Barack Obama in his Own Words

When the first edition of Barack Obama in his Own Words was published in the spring of 2007, little was known about the first-term senator from Illinois, aside from an electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention—where he overshadowed the main attraction, presidential candidate John Kerry. The quotes in that first edition were meant to serve as an introduction for people curious to learn where he stood on the issues of the day.

Fast forward to 2008, and oh, what a difference little more than a year can make. When the primary competition began in earnest, we didn't know how important Obama's use of language and words would be to his campaign. Most candidates attract the attention of potential voters with promises, but Obama drew their notice not only with his words but also with his delivery style. I saw him speak for the first time a few months after the first edition of this book was published, when he was the keynote speaker at an annual meeting of New Hampshire trial lawyers. It was like he was speaking with the audience, not at them, and he spoke off the cuff, only occasionally referring to a single sheet of paper. His tone was self-deprecating and he peppered his speech with references to the life of a lawyer, which were met with knowing chuckles. True, it was one lawyer addressing an audience of other lawyers, but as I looked around the room, the faces of the people were spellbound. And yes, you could hear the proverbial pin drop.

People quickly realized that his sound bites were more thoughtful and, well, more intelligent than the other candidates' in a race where canned replies were the standard. As a result, he was quickly thrust into the spotlight. The others scrambled to keep up by altering their words and speeches, but it was glaringly obvious that they lacked Obama's gift for turning a phrase.

He not only excels at the spoken word, but the written as well. By the age of forty-six, he'd produced two well-written memoirs that he penned without the help of a ghostwriter. Though they lack the audible inflection and infectious energy of a Sunday preacher, the words are not much different from his spoken words: they still jump off the page.

While words have cast Obama into the limelight, they have also earned him increased scrutiny, especially when uttered by others—most notably the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But in every case, Obama continued to surprise us with his words. For example, in response to Wright's rhetoric, the senator faced the situation head-on by talking about what many people would feel uncomfortable saying out loud in his landmark "A More Perfect Union" speech on race.

"I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe," he said.

Americans have rarely experienced a presidential candidate whose rhetorical style was so crucial to his political platform. And they have reacted enthusiastically. Some compared it to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech; Robert Creamer of the Huffington Post said that with that one speech, "Obama showed America that he is the guy you want answering the red phone at 3 a.m." Perhaps more than anything else, and unlike many other politicians, Obama doesn't talk down to his audiences. Rather, he addresses adults as grownups, not as three-year-olds.

In this expanded and updated version of Barack Obama in his Own Words, I've added more of the senator's quotes as well as excerpts from several of his best-known speeches, including the famous speech on race he gave in the spring of 2008. The resulting book acts both as a guide to where he stands on the issues and a compendium of his most famous words and phrases from the 2008 campaign.

Though a flurry of books have been published about the president-elect since he first gained widespread attention during primary season, this second edition of Barack Obama in his Own Words was expanded and revised after Obama won the nation's highest office.

BARACK OBAMA WAS born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, to Barack Obama, Sr., an economics student and devout Muslim from Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas. His parents separated when Barack was two years old and ultimately divorced. After the divorce his father attended Harvard University to pursue a doctorate before eventually returning to Kenya. His mother remarried and moved to Indonesia when Barack was six. The family lived in Jakarta for four years, and Barack returned to Hawaii by himself to live with his grandparents until he graduated from high school in 1979. He attended Occidental College in California for two years before he transferred to Columbia University.

In 1982, he received word that his father had died in a car accident in Kenya, and it threw him for a loop despite the fact that he had only seen his father once since his parents' divorce, when Barack was ten. He graduated from Columbia with a bachelor's in political science in 1983. After spending a year in a corporate job, he moved to Chicago where he chose to work in community projects, joining a nonprofit organization involved in job training. In 1988, he enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he would first gain national recognition for serving as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, Obama returned to Chicago to continue his work with community nonprofits as a civil rights lawyer and taught at the University of Chicago law school with a specialty in constitutional law. He met Michelle Robinson, another lawyer, in the summer of 1989 while they were working at a corporate law firm, and they married in 1992.

As a result of his visibility at Harvard, Random House asked him to write an autobiography, and Dreams from My Father was published in 1995. His mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer a few months earlier, died shortly after the book was published. He and Michelle have two daughters: Malia, born in 1999, and Sasha, born in 2001.

His first run at public office resulted in success when Barack won the election to represent the South Side of Chicago in the Illinois State Senate in 1996. He served until 2004, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate with 70 percent of the vote, becoming the fifth African-American in U.S. history to serve in the august chamber.

In the wake of his increasing national popularity, Barack recorded the audio version of his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, which won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2006. He formed an exploratory committee to decide whether to run for president in 2008, and announced that he would formalize his plans in February 2007.