Barack Obama - An American Life (2008-11-10 22:35:00)
标签： 杂谈
Barack Obama - An American Life
WPD515 11/07/2008
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Barack Obama’s unique biography and successful campaign for the U.S. presidency have opened a new chapter in U.S. politics.
President Obama, the first African-American president of the United States, brings a life story unlike that of any previous U.S. leader. The biracial son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from the American heartland, Obama shot to national prominence with a well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the same year he was elected to the U.S. Senate from the state of Illinois. Just four years later, he rose to the top of a field crowded with Democratic heavyweights to clinch his party’s nomination for the White House and win the presidential election against Republican candidate Senator John McCain.
With a polished speaking style, a command of eloquent and uplifting rhetoric, the ability to inspire the enthusiasm of young voters, and the sophisticated use of the Internet as a campaign tool, Obama was very much a 21st-century candidate. In his campaign, Obama stressed two overarching themes: changing Washington’s traditional way of conducting the nation’s business and invoking Americans of diverse ideological, social, and racial backgrounds to unite for the common good.
“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America,” Obama said in his address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
The Early Years
Obama’s parents came from vastly different backgrounds. His mother, Ann Dunham, was born and raised in small-town Kansas. After her family moved to the Hawaiian Islands, she met Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan scholarship student enrolled at the University of Hawaii. The two married in 1959, and on August 4, 1961, Barack Obama Jr. was born in Honolulu. Two years later the senior Obama left his new family, first for graduate study at Harvard and then for a job as a government economist back in Kenya. The young Obama met his father again only once, at age 10.
When Obama was six, his mother remarried, this time to an Indonesian oil executive. The family moved to Indonesia, and Obama spent four years attending school in the capital city of Jakarta. He eventually returned to Hawaii and went to high school there while living with his maternal grandparents.
In his first book, Dreams from My Father, Obama describes this period of his life as having more than the usual share of adolescent turmoil, as he struggled to make sense of a biracial heritage then still relatively uncommon in the United States. Being rooted in both black culture and white culture may have helped give Obama the expansive vision he brought to politics years later, one that understands many points of view.
“Barack has an incredible ability to synthesize seemingly contradictory realities and make them coherent,” his law school classmate Cassandra Butts told New Yorker magazine writer Larissa MacFarquhar. “It comes from going from a home where white people are nurturing you, and then you go out into the world and you’re seen as a black person.”
Obama left Hawaii to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He later moved to New York City and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University in 1983. In a speech given in 2008, Obama described his thinking at the time: “ … by the time I graduated from college, I was possessed with a crazy idea — that I would work at a grassroots level to bring about change.”
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