If you recently visited Chicago, you must have noticed Barack Obama's image fluttering abundantly on street banners and from storefronts.
The 44th President was born and raised in Hawaii, resided in Indonesia, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles, at Columbia University in New York City, and at Harvard University in Boston. Yet, his deepest social and political roots are clearly in the Windy City.
There he has lived since 1985 when he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project comprising eight Catholic parishes on Chicago's far south side. In Altgeld Gardens he set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization.
In 1989, while a student at Harvard, he was hired as a summer intern at the law firm of Sidley-Austin where a Harvard-educated associate, Michelle Robinson, was asked to be his mentor. Three years later, after graduating from Harvard law school and after a term as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama returned to Chicago. Soon he began dating a native south shore Chicagoan who turned out to be his one-time mentor, Michelle Robinson. Marrying her certainly deepened his ties to Chicago.
In an effort to recruit Obama to its faculty, the University of Chicago provided him with a fellowship and an office to work on his book, Dreams from My Father. From April to October 1992, he led a voter registration drive with 700 volunteers that yielded Chicago 150,000 new African-American voters. Crain's Chicago Business was so impressed that it named Obama to its 1993 list of "40 Under Forty" powers to be.
For twelve years, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. He also joined a Chicago law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development. With obvious political ambitions by 1996, he jumped at the opportunity to win election to the Illinois State Senate from the 13th District on Chicago’s south side. He was reelected twice. In 2000, however, he suffered a setback when he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives against four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.
When, by mid-2002, Obama began considering a run for the U.S. Senate, he found his chief strategist in David Axelrod, a graduate of the University of Chicago, later city hall bureau chief and political columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Axelrod later told The Washington Post, "I thought that if I could help Barack Obama get to Washington, then I would have accomplished something great in my life."
Getting into politics in Chicago was bound to entangle Obama with some of its most powerful but controversial practitioners, such as Mayor Daley and his brother Bill, Senate President Emil Jones, and Governor Blagojevich whom he helped getting elected in 2002. Even more difficult proved to be Obama’s associations with Chicago characters that turned out to become serious political liabilities. There was the Reverend Jeremiah Wright who married Obama and his wife Michelle and baptized their two daughters but also “God-damned” America. There was real estate developer and political fundraiser "Tony" Rezko, later convicted on several counts of fraud and bribery. And there was William Ayers, notorious anti-war activist of the 1960s but now distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois.
For Obama, Chicago became the source of his biggest triumphs and most troublesome tribulations. It gave him the drive and the chutzpah it takes for advancement in American politics.