DelMio Explorations

Where in the world is Barack Obama?

The short answer is, all over the place

whereintheworldisbarackobama.swf

The long and winding road

By Gina Prodan

When Barack Obama gate-crashed the 2000 Democratic National Convention, he was fresh off his first Senate campaign (which failed) and wouldn’t dream of keynoting the convention four years later (which he did).
Obama became a Democratic rock star on national television in 2004. But as he left the Boston stage to roaring delegate crowds, America started to buzz: Who is this ‘skinny kid with the funny name’? Where did he come from?
Much has been made of the Illinois senator’s name (“Barack” is an East African name rooted in the Hebrew “baruch,” which means “blessed”) and nebulous ethnicity (he’s half Kenyan, half Kansan), but Obama attributes much of his political decision-making to a life lived around the world.
Take a trip from his birthplace in Honolulu to his Senate seat on Capitol Hill to get to know this presidential candidate. Each stop features snapshots of Obama’s life and how different locales have colored his political and world views, complete with The Audacity of Hope page references so you can read about Obama in his own words.The Melting Pot: Honolulu, Hawaii
Before there was Barack Hussein Obama Jr., Obama Sr., a Kenyan economics student, met Ann Dunham, from Wichita, Kansas, at the University of Hawaii. The older Obama had grown up herding sheep in rural Kenya before he won scholarships that sent him to study in the United States. Dunham’s family—her father was a failed insurance salesman, her mother worked in a bank—was ever westwardbound in search of fulfillment. Hawaii was their last stop.
After his parents separated when he was 2, Obama lived with his mother’s white, middle-class family in Honolulu while photographs and letters that crisscrossed the country made up the father-son relationship.
That his father’s family was black and his mother’s was white didn’t faze Obama as a child. After all, he grew up in Honolulu’s racial melting pot, which fuels his vision of America to this day. “There is not a black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America,” Obama declared during his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. “There’s the United States of America.”
In Obama’s words…
But the question remains: have we arrived at a color-blind society? Read how Obama thinks race affects American relations within and beyond its borders on pages 231-240.
NEXT STOP: In 1967, Barack Obama and his family island-hopped to which of the following cities?
Nicosia, Cyprus; Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea; Jakarta, Indonesia; Tokyo
(Hint on page 273)Privilege and Poverty: Jakarta, Indonesia
Had Barack Obama’s mother known about the million people slaughtered under General Suharto in 1965, she said she never would have moved her family to Jakarta, Indonesia. Dunham married an Indonesian student named Lolo Soetero in the mid-1960s, and when he was conscripted to the Indonesian military, the family (which included Obama’s younger half sister, Maya) moved to Jakarta in 1967.
Because the family couldn’t afford the private schools most Westerners sent their children to, Obama attended the same Indonesian schools and played in the same Indonesian streets as local children. But even at age 6, Obama sensed that his family was better off than their neighbors. His family, he recalls, always had enough to eat. The difference: status.
Status in 1960s Indonesia wasn’t determined by money; it was based on Western ties. Obama remembers the way Westerners condescended to Indonesians, shunning the language and native culture. Meanwhile Americans, like his mother, were paid in American dollars, whose exchange rate walloped the Indonesian rupiah and raised their standard of living.
Obama believes that the imbalance of Western privilege and tropical poverty provides an apt metaphor for the world outside the United States in which “globalization and sectarianism, poverty and plenty, modernity and antiquity constantly collide.” And he writes that only by recognizing the history of American foreign policy can we begin to help needy nations in the world.
In Obama’s words…
Can the United States use its history with Indonesia to inform its future foreign policies? Learn more about America’s foreign policy record in Southeast Asia and read Obama’s approach for using diplomacy and multilateral strategies to improve our foreign relations, on pages 279-290.
NEXT STOP: Four years after moving to Indonesia, 10-year-old Barack Obama headed back to the United States to live with his family in which city?
New York, New York; Wichita, Kansas; Honolulu, Hawaii; Chicago, Illinois
(Hint on page 66).Practicing Empathy: Honolulu, Hawaii
Empathy, as with most of Obama’s values, was delivered in a smooth, neat package by his mother. “Whenever she saw a hint of [prejudice, bullying or injustice] in me,” he writes, “She would look me square in the eyes and ask, ‘How do you think that would make you feel?’ ” And he took it to heart. But he didn’t experience empathy until he lived with his grandfather.
