United States Senator Barack Obama stood before a cheering crowd in his home state of Illinois on Feb. 8 and announced he will seek the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.
To chants of “Obama! Obama!,” he told the crowd, “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.”
If 45-year-old Obama were to be elected, he would become the nation’s first African-American president. Obama is the son of a black Kenyan father and white American mother from Kansas. The senator acknowledged that he hasn’t been in Washington long, but said he is familiar enough with the city’s political maneuverings to understand that change is in order.
He is considered to be the outsider candidate, as opposed to Hillary who is viewed by many as the insider candidate.
“I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness in this – a certain audacity – to this announcement,” Obama said. “I know that 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.
Prior to his keynote speech in the 2004 Democratic National Convention, most Americans have never heard of Barack Obama. Who is Barack Obama?
Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois. According to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, he is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history and the only African American currently serving in the U.S. Senate. He is a candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. He was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996. Four years later, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Obama won reelection to the state senate in 2002, running unopposed. As early as 2002, he was a critic of the proposed Iraq War, declaring in a television interview that he would have voted against the Iraq Resolution.
In 2004 he ran for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. Midway through the campaign, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and became a nationally known political figure. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with a landslide 70% of the vote, he defeated Alan keys in the race for the U.S. Senate. He attended Harvard and Columbia universities and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He entered politics in Illinois, where he practiced civil rights law and taught at the University of Chicago Law School.
Obama formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007. Recent opinion polls rank him as the second most popular choice among Democratic voters for their party’s nomination, after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.