Obama Stars at Convention

BOSTON—“What is Obama Barack?” a well-shaven man in a pinstriped suit asked me in the hall of the FleetCenter early Wednesday evening. “Everyone’s carrying signs for it,” he added.

“It is not Obama Barack,” I replied, “but he is Barack Obama.” And since his smash-hit keynote speech Tuesday night, nobody is asking who Barack Obama—or Obama Barack—is anymore.

The national media has unanimously dubbed Obama, half white, half black, the new star of the party. In his keynote address Tuesday night, Obama told audiences that the American Dream can be a reality, but also that “we have real enemies in the world” that must be “pursued—and they must be defeated. John Kerry knows this.” He criticized Bush’s policies in the speech, but never attacked the president by name.

Arriving at the convention as an unknown, he leaves a rising star, ready to win the Democrat’s nomination for the open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois.

Sen. Jon S. Corzine, D-N.J., called Obama “the epitome of the future of what America’s about” in an exclusive with The Crimson on Tuesday.

Obama’s speech began on an autobiographical note. Describing his father’s humble beginnings in Kenya as a goat herder and his grandfather’s ambitious dreams, Obama shared his own experiences with hardship as an example to the American people that “a brighter day will come.”

Obama himself has already had many bright days. At 42, he is already an accomplished state senator and an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama is as well-educated as they come.

But when Obama reached the autobiographical portion of his speech Tuesday night, he had two opportunities to mention Harvard, in the context of both himself and his father, who left the family to pursue his Ph.D. at Harvard. But instead, Obama steered clear of the H-Bomb: “Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America.”

Kirkand and Ellis Professor of Law David B. Wilkins, who knew both Obama and his wife Michelle when they were at the Law School, said yesterday that he wasn’t surprised Obama didn’t mention his Harvard background in his address.

“Most politicians who have Harvard in their background, well, let’s just say that they approach their relationship in their speeches with caution,” Wilkins said. “It is the kind of thing that always gets mentioned by the press, but not by the candidate.”

A political science major at Columbia, Obama spent five years after college working as a community organizer with black churches in both Harlem and Chicago before enrolling at Harvard Law School, where he made national headlines as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

In February of 1990, the Associated Press ran an article saying that Obama told them that he would “like to someday return to community work, and has not ruled out a future in politics.” The Los Angeles Times ran a story in March of that same year in which Obama was quoted as saying that he planned to run for public office sometime “down the road.”

In a Boston Globe story that ran in February 1990, John Owens, Obama’s former co-worker from Chicago, was quoted in a telephone interview: “This guy sounds like he’s president of the country already,” Owens said of Obama. “I’ve never met anyone who could leave that impression after only five minutes.’”

A champion of “core values that unite Americans,” Obama possesses a biracial appeal that has been said to have drawn widespread support in the Illinois Democratic primary, in which he garnered 53 percent of the vote in an election with six other candidates.

One of Obama’s most striking political strengths is his ability to draw support from even those who disagree with him. And it seems his ability to unite those who usually agree to disagree has always been with him. In March 1990, the Los Angeles Times ran a feature piece on Obama that pointed to this.

“Yet some of Obama’s peers...find it puzzling that despite Obama’s openly progressive views on social issues, he has also won support from staunch conservatives,” the piece read. “Ironically, he has come under the most criticism from fellow black students for being too conciliatory toward conservatives and not choosing more blacks to other top positions on the law review.”

The article quoted Christine Lee, a black second-year HLS student at the time: “He’s willing to talk to them [the conservatives] and he has a grasp of where they are coming from, which is something a lot of blacks don’t have and don’t care to have.”

Even as president of the Law Review, Obama was a talented politician. In the same article, Obama’s constitutional law professor, Laurence H. Tribe ’62, was quoted: “He’s very unusual, in the sense that other students who might have something approximating his degree of insight are very intimidating to other students or inconsiderate and thoughtless....He’s able to build upon what other students say and see what’s valuable in their comments without belittling them.”

He turned down opportunities to clerk for the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D. C. circuit to work in civil rights law back in Chicago.

Wilkins, who remembers Obama as “a super star” even back in his law school days, said it was “very clear even in his student days that Obama’s first love was politics at the grassroots level.”

Wilkins recalls talking with Obama when he was a third-year about clerkships in the Supreme Court.

“I encouraged him to apply because I knew he’d get one, and he said he wasn’t interested, that he wanted to go back to Illinois and get involved in politics instead,” Wilkins said.