Obama was 10 years old when he returned to the United States, so his grandfather—the father figure in their small Honolulu apartment—was on the receiving end of the boy’s teenage angst. Obama and his grandfather butted heads over household chores and arbitrary rules, and Obama would use his sharp wit to undermine the older man.
As Obama neared high school graduation, however, those small victories lost their satisfaction: “I started to appreciate his need to feel respected in his own home. […] I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.”In Obama’s words…
By neglecting that pivotal question—how would that make you feel?—our country has fallen into an empathy deficit, says Obama. Read how he thinks strengthening American empathy could help us find common ground across national boundaries, social tiers and political-party lines on pages 63-69. NEXT STOP: After graduating from the Punahou School, Hawaii’s top college-prep academy, Barack Obama attended Occidental College, a small liberal arts college, in which city?
Los Angeles; San Diego; Austin, Texas; Santa Fe, N.M.Racial Identity, Mainstream Success: Los Angeles, California
In 1979, Barack Obama changed his family’s westward current, heading east to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he played basketball, went by the name “Barry” and examined the balance between racial pride and mainstream success.
Obama admits that he chose his friends carefully during his Occidental years, preferring politically active black students, Latinos, Marxists and feminists to white kids. Los Angeles had provided Obama’s first experience of black community—even if opportunities to bond with other black students were limited. But it was Obama’s involvement in Occidental’s South Africa divestment movement in the early 1980s that connected him with the local African-American community.
South African divestment also became Obama’s first step into the political sphere. It was at that point that he “made a conscious decision to go into public policy.” So, after two years at Occidental College he was due east again.
In Obama’s words…
Obama believes that one of the keys to his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate was change in Illinois’ African-American community. Read Obama’s impressions of race and the American dream to learn how we can use the achievements of individuals who succeeded against the odds to build toward progress in the future on pages 241-249.
NEXT STOP: After two years at Occidental College, Barack Obama transferred to an Ivy League university in which city?
Cambridge, Mass.; Princeton, N.J.; Providence, R.I.; New York
(Hint on page 289).Change Starts at the Grassroots: New York, New York
Plans for Barack Obama’s first night in New York City didn’t exactly go as planned: after his landlord never showed, Obama ended up sleeping with his luggage in an Upper West Side alley and washing up at a fire hydrant with a homeless man the next morning.
But Obama had come to New York—through a transfer from Occidental College to Columbia University—in search of community. He writes in his first book, “What I needed was […] a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics.” Nevertheless, he spent most of his college years alone, studying.
After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama worked briefly as a research analyst and then as a community organizer at the City College of New York in Harlem. He sent letters nationwide trying to kick-start his community organizing career. Obama writes that when people asked what community organizing entailed, he didn’t have an answer. “Instead, I’d pronounce the need for change,” he says. “Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.”
And in 1985, a man named Jerry Kellman answered Obama’s letters. He was looking for change.
In Obama’s words…
How does Obama stay in touch with the needs of diverse Illinois? Read Obama’s reflections on holding town hall meetings across the state and garnering voter support for his 2004 Senate campaign on pages 101-109.
NEXT STOP: After an aggressive letter-writing campaign, Barack Obama finally found a position as a community organizer on the South Side on which city?
Boston; Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami (Hint on page 1).Faith on the South Side: Chicago, Illinois
In 1985 Barack Obama moved to Chicago, where he organized for a church-based community group called the Developing Communities Project, which focused on the South Side’s black neighborhoods that were still reeling from massive job losses in the local steel mills. For $13,000 a year, Obama drove a beat-up Honda from one congregation to the next, rallying community troops to improve their neighborhoods.
Twenty-four-year-old Obama didn’t turn around the South Side, but his daily trips to historically black churches “fortified [his] racial identity and confirmed [his] belief in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things.” He appreciated the way the black church acted as the spiritual, political, economic and social center of the community, whose members it wholly accepted, welcoming sinners as much as saints.
