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“My presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” Barack Obama began.
“I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story … and that, in no other country on Earth, is my story even possible.”
It was the speech that launched him. Obama was an Illinois assembly member seeking his first term in the U.S. Senate, given a shot at the national stage when John Kerry asked him to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
He had those in the crowd on their feet, cheering wildly, even as many of them – even as many of us – wondered: Who is this guy?
A “skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too,” he told us then.
He touched on the many chapters of his life, as familiar to us now as his rallying cry for change.
There was the black father, also named Barack, who grew up herding goats in Kenya. He traveled on scholarship to attend the University of Hawaii and there, in a Russian language class, met 18-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, the white daughter of Kansas-bred parents.
Barack (“blessed” in Arabic) was born on Aug. 4, 1961. But his parents' marriage didn't last, and his father would be absent for all but a month of the boy's life. His mother, a free-spirited anthropologist passionate about helping women, raised him. Obama once wrote: “What is best in me I owe to her.”
We would learn of the international upbringing, four years spent living in Indonesia after his mother remarried and brought her son to a Third World country, at once exotic and enlightening. Young Barack had a pet monkey, but he also saw poverty and disease, and his eyes were opened to a new world view.
That world view didn't ease Obama's own struggle with his biracial identity. He was among the few black students at his Honolulu high school, where he was known as “Barry” and met with others for a weekly “ethnic corner” discussion. He lived then with his maternal grandparents, including Madelyn Dunham, the grandmother he called “Toot.”
In a remarkable dissertation on race earlier this year, a speech intended to rebuke the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's remarks regarding the nation's racial divide, Obama referred to his “white grandmother” as the woman who helped raise him, sacrificed for him and loved him, but who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street and “who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Dunham died Sunday at age 86. His father died in a car crash in 1982, his mother of ovarian cancer in 1995. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, lives in Hawaii and teaches history.
The compelling life story that helped propel Obama from community organizer to celebrity politician emerged initially in 1990, after he was elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. After Harvard, Obama rejected high-powered job offers, joining a small civil rights firm back in Chicago. He married Michelle Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School grad who served as his adviser during a summer internship at a Chicago law firm. They have two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.
The jump into politics came in 1996, when Obama won an Illinois Senate seat. He helped change laws governing the death penalty, ethics and racial profiling, and he won tax credits for the working poor. But he failed in his campaign for universal health care. He failed, too, in a 2000 bid for a U.S. House seat.
Then came 2004 and the opportunity to run for U.S. Senate – and to introduce himself to his fellow Americans.
He won the election, becoming only the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. But it was “The Speech” that made him a rock star. Talk of a presidential run began even before his first day in Washington. At first, he demurred.
But last year, Obama returned to Illinois to announce his candidacy for president.
He toppled Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, a historic candidate in her own right. He deflected criticism of his lack of experience. And he crossed party lines, earning the backing of former Republican governors and senators and retired Gen. Colin Powell, President Bush's first secretary of state.
“Yes, we can!” his supporters chanted throughout the campaign.
And somehow, he did.
On Jan. 20, 47-year-old Barack Obama will take to another stage, the west front of the U.S. Capitol, to recite the oath of the nation's highest office.
The rock star will be known the world over as Mr. President.
And the skinny kid will take his place in history, proving that unlikely as it may have all been – it was, indeed, possible.