“He’s the kind of person that has always known what he wanted,” he added. “He really knows how to get things done.”

Bloomberg Professor of Law Martha L. Minow, who taught Obama during his time at the Law School, recalls that he always had his mind set on the community, not on the Supreme Court.

“He was very clear that he wanted to return to the issues he had handled as a community organizer in Chicago,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Minow recently worked with Obama on a two-year project run out of the Kennedy School of Government that produced a report called “Better Together,” which examined and identified efforts to strengthen bonds within communities and democracies.

“Barack impressed every participant” working on the project, Minow wrote, “and indeed, we all pledged to support his campaign for President of the United States.”

“He tried it laugh it off,” she added, “but we were serious—and rightly so.”

Wilkins also remembers that Obama’s talents as a speaker developed early on.

“I remember listening to him,” Wilkins said, “when we were both speaking at some event for the Black Law Students Association. His speech wasn’t quite as good as the one he gave last night, but it was just mesmerizing.”

“You could just tell that people were going to listen to this person, that they were going to follow him. He had this kind of calm about him that is quite remarkable for someone his age,” he said.

That kind of calm has carried him through numerous political victories—and might help him if he runs with Hillary Clinton in 2008, as some have speculated might happen if President Bush wins reelection in 2004.

Obama also possesses a formidable intellect.

“He’s extremely smart,” Wilkins said. “I was talking to Larry Tribe the other day, for whom Obama was a research assistant. Tribe had a mathematical background in college, but when they worked together on a paper on the theoretical application of mathematics to law, Larry said he was blown away by Barack’s theoretical intelligence.”

After graduating from HLS, Obama pursued opportunities both in the public and academic sectors. He worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, fighting against employment and housing discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation with a small firm.

He also landed a post at the University of Chicago Law School, although he did not pursue a professorship, choosing to focus instead on politics—his first love.

Minow taught Obama in a course called “Law and Society.”

She remembers that Obama wrote his paper on “issues relating to individualism and community, resonant with his key-note address.”

Minow recalls Obama as a tremendously good leader of the Law Review.

“He ushered in an era of calm, harmonious professionalism and still found time to participate in reading groups and other student activities,” she wrote.

Wilkins added that classmates in Obama’s section “commonly thought of him as the most talented person in the section. People talked about him being on the national ticket even back then.”

“The only thing that people saw barring him,” Wilkins added, “was that nobody thought that you could have a name like that on the national ticket. But look at him now. It’s a name that you don’t forget.”

Even Dean of the Law School Elena Kagan came into Boston to see her “great alumnus” speak at the convention on Tuesday night.

“It was kind of like watching a star being born,” Kagan said, recalling Obama’s address. Kagan, who graduated from HLS just four years before Obama, said she knows the state senator “quite well.”

Kagan was a professor at the University of Chicago law school when Obama taught there as an adjunct professor.

“He’s as fantastic in person as he seems,” she said. “A truly extraordinary person: brilliant, magnetic, and humble. The sky’s the limit for him.”

OBAMA IN POLITICS

Obama became a state senator in Illinois in 1997. In 2000, he had a career low point, when he lost a race against Bobby Rush for U.S. Congress. Rush, a former Black Panther, ran as the incumbent, and many in the black community didn’t find Obama’s biracial heritage appealing.

But Obama’s likely victory for the U.S. Senate this fall could push the Democrats into control of the Senate.

Obama’s parents met as students at the University of Hawaii. His father, who shares his exotic and unusual name, moved back to Kenya, where he worked as a successful economist during Obama’s childhood. His mother, who is white and from Kansas, moved the family to Honolulu, where she raised Obama with her parents. Obama’s mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager, and the family moved to Jakarta for four years.

When he was 10 years old, Obama moved back to Hawaii, where he was raised primarily by his grandparents in a small apartment. His grandfather worked as a salesman and then an insurance agent, his grandmother at a bank.

Encountering academic success early on, Obama got himself into one of Hawaii’s top private schools, the Punahou School.

And though Obama saw his father only once during his childhood—he visited when Obama was 10 years old—he wrote a memoir about the father he never knew, entitled “Dreams From My Father,” in which he discusses his hybrid background and his teenage experimentation with marijuana and cocaine.

“I guess you’d have to say I wasn’t a politician when I wrote the book,” Obama told New Yorker writer William Finnegan in May. “I wanted to show how and why some kids, maybe especially young black men, flirt with danger and self-destruction.”

—Simon W. Vozick-Levinson contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.