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International Politician of the Year

President Barack Obama

President Barack Obama was the unequivocal choice of the jury for International Politician of the Year. There was overwhelming recognition of the extent to which, during his electoral campaign and following his election last November as the new US President, he has broken the mould of American politics as well as constructively engaging with the international community. The jury commended his skilful and enlightened political leadership at a time of successive global crises.

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in August 1961. His mother was from Kansas, his father a government economist from Kenya. His grandparents helped bring him up. He worked his way through Columbia University and spent four years working with disadvantaged black families on Chicago’s south side. He attended Harvard Law School, where at the age of 28 he was to become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

On graduating from law school with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude he returned to Chicago where he continued to work for local communities while teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. From 1993 he was an associate at a firm of lawyers specialising in civil rights litigation. He served on the boards of a number of charitable foundations.

Obama’s political career began in the Illinois state legislature, where he was elected to the state senate in 1996, and over the next eight years was instrumental in passing a number of pieces of important social legislation. In 2003 he was appointed chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee. The following year he stood for the US senate, one of fifteen candidates to enter the primaries following a decision by the incumbent Republican senator and his previous Democrat challenger not to run again. Of the seven candidates in the Democratic primary Obama won handsomely with 53 per cent of the vote.

In the election of November 2004 Obama defeated the Republican candidate, Alan Heyes, by a record margin to become only the fifth black senator in American history. As a senator Obama introduced legislation to restrict the availability worldwide of conventional weapons and established USAspending.gov, a website designed to improve the transparency of public spending by the federal government. He served on several committees including Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In February 2007 he announced his candidacy for president in Springfield, Illinois on the spot where, three years before the start of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had warned the country of the danger it faced in allowing slavery to drive a wedge between northern and southern states. The subsequent whittling down of Democratic presidential candidates pitched Obama directly against former first lady and New York Senate colleague Hillary Clinton. At first the underdog, Obama turned the tables on Clinton by a combination of skilful fund raising and adept marketing. His candidacy was confirmed at the Democratic Convention in August 2008. In November he defeated the Republican candidate, John McCain, by 53 to 46 per cent.

The first months of the Obama presidency have been characterised by the continuing controversy over the economy and America’s overseas military engagements. Nevertheless, Obama has cleared away many of the negatives associated with America following the eight-year administration of his predecessor George Bush. His recent award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is symbolic of the esteem in which Barack Obama is held around the world.