CNN: Barack Obama: A meteoric rise
By Scott J. Anderson
(CNN) -- When Sen. Barack Obama accepts his party's presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, he will have experienced one of the most rapid -- and unexpected -- ascents in American political history.
Obama, an Illinois Democrat, burst onto the national stage in 2004, when he electrified the convention with a keynote address that called for the end of the divisive politics that have pitted Americans against each other. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There's not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America," Obama told the delegates.
It was a message Obama may have been uniquely able to deliver, because he has straddled divisions his entire life....
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Obama's career as a politician began in 1996, when he was elected unopposed to the Illinois state Senate. While in office, he helped pass welfare reform legislation, a state earned-income tax credit, ethics reform and a bill requiring the videotaping of police interrogations and confessions in murder cases.
Obama first took a stab at national politics when he challenged Rep. Bobby Rush, a Chicago Democrat and a former Black Panther, in 2000. Obama lost badly to Rush in the Democratic primary, but, four years later, he made a second attempt to be elected to Congress, running as the Democratic candidate from Illinois for the U.S. Senate. After his speech at the national convention and scandals involving his Republican challenger, Obama won by a wide margin and arrived in Washington with national prominence, a rarity for a freshman senator. He was often mentioned as a future presidential nominee.
That White House bid came much sooner than many had expected. After just three years in the Senate, Obama formed a presidential exploratory committee in January 2007 and one month later launched his presidential campaign on the steps of the old Statehouse in Springfield, Illinois. At the time, Obama's chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination appeared to be a long shot....
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It was an outcome that few would have predicted when the voting began in January, and, as the Democrats gather in Denver, they will be making history by naming Obama the first African-American nominee of a major party.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/18/revealed.obama.profile/index.html
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