“America’s faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and infl uence, that we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions.

“And that’s what we have to change first.”

-- BARACK OBAMA
Announcement of Candidacy, February 10, 2007

Working hard, overcoming the odds.

Barack Obama knows what it is like to overcome long odds. Obama’s mother, from Kansas, and father, a foreign student from Kenya, divorced when he was just 2 years old. When his mother remarried, he lived in Indonesia for 4 years, and then moved back to his birth place in Hawaii to be raised by his grandparents.

They didn’t have a lot of money, but Obama earned scholarships, took out loans, and graduated from Columbia University. It was the start of an extraordinary life.

Putting the Needs of Working Americans First.

Barack Obama chose to work as a church-based community organizer in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood devastated by steel layoff s. After 3 years of service to the community, Obama decided to go to law school to learn how to make a bigger impact in public service. After graduating from Harvard Law School, where he was elected as the fi rst African-American President of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama chose a life of public service.

Obama turned down lucrative law jobs to lead a voter registration drive in Chicago.

Later, he joined a small employment and civil rights law fi rm and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for 10 years.

The Courage to Speak Out, Even When It’s Difficult.

Barack Obama believes America needs a president who has the courage to be candid and honest about the challenges we face, even when it’s politically unpopular.

That’s why he went to Detroit to tell automakers that we must have higher mileage standards on cars to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce dangerous climate-changing emissions, even though automakers have fiercely resisted mileage standards for decades.

It’s why he went to Wall Street to tell executives that they had to do what was right for America, not just what’s right for their business and that improving the lives of their workers was right for America.

It’s why as U.S. Senator he passed sweeping restrictions on lobbyists that require disclosure of who they are raising money from and which politicians they are giving it to, even though leaders of both parties warned him not to rock the boat.

It’s why he had the courage and judgment to speak out against the war in Iraq when it wasn’t popular to do so and when so many others, including Democrats, failed to ask the tough questions and went along with the Bush-Cheney plan to invade Iraq.

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Change We Can Believe in!

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America.

“Theere is not a Black America, and a White America, a Latino America, an 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 the 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 in our libraries in the red states.

“We coach little league in the blue states, and yes, we have 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.”

– BARACK OBAMA
Democratic National Convention, Keynote Address, July 27, 2004

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