When a few weeks ago Barack Obama returned to his childhood island for a week-long family holiday, nobody would have thought that the fellow islanders would be giving a reception to by far the most famous Hawaiin in history.
Half his family has roots in the centre of the heartland Kansas. His largely absent father came from a distant land Kenya and travelled to Hawaii to continue his studies. Obama, born in Honolulu, grew up among other places in Jakarta when his family moved to Indonesia after his mother divorced his father and remarried an Indonesian student. After some years they returned to the United States and he lived with his maternal grandparents. This stamps Obama with two indelible American identities the immigrant dreams and heartland spirit.
He went on to study law at Harvard University and became a community organiser with low income residents in Chicago. When he was 33 he wrote his autobiography, Dreams From My Father dealing greatly with his search for an identity. The Audacity Of Hope written when he had become a senator is a study in American politics.
Besides his ability to write like a professional novelist, he is also a good speaker and his deliveries transcend his listeners. He came to the forefront of national politics when he delivered a keynote speech at the July 2004 Democratic Convention which virtually assured his national presence. Later the three-term Illinois state legislator won the race to become a United States senator. Little more than two years later, Obama declared himself a candidate for president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton was already being acclaimed as the inevitable nominee and she was already enjoying massive double digit advantage in the polls, however this did not deter Obama from joining the race having realised at an early age that he had to fight his way against every conceivable disadvantage. Taking on the Clinton dynasty and their Washington connections seemed an insurmountable feat to anyone except Barack Obama.
His campaign focused on a plan based on delegates and caucuses conceding that the Clintons controlled much of the rest. He was the first to create a fully fledged social networking site launching his own social network which he called Myobama.com. The site invites supporters to create a profile, blog their campaign experiences, plan and attend events, find other supporters, and help raise funds for the campaign. Obama already has an official presence on Facebook and You Tube and also an unofficial page on Myspace. These technological tools permitted Obama to raise millions of dollars through a very large number of small contributions throughout the whole United States. This helped his campaign in no small measure.The campaign for the nomination was not plain sailing and Obama had to take several blows including his denounciation of his friend and pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago Rev Jeremiah Wright. In a speech written by himself Obama used Wright’s anger as a way to explain racial grievances of both white and black Americans. There were the losses in Texas and Ohio primaries indicating that Obama was not making inroads with the white blue-collar workers, Hispanics and older voters who formed the base for Clinton. Then during a San Francisco fundraiser he made some comments suggesting working class people are bitter about their economic circumstances and “cling to guns and religion” as a result. Clinton pounded him for these remarks, calling him “elitist and divisive.” Nonetheless the narrow delegate win which his campaign had predicted came slowly, carefully and unmistakably.
His strategic skills were again manifest in the way he handled the Clintons during the Democratic convention knowing too well that they dominated the party that now he was leading.
They not only demanded respect and deference but also put in play the 18 million votes that Clinton had amassed during the primaries. He allowed the Clinton name to be placed in at the convention, gave her a prime-time speaking slot and another to her husband the following day.
What’s next? Obama seems to have stalled in the polls and has never been over the 50 per cent threshold when all indicators show that the vast majority of Americans are not at all happy with the present government and are calling for a change.
Why is it that Obama is leading his opponent by only a few percentage points? It seems that a considerable number of voters are still harbouring hesitations of various degrees about Obama. Is he too elitist yet too popular, too inexperienced yet too much popular abroad, too radical yet too conservative in certain aspects?
In the coming weeks left before the final countdown Obama has to redraw the narrative, redescribe this moment in history and persuade the doubtful that he is the one to lead America. If America is not ready to elect Obama, a black man, now then it will take history another fifty years before such a possibility will arise.
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