Watch the Video in which Obama swats that fly!
The fly does not stand a chance with these sharp reflexes!!
The fly does not stand a chance with these sharp reflexes!!
Here is the Video of the Fly-killing Act
Obama Swats Fly during CNBC Interview
Obama Swats Fly during CNBC Interview
Runtime: 0:31
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Number 3 - Obama and McCain during their final Presidential Debate at Hofstra University on October 15th
Senator John McCain used the final debate of the presidential election on Wednesday night to raise persistent and pointed questions about Senator Barack Obama's character, judgment and policy prescriptions in a session that was by far the most spirited and combative of their encounters this fall.At times showing anger and at others a methodical determination to make all his points, Mr. McCain pressed his Democratic rival on taxes, spending, the tone of the campaign and his association with the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers, using nearly every argument at his disposal in an effort to alter the course of a contest that has increasingly gone Mr. Obama's way.
But Mr. Obama maintained a placid and at times bemused demeanor - if at times appearing to work at it - as he parried the attacks and pressed his consistent line that Mr. McCain would represent a continuation of President Bush's unpopular policies, especially on the economy.
That set the backdrop for one of the sharpest exchanges of the evening, when, in response to Mr. Obama's statement that Mr. McCain had repeatedly supported Mr. Bush's economic policies, Mr. McCain fairly leaped out of his chair to say: "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago."
Acknowledging Mr. McCain had his differences with Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama replied, "The fact of the matter is that if I occasionally mistake your policies for George Bush's policies, it's because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people - on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities - you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush."
The debate touched on a wide variety of issues, including abortion, judicial appointments, trade and climate change as well as the economy, with the candidates often making clear the deep differences between them.
But it also put on display the two very different temperaments of the candidates with less than three weeks until Election Day. The lasting image of the night could be the split screen of Mr. Obama, doing his best to maintain his unflappable demeanor under a sometimes withering attack, and Mr. McCain looking coiled, occasionally breathing deeply, apparently in an expression of impatience.
Sitting side by side with only the host, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, between them on the stage at Hofstra University, Mr. McCain made clear from the start that he was going to follow the prescriptions of many of his supporters - among them his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska - and try to put Mr. Obama on the defensive and shake him from his steady debate style.
Seeking to suggest that Mr. Obama would hurt the economy and many entrepreneurs, Mr. McCain said, "The whole premise behind Senator Obama's plans are class warfare - let's spread the wealth around," repeating a phrase Mr. Obama had used to Mr. Wurzelbacher in explaining the rationale for his upper-income tax increase.
"Why would you want to do that - anyone, anyone in America - when we have such a tough time, when these small-business people like Joe the Plumber are going to create jobs unless you take that money from him and spread the wealth around," Mr. McCain said.
The plumber came up directly or indirectly 24 times during the debate, an Everyman symbol of the divide between the candidates on how best to address the economy.
As he has done in previous encounters, Mr. Obama looked into the camera and repeated his plan: "Now, the conversation I had with Joe the Plumber, what I essentially said to him was, five years ago, when you weren't in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then. And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn't yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now."
Steps 2 Passive Income
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byThe Economy
Coming on a day that the Dow Jones average had one of its worst drops in history, Mr. Schieffer tried something other moderators had failed to do this fall: get the two candidates to enumerate which proposals they would specifically have to postpone or cut in the face of an economic environment that has changed drastically since they first drew up their plans.Neither man went very far, though Mr. McCain perhaps offered a more detailed list. Repeating his pledge of an across-the-board spending cut, he said, "Well, one of them would be the marketing assistance program. Another one would be a number of subsidies for ethanol."
Mr. Obama, for his part, specifically cited the "$15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies," a component of the Medicare program. But, he said more generally, "we need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work, and I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page. Programs that don't work, we should cut."
Still, though the winner of this election will inherit the most sweeping federal intervention in financial markets in at least three generations, the debate, while not short of policy discussions, was at least as much about the styles of the two men as they engaged one another.
In the days before the debate, Mr. Obama had appeared to have goaded Mr. McCain, saying in an interview with ABC News that he did not know why Mr. McCain had not personally made an issue of Mr. Obama's association with Mr. Ayers, with whom he worked with on two nonprofit boards, in their last debate considering that Mr. McCain's campaign had done so repeatedly in recent weeks.
And there was some degree of anticipation over whether Mr. McCain would do so this time. He did, though only after a bit of prompting from Mr. Schieffer, who, in a question about the tone of the campaign directed at both men, asked Mr. McCain specifically, "Your running mate said he palled around with terrorists."
Mr. McCain initially did not address that point directly.
