Originally published in the Valley News on December 22, 2007
Obama Advocates Return to Unity
Years in Chicago Set Stage
For Hard Charge for Democratic Nod
By Mark Davis — Valley News Staff Writer
On a weekday morning in 1985, the Rev. Alvin Love was sitting in his office in a Baptist church in Chicago's South Side, trying to figure out how to motivate his elderly parishioners to become active in their troubled community when suddenly, a stranger knocked on the door.
"You have to know that my church does not sit on the main thoroughfare," Love recently recalled. "You either have to be looking for the church, or walking the street trying to see what's there."
Barack Obama, a newly hired community organizer, told Love he wanted to rally churches in the area to tackle problems created by the closing of a nearby steel mill. Desperate, Love was willing to listen to the skinny 23-year-old's pitch.
But Obama didn't have one.
"Most of the time, when people come from organizations, they come and tell the pastors, 'This is what we'd like to do' " Love said. "Very seldom do you have someone come and ask you, 'What's important to you?' He took the simple step of sitting down and saying, 'What do you think needs to be done?' "
Obama kept asking the question — of Catholics and Protestants, blacks and Latinos, Irish- and Polish-Americans, and told them that their different backgrounds didn't prevent them from having much in common, including the need to confront a variety of social ills, ranging from joblessness to pollution. Obama formed relationships easily, people recall, and used those relationships to persuade church leaders to come to meetings and to work together to find solutions.
Two decades later, Obama has made that ability to unite people a centerpiece of his improbable quest for the presidency.
"I know how to lead people," Obama told the Valley News in late November, "and I know how to set a direction and get people to follow it, and I know how to inspire people from a wide variety of perspectives."
The Experience Issue
Although recent poll numbers indicate that the 46-year-old U.S. senator from Illinois is leading Hillary Clinton in Iowa and close behind in New Hampshire, the presidential candidacy of Barack Hussein Obama seems, at first glance, an unlikely venture.
He is the youngest candidate in either party, and he has been a national figure for all of three years, after eight years in the Illinois Senate. Obama is suggesting that he is ready to occupy the world's most powerful office at a time when the next president will confront a list of daunting problems, including Social Security solvency, a health care reform, a Middle East that appears ready to explode and growing concern about the environmental health of the planet.
If elected, Obama would be America's first black president, and the third youngest. His opponents — implicitly in the campaign's early days, explicitly in recent weeks — have questioned his readiness to be commander in chief.
Former President Bill Clinton recently suggested this month that voting for Obama would be to "roll the dice" with the presidency.
"When is the last time we elected a president based on one year of service in the Senate before he started running?" Clinton said.
Obama disputes the inexperience charge and counters that he represents change from the status quo and can better relate to average Americans.
"Michelle and I were talking about this a couple nights ago," Obama, referring to his wife, said in a phone interview earlier this month. "One of the things we bring to this race is we're not too far away from normal. Michelle still shops at Target. It was only a couple years ago I shopped for groceries."
In lieu of a lengthy national resume, what Obama offers — and what his supporters say they are drawn to most — is the power of personality, and his professed ability to unite and to lead.
When Obama really wants to bring home the point that he is a capable of being the kind of leader they want in a president, he recalls his organizing days on the South Side.
"It was in these neighborhoods that I received the best education I ever had," Obama said during his February speech announcing his candidacy. Organizing "taught me a lot about listening to people as opposed to coming in with a predetermined agenda."
Chicago
Jerry Kellman had sifted through dozens of applications for a new organizer to work for the new Developing Communities Project, an effort to unite the South Side's largely black neighborhoods, which also had a mix of Polish, Italian and Irish immigrants. None of the applicants were as impressive as Obama, he said.