Obama's 'walk between worlds'

It was a Wednesday night ritual for Barack Obama. After a day of debating taxes, the death penalty or some other divisive issue, he'd head to a meeting of "The Committee."

Lawmakers and lobbyists, Democrats and Republicans alike, would put their politics on hold and gather for ... their weekly poker game.

It was a chance for Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, to socialize over cards and cigars. It also was a way for this son of an African goat herder, this Harvard-educated lawyer, author and professor to show he could be just one of the guys.

That was nothing new for him. He already had navigated the exotic corners of Hawaii and Indonesia, the halls of privilege of Cambridge, Mass., and the poverty-wracked streets of Chicago as a student and a young man.

Along the way, Barack Obama -- now a freshman U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate -- set out to do the things he says will work in the White House: bridging gaps, making connections, forging alliances.

His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, puts it this way: "He walks between worlds," she says. "That's what he's done his entire life."

His father, also named Barack Obama, was a black scholarship student who traveled from his small village in Kenya to attend the University of Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was white and just 18 when they met in a Russian class.

Barack was born Aug. 4, 1961. His parents' marriage was short-lived.

His father left his family to study at Harvard when young Barack was 2, returning just once. Obama wrote about that visit in his memoir -- remembering the basketball his father gave him, the Dave Brubeck concert they attended.

Obama, then 10, never saw his father again. By then, Obama's mother had remarried. They moved to his stepfather's native Indonesia, plunging the 6-year-old Obama into a land of delicacies such as snake meat and grasshopper and the harsh realities of Third World poverty.

After four years, Obama returned to Hawaii, first living with his mother, then with his maternal grandparents. In Hawaii, Obama was typical. And atypical. He was a scholarship student at the prestigious Punahou School, a private academy in Honolulu. The chubby kid who collected "Spider-Man" and "Conan the Barbarian" comics grew into a teen who listened to jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., golfed, played poker, sang in the choir and joined the school's literary journal.

Obama also loved basketball; he was a forward dubbed "Barry O'Bomber." During his senior year, the varsity team captured the state championship.

There also was an introspective side to Obama, the outsider grappling with his biracial roots.

Though he had a racially mixed group of friends, he and two others among Punahou's few black students met weekly for what became known as "ethnic corner."

Obama arrived in Chicago in 1985 with a college degree, a map of the city and a new job -- community organizer.

Obama, who had worked in New York briefly after graduating from Columbia University, knew little about Chicago's bare-knuckle politics. But living abroad gave him experience as an outsider and a natural empathy for people without money and power, says Gerald Kellman, the man who hired him.

Working for the Developing Communities Project, Obama organized black churches on the South Side, an area crippled by the loss of steel mills and factories.

Obama's task was to mobilize residents to agitate for themselves, whether it was lobbying for a job training center, pushing for park services or removing asbestos from a housing project.

In three years as an organizer, Obama became increasingly aware of the limits to what he could achieve and grew more pragmatic, Kellman says. He was ready to move on -- to Harvard Law School. But he promised he'd return.

Obama had two pivotal moments at Harvard. One came during his first summer when he worked at a large Chicago corporate law firm and met another Harvard law graduate, Michelle Robinson, who would become his wife and the mother of their two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

The other was a professional triumph: Obama made headlines when he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. With graduation, Obama became a hot commodity. High-powered job offers flooded in. He chose another direction.

Back in Chicago, Obama joined a small civil rights firm, ran a voter registration drive and lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

In 1996, he won a state Senate seat representing Hyde Park -- the South Side neighborhood that encompasses the university as well as some very poor neighborhoods.

Obama later wrote that he understood politics was "a full-contact sport and minded neither the sharp elbows nor the occasional blind-side hit." But in Springfield, the state capital, he was known as a pragmatist who'd cross party lines, working with other Democrats as well as Republicans.

By the time he began plotting a campaign for the U.S. Senate, he had a network of friends and supporters in Springfield, including his poker buddies who saw similarities in how he approached his work and the game.

Some call it The Speech -- a 17-minute star-making turn as a keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Obama was little known outside Illinois when he was chosen for the high-profile address. But his appearance at the convention that July night followed an old Broadway plot line: Barack Obama walked on stage an unknown. He walked off a star.

Commentators and politicians were buzzing with talk about his future -- and mentioning him as a possible presidential candidate.

But first things first.

Four months later, Obama, helped by lucky breaks, won the U.S. Senate seat in a landslide. Since then, he has had the Midas touch: Two best-selling books, a Grammy award for recording one of them, magazine covers, TV appearances, invitations galore.

Last fall, Obama became one of the hottest attractions on the 2006 campaign trail, stumping for Democratic candidates around the nation.

From the moment Obama emerged on the national scene, the question was asked: Would he run for president? No, no, no, he said. Absolutely not.

Then after a scant two years in the U.S. Senate, he reversed course.

On a blustery February day, Barack Obama returned to Springfield to the steps of the Old Capitol, where his hero Abraham Lincoln was a legislator.

He came to make another big speech. He announced he was running for president.