But as Mr. Schieffer seemed prepared to move to another topic, Mr. McCain returned to Mr. Ayers on his own. Mr. McCain seemed most agitated in that moment, saying: "I don't care about an old, washed-up terrorist. But as Senator Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship. We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with Acorn, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
He was referring to a community activist group that focuses on housing issues and has been running voter registration efforts in many states that have drawn accusations of fraud.
Mr. Obama's aides said during the day that he was preparing for the Ayers question.
"Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago. Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts," Mr. Obama said. "Ten years ago, he served and I served on a board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg."
On Acorn, Mr. Obama said, "Apparently what they have done is they were paying people to go out and register folks. And apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names. Had nothing to do with us. We were not involved."
Speaking of his involvement with the group, he said, "The only involvement I've had with Acorn was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people register at D.M.V.'s." Mr. Obama's campaign made some payments to an affiliate of Acorn.
Mr. Obama said sternly as Mr. McCain bristled, "And I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Senator McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me."
Article by JIM RUTENBERG
McCain vs. Obama Nashville, Tennessee Townhall Debate
Debate Number 2 held on October 7th
The presidential candidates locked horns over the economy and Iran in the debate held in Nashville.Barack Obama delivered his strongest ever debate performance on Tuesday night to deny John McCain a comeback in his faltering presidential campaign.
McCain, losing ground in the polls as the Republicans bear the brunt of public anger at the economic crisis, needed a game changing moment in the debate. It did not materialise.
Instead, Obama did better than expected, delivering crisper and less academic answers than he did in his earlier encounters against Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign. He also made more of an effort to connect emotionally with the experience of ordinary Americans.
The town hall debate at Nashville's Belmont University offered a mix of questions from the studio audience and the internet. It produced a more substantive airing of the candidate's views on the economic meltdown and healthcare reform than the first encounter nearly two weeks ago.
The format initially was thought to favour McCain's relaxed and humourous style.
But the Republican seemed uncomfortable, jumping up from his high chair to march towards the audience, and rambling in his answers. At one point, he referred to Obama as "that one" - a reference that caused some women in the audience to wince.
The age gap between the two men - McCain is 72 and Obama is 47 - has seldom been as obvious. The Republican, asked how the economic crisis would affect the three top priorities of his administration, appeared unable to remember what they were and jotted down a note.
That was a gift to Democrats in the spin room who variously described McCain's performance as "confused", "agitated" and "odd" - all digs at his age.
In an acknowledgment that the night had failed to shift the public focus on the economy, or inflict serious damage on Obama, a key McCain adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, accused the moderator, Tom Brokaw, of hijacking the format of the debate.
McCain will have another opportunity to reverse his fast-declining political fortunes in a debate in New York state next Wednesday.
After a halting start for Obama, the turning point came 20 minutes into the 90-minute encounter when both men were asked by a woman in the audience why anyone should trust either party since both had been responsible for the economic mess.
Obama, doing what he failed to do up to that point, personalised the economic discussion by noting that motorists in Nashville were paying $3.80 a gallon to fill up their cars.
"I understand your frustration and your cynicism, because while you've been carrying out your responsibilities - most of the people here, you've got a family budget. If less money is coming in, you end up making cuts. Maybe you don't go out to dinner as much. Maybe you put off buying a new car. That's not what happens in Washington."
Debate Number 1 - at the University of Mississippi on September 25th
Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, meeting on a debate stage for the first time last night, clashed over the root causes of the crisis gripping the nation's financial system, with McCain blaming greed and incompetent government oversight and Obama trying to pin the meltdown on a laissez-faire approach to the private sector that McCain has long championed.
Facing each other from wooden lecterns on a stark stage at the University of Mississippi, McCain and Obama sought to demonstrate economic leadership to a country that badly wants it with the markets shaky, financial companies going under nearly every day, and Washington haggling over an emergency $700 billion bailout plan to stave off a deep recession.
In their 90-minute, free-wheeling encounter, they also engaged sharply over who had shown the best judgment on the Iraq war and when it was appropriate to meet with leaders of rogue nations. McCain sought to tag Obama as naive on foreign affairs, but Obama gave as good as he got, accusing McCain of focusing myopically on Iraq and losing sight of the real culprit in the war on terror - Al Qaeda.
Though the debate was supposed to focus mainly on foreign policy, Obama and McCain spent more than a half-hour at the outset exchanging criticism of each other's records and economic plans for the country.
"This is the final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies," Obama said of the current crisis.
He linked McCain with what he said was a Republican philosophy that the "market can always solve everything and that the less regulation we have the better off we're going to be."
