating the pavement, trying to get to every pastor in the community to help they remember him now as “this skinny, scrawny guy trying to find out how we can make the community better. He just walked the streets”.

            In the beginning. Obama called meetings where few people showed, and church leaders closed their doors on his ideas, but finally he did find some success! He helped bring job-training programs to poor neighborhoods also he gathered a busload of parents from a housing project and drove them to a downtown Chicago Housing Authority office. With Obama’s support, they insisted on asbestos testing and removal for their apartments. He says he often felt discouraged by the snail’s pace for change but as he got closer to the people in the community it fueled his desire to do more for everyday folks. He realized most people didn’t have the opportunities he had to be exposed to a larger world than a single run-down neighborhood. The more Obama met people in need, the more his desire to help them deepened. Three years after arriving in Chicago, Obama applied to several law schools to learn more tools for change. Several schools accepted him but he chose Harvard University, where his father had attended. Before he went to Harvard he says he had a deep need to re-connect with his family in Kenya even though his father had all ready passed he wanted too see the other side of his family and learn where his father was from. He was introduced to his very big family there and in a months time he pieced together his African history. He learned about his father’s high-level government job as an economist. He heard about his fall from grace after he bucked corrupt officials. He then cried at his fathers grave and made peace with the man and he says he left Kenya with a stronger feeling of himself and where he belonged in the world.

            Obama entered Harvard in the fall of 1998 and a former classmate comments “he seemed experienced in the world in ways some of us weren’t - very broad minded.” Barack was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. This produced a flurry of media attention and a publishing company contracted with Obama to write the story of his life also doors opened to leading law firms. Barack clerked for a little while in a large Chicago law firm and discovered that he did not like the cut throat atmosphere so he returned to Chicago looking for work. He did have one good thing to say about the law firm that is where he met his wife who graduated a year before him they married in 1991.  The couple moved back to Chicago’s southside where he finished his book and took a job at a smaller law firm that focused on civil rights. The legal cases there focused on job-discrimination and low-income housing. He worked to improve public health and the environment.

            In 1992 Obama also took on the Illinois Project Vote where under his discretion, the project registered 150,000 new voters from poor neighborhoods to give them a voice in elections. In 1996 he wins the election for Illinois state senator. For the seven years in the Illinois Senate, Obama fought on behalf of working families. He chaired the public health and welfare committee. In this position, he introduced more than 780 bills. About 280 became law. Under Obama’s leadership, the state government expanded insurance programs for twenty thousand additional children and sixty-five thousand more families in Illinois. He helped reduce taxes for working families. He ushered in a bill to further protect women from abuse. He also led the call for groundbreaking rules that required police to videotape questioning of murder suspects.

            In 2004 he was elected U.S. Senator from Illinois, becoming the fifth African American in history to join the Senate. He won that with a sweeping victory against his opponent with 70% of the vote, shortly after that he won many award including one from the NAACP Fight for Freedom Award. Obama’s publisher offered him a three-book deal worth 1.9 million. After this accomplishment Obama wrote in a blog “It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun.” Some called him the Great Black Hope, or a rising star. People in Obama’s father’s province in Kenya expressed similar high hopes. African parents named babies Barack, after him. They also held Obama up as a role model for the older kids and named an elementary school after him.

            He is a man that was raised in two different countries with roots in a third and his lived all over has a broad understanding of what is important to every group of people.      AND GUESS WHAT I GOT ALL MY INFORMATION OUT OF THE LIBRARY NOT THE INTERNET!