Conservative talk radio keep asking the question, who is Barack Obama?  What is this guy all about?  They depict a guy that no one can really relate to with a suspicious background.  Their argument works really well on their long time listeners who would rarely question anything they say anyway.  They spend four hours or more a day preaching to the same choir and asking “who is this Barack guy?” even though he has two book out about his life: “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” and “Barack Obama: Audacity of Hope”.  He also has a two year voting record that goes back to early 2005.   http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=9490

His life was influenced by his highly academic, free spirited, liberal mother.  And he is clearly a very liberal candidate who nearly always votes along Democratic Party lines.  The conservative propaganda is more than enough to scare the far right into submission, but may not be enough to convince the masses of voting independents.

Barack’s life is a reflection of his values. I am not saying that those values are good or bad.  I personally agree with some and disagree with others.

One thing his professional life shows is his amazing ability to raise money.  He did it when he was a community organizer in Chicago.  As the director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000.

Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapiolani Medical Center^{[citation needed]} in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr., a Black Kenyan of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a White American from Wichita, Kansas. His parents met while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student.^[4] They separated when he was two years old and later divorced.^[5] Obama’s father returned to Kenya and saw him only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.^[6] After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro’s home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta until he was ten years old. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.^[7] Obama’s mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years and then back to Indonesia for her fieldwork. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995.^[8]

Following high school, Barack Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years.^[9] He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations.^[10] Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then worked for a year at the Business International Corporation^[11] and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.^[12][13]

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago’s far South Side.^[12][14] During his three years as the DCP’s director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.^[15] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.^[16] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks then Kenya for five weeks where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.^[17]

Barack Obama v • d • e

Early life and career · (Family · Memoir) Illinois Senate career U.S. Senate career Presidential primaries · Obama–Biden 2008 Policy positions · Cultural and political image

Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988 and at the end of his first year was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review based on his grades and a writing competition.^[18] In his second year he was elected president of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the law review’s staff of 80 editors.^[19] Obama’s election in February 1990 as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles.^[19] He graduated with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991 and returned to Chicago where he had worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.^[18][20]

– Wiki