"We're also going to have to look at, how is it that we shredded so many regulations," Obama said, though the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed some of the deregulation measures.
McCain, seeking to avoid that stain, blamed government regulators, whom he said were asleep at the switch, and he again expressed a populist fury at Wall Street executives.
"Somehow in Washington today, and I'm afraid on Wall Street, greed is rewarded, excess is rewarded, and corruption or the failure to carry out our responsibilities is rewarded," he said.
Given the cost of the bailout, McCain floated the idea of freezing government spending except on defense, veterans, and a few other "vital" programs he did not specify.
Obama opposed a general spending freeze, saying that some programs, such as early childhood education, are worthy investments. "The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel," Obama said.
McCain went after Obama for requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in congressional earmarks, a practice McCain has long fought against. "That kind of thing is not the way to rein in runaway spending in Washington, D.C.," McCain said.
In their 90-minute, free-wheeling encounter, they also engaged sharply over who had shown the best judgment on the Iraq war and when it was appropriate to meet with leaders of rogue nations. McCain sought to tag Obama as naive on foreign affairs, but Obama gave as good as he got, accusing McCain of focusing myopically on Iraq and losing sight of the real culprit in the war on terror - Al Qaeda.
Though the debate was supposed to focus mainly on foreign policy, Obama and McCain spent more than a half-hour at the outset exchanging criticism of each other's records and economic plans for the country.
"This is the final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies," Obama said of the current crisis.
He linked McCain with what he said was a Republican philosophy that the "market can always solve everything and that the less regulation we have the better off we're going to be."
"We're also going to have to look at, how is it that we shredded so many regulations," Obama said, though the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed some of the deregulation measures.
McCain, seeking to avoid that stain, blamed government regulators, whom he said were asleep at the switch, and he again expressed a populist fury at Wall Street executives.
"Somehow in Washington today, and I'm afraid on Wall Street, greed is rewarded, excess is rewarded, and corruption or the failure to carry out our responsibilities is rewarded," he said.
Given the cost of the bailout, McCain floated the idea of freezing government spending except on defense, veterans, and a few other "vital" programs he did not specify.
Obama opposed a general spending freeze, saying that some programs, such as early childhood education, are worthy investments. "The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel," Obama said.
McCain went after Obama for requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in congressional earmarks, a practice McCain has long fought against. "That kind of thing is not the way to rein in runaway spending in Washington, D.C.," McCain said.
But Obama said it was "hard to swallow" McCain's complaints about spending when the GOP had been in power the last eight years and had increased the national debt by several trillion dollars.
"John, it's been your president - who you said you agree with 90 percent of the time - who presided over this increase in spending, this orgy of spending, and enormous deficits," the Democrat said.
The highly anticipated debate, their first head-to-head clash of the general election, was nearly eclipsed by the wrangling over the Bush administration's controversial bailout bill, which has transfixed Washington. Until late yesterday morning, it was unclear whether the debate would even happen.
McCain announced Wednesday afternoon that he would suspend his campaign and devote himself to the bailout negotiations and that he wanted the debate postponed "until we have taken action to address this crisis." But Obama rejected his offer to put the debate off, and McCain said yesterday that he would fly to Mississippi in light of what his campaign called "significant progress toward a bipartisan agreement."
Last night's debate - 48 years to the day when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon squared off in the first televised presidential debate - was the first of three between Obama and McCain scheduled over the next three weeks.
They are set to meet for a town hall-style forum at Belmont University in Nashville on Oct. 7, and for a debate on domestic issues at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., on Oct. 15. The vice presidential candidates, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, are slated to debate just once, on Thursday at Washington University in St. Louis.
The latter two-thirds of last night's debate focused on foreign policy.
On Iraq, Obama offered a strong critique of McCain's original championing of the war, which Obama opposed from the start. "When the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy," he said. "You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni, and you were wrong."
By focusing nearly all its energy on the war in Iraq, Obama said, the United States had left itself less safe. "In the meantime, [Osama] bin Laden is still out there," Obama said. "He is not captured. He is not killed. Al Qaeda is resurgent."
McCain said the next president wouldn't have to deal with the genesis of the war, but instead "how we leave, when we leave, and what we leave behind."
He also accused Obama of refusing to acknowledge the success of the surge of 30,000 additional troops last year, even likening what he called Obama's "stubbornness" to President Bush's. "We need more flexibility in a president of the United States than that," McCain said. Obama laughed incredulously.
"John, it's been your president - who you said you agree with 90 percent of the time - who presided over this increase in spending, this orgy of spending, and enormous deficits," the Democrat said.
