YES I CAN

"As long as I live, I will never forget that in one other country on Earth is my story even possible."
Never in the history of the world has the election of a President, let alone the President of the United States of America caused as much excitement and joy in the world. Kenya declared 5 November a national holiday, the birthplace of his father, his roots in Africa. The first African man to become president of the most powerful nation in the world.
Barack Hussein Obama, born 4 August 1961 in Honolulu (Hawaii), is the first black person to be nominated by a political party to be their candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America. Barack Obama is a man who stands out from the rest. He has been a Senator of Illinois since 2005.

He first became noticed nationally when he gave the principal speech at the democratic convention in 2004, the same year when he was elected to become senator to represent Illinois in Congress. Four years later he had become the front runner for his party in the race for the investiture in the White House, having beaten the old hands in the party who were expected to win the nomination.

A speaker with a remarkable style and a master in providing emotive speeches that put across his message, Barack Obama manages to raise enthusiasm in young people. He has used the internet to provide a solid backing to his campaign. Barack Obama is a real 21st Century candidate. He possesses the knowledge and skills necessary to understand the electoral system and which is enabling to get up out of the traditional trenches and throughout the long five months of the electoral campaign with its sometimes brutal conflicts, he managed to eliminate his principal rival senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. During the whole of his campaign, he has made the American people understand that the election is about voting for a man and his ideas and not for a black or a white.
"There is not a liberal America or a Conservator America – there is the United States of America” he declared in his speech to the Democratic Congress in 2004.

“There is not a black America and a white America and a Latino American America or an Asian America; there is the United States of America… we form a single people, we all take our allegiance to the same flag, we all strive to ensure the well being of the United States of America”.

Barack Obama has become a pioneer in politics. His candidacy came at just the moment when a great number of Americans felt that the time had come for a change . Son of a black father who came from Kenya. Barack Obama senior was a brilliant economist and his mother White from Kansas in the traditional heartland of America (Stanley Ann Dunham). His father was from the Luo tribe had been raised under the Muslim religion but had lapsed into atheism. His mother was a Christian. From his grandmother (his mother’s mother, Barack has Cherokee blood). Barack’s parents met in Honolulu whilst doing their studies and got married in 1960.
In 1963, Barack senior was accepted into the University of Harvard. In the same year his parents separated and divorced. After his brilliant studies Barack senior left his family and went back to live in Kenya where he founded a new family. Barack junior wrote a book about this “the Dreams from my Father: a story of race and inheritance”.
Barack Obama’s father went on to become a minister in the Kenyan government., where he was a well known economist in Jomo Kenyatta’s government, however he was often opposed to his President and was finally sacked and he sunk into a world of alcohol. He died in a car accident in 1982. Barack only saw his father one more time.
At the age of six, he followed his mother who was remarried with an Indonesian student (Lolo Soetoro), to Djakarta (Indonesia), where he spent four years from 1967 to 1971 and where his half-sister was born. At the age of ten, he asked to live with his grand-parents in Hawaii in order to go to school at Punahou College. The school tended to be the reserve of an elite American white.
His mother separated from Lolo Soetoro and his sister and mother joined him in Hawaii. His Grandmother Madelyn Dunham who brought him up died on the eve of his election on 3 November 2008 at the age of 86. She had voted in advance and her dying hope was that her grandson could fulfil his ambition and become he who he has become.
Barack left school in 1979  and studied for two years at the Occidental school of California, before going to Columbia University in New York in 1981, where he graduated  He went to Chicago and got a job in an accountancy company. However his social conscious got the better of him and he left his job to work as a social worker.
He converted to the Christian religion and left his well paid job to work among the down and out in the poorest areas of Chicago. He took up the challenge against inequality, racial discrimination and the battle for the rights of Afro-American rights.
In 1988 he went to Harvard and came out with a doctorate in law with the mention “magna cum laude”. From 1991 to 2005, Barack Obama worked as the joint manager of an important firm of lawyers specialized in civic rights. During this time he was also joint editor of the famous Harvard Law Review and a speaker in constitutional rights at the University of Chicago. In 1990 when he became the first editor of the Harvard Law Review he beat 18 other candidates for the post.
In 1992 he married Michelle Robinson, a fellow lawyer who he had met at the end of his studies. They have two daughters Malia Ann, born in 1999, and Natasha, born in 2001. Michelle Robinson-Obama, comes from a black working class family from the south side of Chicago. With qualifications from Princeton and Harvard, she is a brilliant lawyer responsible for, amongst other things, the community and external relations of the University hospital of Chicago. As an important and active member of the local Democratic Party, she has helped her husband get close to the politic ties of the Mayor’s office in Chicago and has worked hard on his election campaign.
The 1990’s herald Barack’s commitment to politics. In 1992 Barack Obama worked hard to support Bill Clinton’s election to the Presidency of the United States, initially, during the primaries and then in his campaign against George H.W. Bush. He also participated in the election for the senator of Illinois Carol Moseley-Braun.
Inspired by Gandhi’s struggles, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, he actively defends the rights of blacks, poor people, gays, students and the environment and is more generally opposed to the moral order of the neo conservatives. He has involved himself in issues such as the death penalty, Aids, Abortion rights and social justice. In 1995 he published his autobiography in 1995, ‘Dreams from My Fathers’ in which he tells us the story of his life from his childhood and the search for his father, of being of mixed race and being seen as a Black by White America. His mother died in 1995 from a cancer in the ovaries.
Barack Obama began his political career in 1996 when he was elected to the Senate of Illinois. He was named president of the health committee and worked hard to get a law passed that would give healthcare to those with little means. In 2000 he proposed his candidature to the Representatives Committee, however he lost. In 2003, he was one of the rare Americans to participate in the pacifist demonstrations against the war in Iraq. In July 2004, his charisma, his eloquence and the content of his speeches made him stand out from the America of George Bush and he was a star performer at the Democratic Convention which nominated John Kerry as candidate for the presidential elections of 2004. On the 2nd of November of the same year he was elected to become Senator for Illinois in Congress.  With 70% of the vote over his Republican adversary Barack Obama was elected and became the only Black member of the Senate and only the third to ever have a place in the Senate.
His political success enabled him to win a contract with an editor and he wrote three books, including "The Audacity of Hope” and “Thoughts of reclaiming the American Dream”.
As the Republican analyst pointed out, one of Barack Obama’s talents has been to avoid taking up the racial issue as black against white. Throughout his career he has sought to identify his cause as defending the diversity and wealth of America, thereby identifying himself with John Kennedy.
Barack Obama declared that he was a candidate for the presidential investiture on 9 February 2008. On 3 June he was voted in to represent the Democratic Party as their official candidate, beating Hillary Clinton and the rest of the field. He managed to rally round him personalities such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, the actors George Clooney, Matt Damon, Will Smith, Ben Affleck, Robert De Niro, the actresses Halle Berry, Sophia Bush and Scarlett Johansson,  the rappers Nas, Will.I.am and later Colin Powell,  Toni Morrison,  Oprah Winfrey, John Kerry, Nicole Scherzinger.
Barack Obama went on to run his presidential election campaign by seeking to get everyone to work together, to encourage everyone rich or poor to give what they wished and what they could? Never has as much money been raised, never has a candidate refused national funding. With the internet battle won, with speeches spoken without notes and an army of supporters, the Barack machine made an inevitable march that resulted in the result of 4 November.
The world waits with baited breath for the Obama effect to touch the world, will his presidency be the meeting of the third world with the west, will Africa become a continent that merits respect and is taken seriously, will the world change or what?