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FinalCall.com News
Analysis, Statements and Briefs
Barack H. Obama sworn in as 44th U.S. President
By Askia Muhammad
Senior Correspondent
Updated Jan 21, 2009 - 12:18:00 PM
WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - On January 20, Barack Obama’s improbable path to the presidency of the United States of America was completed.
The son of a Black man from Kenya and a White woman from Kansas whose childhood found him places like Hawaii and Indonesia, whose educational career carried him to Occidental College, Harvard University and Columbia. His professional career found him as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and his career as an activist brought him to the tough gritty streets of the south side of Chicago. Now, this seemingly unlikely path has taken him to The White House in Washington D.C.
While at Harvard, he became the first Black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, a foreshadowing of things to come. His political career began in 1996, when Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate representing the 13th district of Illinois. He was reelected in 1998, but in 1999, he chose to step out and make a run for Congress.
In 2000, Barack lost his bid for the Illinois House of Representatives to veteran Bobby L. Rush, however, the loss may have been a blessing in disguise. Mr. Obama became motivated to make more connections and continue to strive harder to achieve his goal. In 2002, he was reelected to the Illinois state senate.
On Oct. 2, 2002 in downtown Chicago, when Obama announced his opposition to the Iraq War, it would be a move that defined him as a sober minded rational thinking leader, and would prove to be an important factor in gaining support for a future run at the presidency.
On July 27, 2004, Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts during the Kerry/Edwards campaign.
“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States, and yes we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America,” said Mr. Obama.
Sen. Kerry failed to win the presidency, however, many political observers indicated that on that night, a political star had been born as Mr. Obama delivered words that would lay the base for his future run for the presidency.
On Nov. 2, 2004, Barack Obama defeated former presidential candidate and lecturer Alan Keyes who ran as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Mr. Keyes attempted to challenge Barack Obama’s morality as well as his cultural heritage, but none of those strategies proved effective as Barack Obama trounced his Republican opponent by a margin of 70 per-cent to 27 percent to become the U.S. Senator from Illinois and only the fifth Black senator in U.S. history.
In 2006, he won a Grammy for “Best Spoken Word Album” for “Dreams of My Father.” October of 2006, Barack Obama released the book “The Audacity of Hope,” the title derived from a sermon delivered by his mentor and former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The audio version of “The Audacity of Hope” won him a second Grammy in the same category in 2008 and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, French and Croatian.
On February 10, 2007, on a cold, snowy day, on the steps in the shadow of the Old Illinois State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln once delivered speeches over 140 years ago, accompanied by his wife and two daughters, Barack Obama announced formally that he would run for president of the United States.
“It was here, in Springfield, where North, South, East and West come together that I was reminded of the essential decency of the American people—where I came to believe that through this decency, we can build a more hopeful America. And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States,” said Mr. Obama.
“I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness—a certain audacity—to this announcement. I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.”
As a result of the high level of serious threats against his life, Barack Obama was assigned U.S. Secret Service protection in May 2007—the earliest ever for a presidential candidate event.
On December 8, 2007, Barack Obama received an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey. The endorsement was somewhat controversial because many White women felt at the time that Ms. Winfrey should place her considerable support—financial and otherwise—behind the first viable female candidate for president of the United States, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
On January 3, 2008, Barack Obama defeated Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Edwards in the Iowa caucuses—a stunning victory in the first 2008 Democratic nominating contest.
“They said this day would never come,” Mr. Obama said in his Iowa victory speech. “They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.”
His victory was significant because Iowa had a 95 percent White population, and at that time, Sen. Clinton and her husband, Pres. Bill Clinton, had launched a public relations offensive attempting to place Mr. Obama in “Black candidate” category, implying that he could not draw support from Whites nationwide. His victory demonstrated that White people of all educational and income demographics were willing to support him, but challenges still remained.
Super Tuesday
Dubbed “Super Tuesday” in the political world, February 5, 2008 represented a date in which 20 state primaries and caucuses were scheduled. Many pundits predicted that the air of “inevitability” surrounding the presidential campaign of Sen. Clinton would finally manifest itself.
Mr. Obama won 13 states to Sen. Clinton’s 10, and gained 847 delegates to her 834. This was monumental because many political pundits began to see that Mr. Obama was generating a considerable groundswell of support and not only was still in the race—he was leading—at a point where he was supposed to have been defeated.
At that point, Barack Obama’s campaign really began to pick up steam, as he put together an impressive streak of 12 primary victories.
On March 18, 2008, after words taken out of context and lifted from sermons delivered by Pastor Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ began to be heavily circulated in the media, Mr. Obama delivered a speech on race titled “A More Perfect Union” in Philadelphia, Pa. At that time, Mr. Obama defended Rev.Wright and spoke to the very real
racial divide that exists in the United States.
“On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend White and Black alike,” said Mr. Obama. “I can no more disown him (Rev. Wright) than I can disown the Black community. I can no more disown him than I can my White grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
On April 28, 2008 Rev. Jeremiah Wright spoke at the National Press Club and defended himself, his comments that had been the source of so much controversy as well as the Black faith tradition. The very next day, on April 29, Mr. Obama announced that he was leaving Trinity United Church of Christ and wrote a letter to the current pastor, Rev. Otis Moss III stating that he and his family chose to leave the church as a result of relations being “strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own views.”
After more primary victories, including a pivotal victory in North Carolina, on June 3, 2008—after a celebratory fist bump with his wife Michelle—Mr. Obama stood before the world in St. Paul, MN and said, “Tonight, we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another—a journey that will bring a new and better day to America,” Mr. Obama told his supporters. “Because of you, tonight I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America,” he told the crowd.
On July 24, 2008 Mr. Obama spoke to 200,000 in a speech in Berlin, Germany. Mr. Obama began to look more and more presidential and support continued to grow.
Just a few days prior to the beginning of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Mr. Obama announced Sen. Joe Biden from Delaware as his Vice-presidential running-mate.
On August 28, 2008, in a historic moment viewed around the globe, Mr. Obama stood before 80,000 at INVESCO Field in Denver as he officially accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States.
“With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States,” said Mr. Obama on the exact day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 45 years prior delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “We are here because we love this great country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On Nov. 4, we must stand up and say eight is enough!”
Mr. Obama’s entire acceptance speech was carried live on 10 TV networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo. According to Nielsen Ratings, it was viewed by 38.4 million people, and that total did not even include those watching via C-SPAN, which does not keep viewership numbers, nor did it include those viewing on PBS.
The stage had been set for him to square off against his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
After a debate held at the University of Mississippi in Oxford on September 26; another in Nashville, Tennessee on October 7; and another on October 15 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, Mr. Obama held his own and poll numbers continued to rise.
On October 19, 2008, former Secretary of State Colin Powell came out in support of Mr. Obama, and also that month, the Obama campaign announced a record fundraising amount of $150 million.
On October 29, in an unprecedented move, Mr. Obama purchased primetime television spots to air a 30-minute show aimed at further connecting him with the people.
On Nov. 4, 2008, Mr. Barack Obama walked out on the stage at Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois after defeating Sen. John McCain by a margin on 365 to 173 in the Electoral College, and by a margin of close to 10-million popular votes.
On January 20, 2009 Mr. Obama took the Oath of Office, with his hand on the Bible and millions viewing worldwide, to become the 44th President of the United States of America.