So it was Obama’s choice (not an epiphany) to be baptized in 1988 at Trinity United Church on the South Side, where he says, “I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”In Obama’s words…
Faith in God didn’t dawn on Obama overnight. Find out how working on Chicago’s South Side sparked Obama’s journey from lacking a vessel for his beliefs through making the decision to be baptized as a Christian, on pages 202-209.
NEXT STOP: After three years as a community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama’s career path headed east, again, to law school in which city?
Cambridge, Mass.; New York; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia.Leadership by Consensus: Cambridge, Mass.
Barack Obama arrived at Harvard Law School in 1988. He was an elder statesman at the age of 27, but his life as we know it was just about to start.
Obama had been at Harvard for two years before his first shock of media exposure: in 1990 he was selected—after he entered the complex and competitive election late in the game—as Harvard Law Review’s first black president. News media latched onto the story about the new black leader of the nation’s most prestigious law review, and, by the time he graduated in 1991, Obama had a book deal for his memoir. The presidency itself was a charged, political position (his first) in which Obama used his experience mobilizing at the grass-roots level to guide warring sides to a compromise. Amidst racial tensions and partisan policies, he developed his ability to lead constituents to consensus and to present himself as a good listener. It was at Harvard that he found his political approach.In Obama’s words…
Could Obama’s Harvard Law Review presidency prepared him for the vitriolic, bipartisan battles in the United States Senate? Read Obama’s approach to decision-making and working with senators on both sides of the aisle on pages 15-20.
NEXT STOP: Many of Barack Obama’s Harvard professors say he turned down offers from many high-profile law firms in favor of practicing civil rights law for a firm in which Midwest city?
Cleveland; St. Louis; Chicago; Indianapolis (Hint on page 327).Return to the Inner City: Chicago
Law degree in hand, Barack Obama returned to Chicago in 1992 for good. After organizing Illinois Project Vote’s minority-targeted registration and education initiative, he litigated civil rights cases for victims of employment and housing discrimination as an associate with Miner, Barnhill and Galland. He also became a regular at MacArthur’s, a soul food hotspot on Chicago’s West Side owned by Mac Alexander.
The inner city, says Obama, needs people like Alexander. While he runs and develops businesses that make rundown areas more viable for consumer traffic than drug traffic, Alexander also offers ex-convicts a second chance—hiring people with criminal records, breaking them into a work-week schedule and giving them a legitimate job history for future employment. And that’s a start.
Obama believes that by curing the problems—both institutional and cultural—that plague the inner city, we can approach the more universal issues of poverty in other parts of our country and around the world.In Obama’s words…
Keep reading about Mac Alexander and find out how Obama proposes business leaders like Alexander can help turn around the inner city and change the face of cultural poverty on pages 249-259.
EXT STOP: In 1992 Obama made his way to the Illinois State Legislature, where he focused on such issues as welfare reform, public school funding and work-force preparation. His current term as a United State Senator from Illinois started in 2004 in which city?
Philadelphia.; Springfield, Ill.; Washington, D.C.; New York (Hint on page 71).The Curse of the Media Darling: Washington, D.C.
Barack Obama says that a senator’s first year on Capitol Hill is a lot “like drinking from a fire hose”—the briefings, committee meetings, introductions and speaking invitations all come at once. And following his barnstorming speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was exposed to a little more media attention than the average freshman senator. Obama has dealt with his fair share of the spotlight (read about 2004 DNC on pages 354-359) and the limelight (read about his media run-in with conservative columnist Peggy Noonan on pages 122-123), so he has grown intensely aware of how the attention can change a person. He catches his friends, and sometimes himself, studying his expressions, his words for signs that politics and media have made him a different person. But he doesn’t know that it has happened yet.
The media attention, nevertheless, has made Barack Obama, “the skinny kid with the funny name,” a household name and a leading candidate for president.
NEXT STOP SURVEY: What do you Barack Obama’s future holds?
First African-American U.S. President; 2008 Candidate for Vice President; U.N. Ambassador; Harvard Law Professor; Other:

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