Profile - Barack Obama: He is hoping Americans hungry for change will help him reach the White House, but first he has to beat Hillary Clinton, who has strong support among black voters, writes Denis Staunton.
When US senators declare that they are running for president, they usually break the news at a formal press conference in the Capitol or on one of the more serious Sunday morning political talk shows. Barack Obama's announcement this week that he is taking the first step towards a presidential bid came instead on a webcast to supporters, with the candidate dressed casually in a white, open-necked shirt and dark blazer.
"I am struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics. The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put us in a precarious place," he said.
Obama's hope of winning the Democratic nomination depends on the depth of the hunger for change among voters and his capacity to create an organisation to rival that of the party's front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
His announcement has already had a dramatic impact on the Democratic race, forcing Clinton's team to revise its campaign strategy and bring forward her own declaration, which could come as early as this weekend.
Until Obama joined the race, Clinton's advantage over other Democratic contenders in terms of name recognition, political organisation and fundraising appeared unassailable. Her confidence allowed her to project an increasingly moderate image designed to appeal to voters in the presidential election itself, even if it alienated some Democratic primary voters.
Obama's announcement this week brings a new and unpredictable element into the race, not least because he is the first ever African-American candidate with a credible chance of being elected president. His personal charisma, inspirational eloquence and sheer ease in his own skin serve to highlight Clinton's perceived weaknesses, notably her buttoned-up manner and cautious political style.
A strong Obama campaign could prove fatal to former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who has worked assiduously since 2004 to position himself as the strongest left-wing alternative to Clinton. Obama's entry is just the latest piece of ill fortune to hit Edwards, who launched his campaign in New Orleans just after Christmas. Anticipating generous media coverage in what is often a slow news week, Edwards instead found himself pushed off the front pages by the deaths of former president Gerald Ford, "Godfather of Soul" James Brown and former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
THE SURGE OFpopularity that led to this week's announcement started building last September, after Obama returned from a well-reported visit to Africa. A national tour to promote his latest book, The Audacity of Hope, boosted his profile as he campaigned for Democrats in November's congressional elections, becoming the most sought-after speaker at rallies throughout the country.
In December, he drew unprecedented crowds during his first visit to New Hampshire, where the first Democratic primary will be held early next year. Obama's celebrity status was confirmed not just by appearances on Oprahand The Tonight Showwith Jay Leno, but by the publication in Peoplemagazine last week of a paparazzo photograph of the 45-year-old senator in a bathing suit.
Obama has been tipped for greatness since 1990, when he became the first African-American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. As an Illinois state senator from 1996 until he entered the US senate in 2004, he developed a liberal legislative record and established a valuable relationship with Chicago's most powerful political family, the Daleys.
In his memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama remarks on the dramatic changes in American society since his Kenyan father met his mother, a white woman from Kansas.
"In 1960, the year that my parents were married, miscegenation was still described as a felony in over half the states in the Union. In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the most sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother's predicament into a back-alley abortion," he writes.
Born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961, Obama remembers seeing his father only once, when he was 10 years old. When his son was just two, Barack Hussein Obama Sr left for Harvard and later returned to Kenya, where he died in a car accident in 1982.
Obama's mother Ann then married Lolo Soetoro, a Muslim student from Indonesia, and the family moved to Jakarta for a few years, where Obama attended Muslim and Catholic schools. At 10, Obama returned to Hawaii under the care of his grandparents and later his mother, and it was there, at an American school, that he first became conscious of the role of race in the US.
At high school and later at Occidental College in California, he used marijuana and cocaine as he struggled with his identity as a middle-class, mixed-race man in the US. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though - Micky, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that . . . Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," he writes.
OBAMA'S MEMOIR WASpublished in 1995, long before he entered politics, and some political commentators believe its candour could prove a liability in a presidential campaign. His aides are confident that, by introducing the issue of drug use himself, Obama has robbed the revelation of its news value, and they are more concerned about the fact that he remains a cigarette smoker.
Obama's immediate challenge is to build up a national organisation capable of raising tens of millions of dollars over the next year and of taking on the formidable political machine Clinton and her husband have created over the past 15 years.
Edwards, meanwhile, has visited Iowa, where the first Democratic caucus is held, dozens of times, and has developed close ties with some trade unions, a fertile source of funds and volunteers.
A USA Today/Gallup poll this week showed that Clinton retains an edge over Obama among African-Americans, with 39 per cent support compared to his 31 per cent. Black voters account for just 10 per cent of the general population but account for a quarter of Democratic voters and almost half the voters in many Democratic primaries.
Obama cannot take black support for granted, not least because President Bill Clinton was such a beloved figure among African-Americans, with Toni Morrison describing Clinton as "the first black president".
Although only a handful of Americans admit to pollsters that they would refuse to vote for a candidate because of his colour, racial prejudice remains a potent force in American politics, as Harold Ford Jr discovered in Tennessee last November. The young African-American congressman narrowly lost a Senate race after Republicans ran a television ad that depicted a young white woman suggesting a sexual tryst with Ford.
OBAMA'S UNUSUAL BACKGROUNDand his conciliatory rhetoric on racial issues is reassuring to many white voters, but he remains the only African-American in the US senate and only the third black senator since Reconstruction.
As an early opponent of the Iraq war who did not have to vote on the congressional authorisation to go to war, Obama hopes to win support from Democrats who are disappointed by Clinton's cautious stance. In fact, their positions on the war are now almost identical, with both opposing President George W Bush's troop build-up but opposing an immediate withdrawal.
Edwards has outflanked both by calling on Congress to refuse to fund the troop build-up and to use its power of the purse to end the war.
Obama's most formidable challenge will be to persuade voters that, after just two years as a senator, he has the necessary experience to lead the US in turbulent times. His chief aide, David Axelrod, said this week that presidential campaigns are tough enough to test any candidate's qualifications for the job.
"People get to see how you handle pressure and how you react to complicated questions. It's an imperfect and sometimes maddening system, but at the end of the day it works, because you have to be tough and smart and skilled to survive that process," he said.
Axelrod argues that Obama has already proved his sound judgement, with one decision that sets him apart from other Democratic presidential candidates - his opposition from the start to the war in Iraq. "However many grey hairs he has, he managed to get it right on Iraq," Axelrod said.
The Obama File
Who is he?Democratic senator for Illinois
Why is he in the news?Took first step this week in a campaign for president in 2008
Most appealing characteristic: Candour
Least appealing characteristic: Inexperience
Most likely to say: "I was against the war from the start"
Least likely to say:"I didn't inhale"