Reply #3: Here is the original New Yorker article - 5/31/2004 [View All]

[Pirate Smile]

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1?currentPage=all

The Candidate
How the son of a Kenyan economist became an Illinois Everyman.
by William Finnegan

he climax of Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” occurs in rural Kenya when the author sits between the graves of his father and his grandfather and weeps. Obama, then in his late twenties, hardly knew his father and never met his grandfather, but in the course of writing the book he had learned their stories in devastating detail. Both were proud, ambitious men who travelled far from the Luo-speaking villages where they grew up—indeed, Obama’s grandmother still has her son’s Harvard diploma hanging in her house nearby. Their respective struggles in the world ended painfully, in bitter loneliness. Beside their graves, Obama, a middle-class American, both mourns and, for the first time, understands his African forebears.

People in Illinois seem largely unaware of Obama’s long, annealing trip into their midst, although they often remark on his unusual calm. Now forty-two and a state senator, Obama emerged, in March, from a raucous primary as the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. In a seven-person field, he received a remarkable fifty-three per cent of the vote—he even won the “collar” counties around Chicago, communities that supposedly would never support a black candidate. And everyone recalls that, as the votes were being tallied at his headquarters on Election Night, he seemed to be the least agitated person in the place.

-snip-
On a raw, rainy late-April day in Springfield, the state capital, Obama, who represents a district on Chicago’s South Side, ducked out of the statehouse for a meeting with labor leaders from southern Illinois at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. building down the street. “This is a kiss-and-make-up session,” he told me as we entered a ground-floor conference room—the state A.F.L.-C.I.O. had supported one of his opponents in the Democratic primary. Twenty-five white males, in windbreakers and golf shirts, sat around the room. They represented the building trades—the painters’ union, the carpenters.

Obama, lanky and dapper in a dark suit, his shoulders almost strangely relaxed, seemed to know most of the men there. He broke the ice with a joke at the expense of Ed Smith, a huge, tough-looking delegate from Cairo. Obama had met Smith’s mother on a recent downstate swing and had discovered that “she’s the one who really calls the shots there.” Smith laughed, and the other delegates said they wanted her phone number. Then Obama gave a short, blunt, pro-labor speech. The men eyed him carefully. Heads began nodding slowly, jaws set, as he drove his points home: “two hundred thousand jobs lost in Illinois under Bush; overtime rights under threat for eight million workers nationally; the right to organize being eroded.” Then he said, “I need your help,” and took questions.