The highly anticipated debate, their first head-to-head clash of the general election, was nearly eclipsed by the wrangling over the Bush administration's controversial bailout bill, which has transfixed Washington. Until late yesterday morning, it was unclear whether the debate would even happen.
McCain announced Wednesday afternoon that he would suspend his campaign and devote himself to the bailout negotiations and that he wanted the debate postponed "until we have taken action to address this crisis." But Obama rejected his offer to put the debate off, and McCain said yesterday that he would fly to Mississippi in light of what his campaign called "significant progress toward a bipartisan agreement."
Last night's debate - 48 years to the day when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon squared off in the first televised presidential debate - was the first of three between Obama and McCain scheduled over the next three weeks.
They are set to meet for a town hall-style forum at Belmont University in Nashville on Oct. 7, and for a debate on domestic issues at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., on Oct. 15. The vice presidential candidates, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, are slated to debate just once, on Thursday at Washington University in St. Louis.
The latter two-thirds of last night's debate focused on foreign policy.
On Iraq, Obama offered a strong critique of McCain's original championing of the war, which Obama opposed from the start. "When the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy," he said. "You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni, and you were wrong."
By focusing nearly all its energy on the war in Iraq, Obama said, the United States had left itself less safe. "In the meantime, [Osama] bin Laden is still out there," Obama said. "He is not captured. He is not killed. Al Qaeda is resurgent."
McCain said the next president wouldn't have to deal with the genesis of the war, but instead "how we leave, when we leave, and what we leave behind."
He also accused Obama of refusing to acknowledge the success of the surge of 30,000 additional troops last year, even likening what he called Obama's "stubbornness" to President Bush's. "We need more flexibility in a president of the United States than that," McCain said. Obama laughed incredulously.
John McCain vs. Barack Obama: The Best President
John McCain vs. Barack Obama: The Best President
We are tired of Washington Gridlock We are tired of partisanship We are tired of a do nothing congress We need action; action on energy independence, education, health care, the economy, government spending, and victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need a leader; someone who will take action to solve our problems and finally put the needs of the country before the needs of the parties. So who can give us what we need? Who can really unite this country? Let's examine the options Obama made speeches about out of control government spending McCain has never taken an earmark in a 25 year career. Obama made speeches about the need for Campaign Finance Reform McCain led a seven year bipartisan effort to make it happen (McCain Feingold) Obama made speeches about the need to address climate change McCain led the fight over climate change against his own party while creating legislation combat it Obama made speeches about the need for Immigration reform McCain led the bipartisan effort to make it happen at the cost of his own popularity within his party Obama made speeches about bipartisanship McCain led the2006 bipartisan Gang of 14, again against the will of his own party, to pass judges and avoiding a complete collapse of judicial confirmation rules Obama made speeches about the need for energy independence McCain leaves nothing off the table to achieve it Obama made speeches about National Service McCain served our country in a Vietnamese Prison for 5 years rejecting early release. Obama made speeches about improving America's relationships in the world McCain cleared the path for the United States and Vietnam to normalize relations. Obama made speeches about corporate responsibility McCain led the 1998 effort to finally hold the tobacco industry accountable Obama made speeches about leaving Iraq without victory McCain fought President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld to adopt a new strategy for victory, which will now allow us to leave Iraq a democratic and sovereign nation Obama made speeches calling McCain a 3rd Bush term McCain was asked by the leader of the Democratic Party to become his 2004 vice presidential candidate When the Hype passes it will be time to decide Important decisions need to be made We have heard enough speeches; we need action. Who do you trust to take real action to solve problems? Not just give them lip service Look at the records and ignore the hype
Runtime: 3:03
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McKain - His Earlier Years
We all know that Senator McKain is now aged 72.However, in his youth, he was a real heart-throb, as indicated by this photograph
John McCain was born in 1936 at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, Panama, to naval officer John S. McCain, Jr. (1911-1981) and Roberta (Wright)(b. 1912). At that time, the Panama Canal was under American control.
McCain has Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish and English ancestry. His father and his paternal grandfather both became four-star United States Navy admirals. His family, including his older sister Sandy and younger brother Joe, followed his father to various naval postings in the United States and the Pacific. Altogether, he attended about 20 schools.
In 1951, his family settled in Northern Virginia, and McCain attended Episcopal High School, a private preparatory boarding school in Alexandria. In high school, he excelled at wrestling and graduated in 1954.
Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, McCain entered the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. There, he was a friend and informal leader for many of his classmates, and sometimes stood up for people who were being bullied. He also became a lightweight boxer. McCain came into conflict with higher-ranking personnel, he did not always obey the rules, and that contributed to a low class rank despite a strong intelligence. He did well in academic subjects that interested him, such as literature and history, but studied only enough to pass subjects he struggled with, such as mathematics. McCain graduated in 1958.
John McCain served in Vietnam and his capture and subsequent imprisonment began on October 26, 1967. He was flying his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam, when his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by a missile over Hanoi. McCain fractured both arms and a leg, and then nearly drowned, when he parachuted into Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi. After he regained consciousness, some North Vietnamese pulled him ashore, then others crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted him. McCain was then transported to Hanoi's main Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton".
Although McCain was badly wounded, his captors refused to treat his injuries, instead beating and interrogating him to get information, and he was given medical care only when the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a top admiral. His status as a prisoner of war (POW) made the front pages of major newspapers.
McCain spent six weeks in the hospital while receiving marginal care. By then having lost 50 pounds (23 kg), in a chest cast, and with his hair turned white, McCain was sent to a different camp on the outskirts of Hanoi in December 1967, into a cell with two other Americans who did not expect him to live a week. In March 1968, McCain was put into solitary confinement, where he would remain for two years.
In mid-1968, McCain's father was named commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater, and McCain was offered early release. The North Vietnamese made that offer because they wanted to appear merciful for propaganda purposes, and also wanted to show other POWs that elite prisoners like McCain were willing to be treated preferentially. McCain turned down the offer of repatriation; he would only accept the offer if every man taken in before him was released as well. Such early release was prohibited by the military's Code of Conduct.
In August 1968, a program of severe torture began on McCain. He was subjected to rope bindings and repeated beatings every two hours, at the same time as he was suffering from dysentery. Further injuries led to the beginning of a suicide attempt, which was stopped by guards. After four days, McCain made an anti-American propaganda "confession". He has always felt that his statement was dishonorable, but as he would later write, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine." His injuries left him permanently incapable of raising his arms above his head. He subsequently received two to three beatings per week because of his continued refusal to sign additional statements. Other American POWs were similarly tortured and maltreated in order to extract "confessions" and propaganda statements, with many enduring even longer and worse treatment.
McCain refused to meet with various anti-war groups seeking peace in Hanoi, wanting to give neither them nor the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory. From late 1969 onward, treatment of McCain and many of the other POWs became more tolerable, while McCain continued actively to resist the camp authorities.
Altogether, McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five and a half years. He was finally released from captivity on March 14, 1973.
Obama - His Earlier Years
Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, so he is now aged 47.He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr., a black Kenyan of Nyang'oma Kogelo, Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a White American from Wichita, Kansas. His parents met while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student. They separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982. After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta until he was ten years old. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years and then back to Indonesia for her fieldwork. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995. As an adult, Obama admitted that during high school he used marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol, which he described at the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency as his greatest moral failure.
Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then worked for a year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. During his three years' as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute. In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. At the end of his first year, he was selected, based on his grades and a writing competition, as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In February 1990, in his second year, he was elected president of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the Law Review's staff of eighty editors. Obama's election as the first black president of the Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles. During his summers, he returned to Chicago where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.
The publicity from his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations. In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book. He originally planned to finish the book in one year, but it took much longer as the book evolved into a personal memoir. In order to work without interruptions, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Bali where he wrote for several months. The manuscript was finally published in mid-1995 as "Dreams from My Father".
Obama directed Illinois' Project Vote from April to October 1992, a voter registration drive with a staff of ten and seven hundred volunteers; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African-Americans in the state, and led to Crain's Chicago Business naming Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.
Beginning in 1992, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, being first classified as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004.
He also, in 1993, joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a twelve attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.
Obama was a founding member of the board of directors of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife, Michelle, became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago in early 1993. He served from 1993 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund Obama's DCP, and also from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of The Joyce Foundation. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995-2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995-1999. He also served on the board of directors of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.
State legislator, 1997-2004
Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois' 13th District, which then spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park-Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn. Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws. He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.
Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, and again in 2002. In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.
In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority. He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations. During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms. Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in November 2004 following his election to the US Senate.
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Posted March 02, 2009
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cwilson wrote...
Good lens
My only question is whether a Christian could vote for Obama. I wrote a lens on what I think at are you a Christian if you voted for Obama
You all please tell me what you think
thanks
Posted November 05, 2008
Lakota429 wrote...
Great lens! Definitely 5 stars! Thanks for all the great info!! Annie~
Posted November 04, 2008
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by Diane1
I feel that every individual should have the opportunity to live the life they want to lead. I want to progress to real freedom, and to he...
