Читать книгу The Barack Obama Miscellany - Hundreds of Fascinating Facts About America's Great New President - Mark Hanks - Страница 10
ОглавлениеOn 19 September 1995, 34-year-old Barack Obama announced his Democratic candidacy for the Illinois State Senate seat to an audience of 200 at the lakefront Ramada Inn in Chicago. The Illinois Senate was controlled by Republicans at the time. Springfield is home to the Illinois government.
While Barack was running for the Illinois State Senate seat, one veteran politician suggested Obama change his name, while another told him to put a picture of his light-skinned face on the campaign materials, ‘so people don’t see your name and think you’re some big dark guy’.
Obama’s mother, Ann, died of metastatic uterine cancer on 7 November 1995, aged 52. Barack went to Hawaii to help his half-sister Maya scatter their mother’s ashes over the Pacific. Before she died, Ann completed a 1,000-page thesis on peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia and had been working towards getting parts of it published.
Obama has said his biggest mistake was not being at his mother’s side when she died.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was published in 1995 to overwhelmingly positive reviews.
In the March 1996 primary election, Obama won the Democratic nomination for State Senator for the 13th District of Illinois.
On 5 November 1996, Obama was elected State Senator for the 13th District of Illinois, taking 82 per cent of the votes. That same year, President Bill Clinton became the first Democratic President to be awarded a second term in six decades.
Sworn in on 8 January 1997 for a two-year term as State Senator for the 13th District, Obama was made responsible for an area spanning Chicago’s poorer South Side neighbourhoods – from Hyde Park-Kenwood through South Shore and from the lakefront west through Chicago Lawn.
Obama lived in the Renaissance Inn on the edge of downtown Springfield while Michelle stayed back in Chicago. He played basketball at the YMCA in the morning and watched sports on TV, but always spoke to Michelle on the phone for an hour a night.
He took golf lessons and joined the senators’ poker night, to which he brought a six-pack of beer. His fellow-players were all over 50 and white.
Barack strongly wanted to lead black communities away from the unrealistic politics of assimilation, which he felt only helps a few people to ‘move up, get rich, and move out’. He also opposed black nationalism because he believes it doesn’t unify ordinary people or create realistic agendas for change.
Obama had an aide who advised him on how to be a ‘regular guy’. Among the lessons were to order regular mustard, not Dijon, and not to wear button-down shirts.
Obama started writing a regular column – ‘Springfield Report’ – for the Hyde Park Herald (his local Chicago newspaper) in February 1997.
Obama quickly gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and healthcare laws.
Some African-Americans resented this intellectual outsider. One favourite line was: ‘You figure out whether you’re white or black yet, Barack, or still searching?’
Barack backed a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform and promoted increased subsidies for childcare before being re-elected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election.
In 1999, Congressman Bobby Rush – a former member of the Black Panther party – lost a challenge to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Obama saw this as his chance and decided to run for the Democratic candidacy for Congress.
During the campaign, a pivotal vote on gun control legislation was due in the State Senate. When the vote came on the floor, Barack was in Hawaii visiting his 18-month-old daughter, Malia, who was ill. The gun control bill didn’t pass and Barack came under fire for not attending the vote.
Barack lost the Democratic primary run for the US House of Representatives to Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one. Following this, he experienced the ‘not black enough’ charge from several quarters for the first time in his political career. But there was a positive: while he may not have been a ‘black’ candidate, Barack realised that he was a blend of America, and that this could work in his favour.
Obama speaking on 11 September 2001: ‘Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy … We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any US military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbours and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe – children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.’
Obama was one of the very few mainstream Democrats to oppose the Iraq war before it started. Addressing an anti-war rally in Chicago’s Federal Plaza in October 2002, Obama denounced the planned invasion of Iraq, while repeating the line ‘I don’t oppose all wars.’
