When Barack Obama stood before a cheering crowd in his home state Illinois and announced his candidacy, no believed that this guy had any chance of winning the nomination.
Majority of Americans did not believe that the country was actually ready for an African
American president with a promise of changing the course of politics in Washington.
The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in
Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and
Harvard Law School. Obama's father left the family when Obama was two and, after further studies at Harvard University, returned to Kenya, where he died in an automobile accident nineteen years later. After his parents divorced, Obama's mother married another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From age six through ten, Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools. "I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child," Obama later recalled. "And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me."Concerned for his education, Obama's mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and to attend Hawaii's prestigious Punahou School from fifth grade through graduation from high school. While Obama was in school, she divorced
Soetoro, returned to Hawaii to study cultural anthropology at the university, and then went back to Indonesia to do field research. Living with his grandparents, Obama was a good but not outstanding student at Punahou, played varsity basketball and, as he later admitted, "dabbled in drugs and alcohol," including marijuana and cocaine. Obama left Hawaii for college, enrolling first at Occidental College in Los