The Democrats usurped Republican control of the Illinois Senate in 2002. That same year Obama was re-elected to the State Senate. In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee. He sponsored legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained. He also sponsored legislation making Illinois the first state to authorise videotaping of homicide interrogations.
Obama formally entered the race for the United States Senate in 2003. During the primaries, his Democratic rival, Blair Hull, took the lead, but after a short while dropped out when domestic-abuse allegations surfaced. Barack hired David Axelrod as his political strategist. Axelrod began filming Obama in public in 2003, footage he would later use to create a five-minute film for the internet for the 16 January 2007 announcement that Obama was running for President. ‘Barack showed flashes of brilliance,’ Axelrod said, ‘but there were times of absolute pure drudgery… his speeches were very theoretical and intellectual and very long.’
During his campaign for the Senate, Barack’s aides thought he should have a driver but he refused: he liked having the time alone to clear his head.
In March 2004, Obama won the primary with 52 per cent of the vote.
In the general election, Barack faced Republican candidate Jack Ryan, but Ryan was forced to withdraw due to a sex scandal reported in the Chicago Tribune. African-American Alan Keyes replaced Jack Ryan, and soon questioned Obama’s Christianity and blackness.
Obama’s 2004 race against Republican Alan Keyes marked the first time in US history that two African-Americans ran as major party nominees for a Senate seat.
During the campaign, the police credited Obama for his active engagement in enacting death-penalty reforms.
In August 2004, John Kerry asked Barack to be his keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention address. ‘There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,’ said Obama in his speech. ‘There’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America … there’s the United States of America … We are one people …’ The speech went out on primetime television to an estimated 9.1 million viewers. Barack Obama became famous overnight. ‘Obamamania’ was born.
Dreams from My Father was reissued with a new introduction by Obama and the DNC keynote address. It became a huge bestseller. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison said Obama is ‘a writer in my high esteem’ and that his memoir is ‘quite extraordinary’. The Guardian wrote that Dreams from My Father ‘is easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years’, while the New York Times described it as ‘the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president’.
In November 2004, Obama won the Senate seat, notching up 70 per cent of the vote. He was the fifth African-American Senator in the history of the US, and only the third to have been popularly elected. His step-grandmother, Kezia, attended his inauguration.
The buzz about a presidential candidacy began before Obama had even been sworn into the Senate in January 2005. But Obama had told reporters in November 2004, ‘I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years.’
For the first nine months in Washington, Obama travelled nearly 40 times to the remotest corners of Illinois, holding surgeries in libraries and village halls. He worked 12-hour days and ate takeaway food at his desk. Every weekend he flew home economy class to see his wife and children in Chicago.
Obama rented a one-bedroom apartment in Washington and began work on his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream’, aiming to set out his political vision.
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream was published in 2006 and shot to number one on both the New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller lists after Obama was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. The book advance from the publisher totalled $1.9 million contracted for three books.
Obama’s first law was passed with Republican Tom Coburn. The law allowed every American to go online and see exactly how tax dollars were being spent.
He won a Best Spoken Word Grammy Award for the audiobook Dreams of My Father in 2006.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the large crowds that gathered at Audacity of Hope book signings influenced Obama’s decision to run for President. A former presidential candidate described the book as Obama’s ‘thesis submission’ for the US presidency.
The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 30 weeks.
In December 2006, President Bush signed into law the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act, marking the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor.
Obama also introduced the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, a bill to criminalise deceptive practices in federal elections and the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007, neither of which was signed into law.
As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. He met with Mahmoud Abbas before he became President of the Palestinian Authority, and gave a speech at the University of Nairobi condemning corruption in the Kenyan government.
Barack and his wife Michelle took HIV/Aids tests at Kisumu, which has one of Kenya’s highest rates of HIV prevalence, encouraging local people to do the same.
Thousands lined the streets of Kogelo at Obama’s homecoming to his father’s village.
He visited the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School built on land donated by his paternal grandfather.
On 10 February 2007, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in the 2008 US presidential election.
