Barack Obama: 44th president of the U.S.

by Mark Silva

Barack Hussein Obama, born of a mother from Kansas and father from Kenya who had their only son in Hawaii, will take the oath of office as 44th president of the United States at noon today on the Western front of the U.S. Capitol before an audience that could span a two-mile length of the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial.

At 47, Obama will not be the nation's youngest chief executive -- Presidents John Fitzgerald Kennedy and William Jefferson Clinton were younger at their inaugurations. But in profile, Obama will be unique in American history: Becoming the first African-American president of a nation once riven by slavery and racially segregated by law for decades afterward, he will swear to the presidential oath on Abraham Lincoln's Bible.

Obama, who campaigned for the presidency with a sweeping promise of "change we can believe in,'' will enter office at one of the most challenging junctures in modern American history: In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and with the nation at war on two fronts.

Public expectations surrounding this new president could hardly be greater -- with about two-thirds of the American public surveyed voicing optimisim in Obama's ability to do the job right. Crowds of people started streaming on to the National Mall before dawn this morning, for an inauguration that will play out at high noon.

The new president will ask the Congress to approve, within his first month in office, a nearly $1-trillion economic stimulus that promises more than 3 million new jobs in the next few years. At the same time, it will compound an annual nation debt which already surpasses $1 trillion before he enters office.

Obama enters office with a pledge for an "orderly'' and "responsible'' withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq after nearly six years of war that has claimed more than 4,000 American lives. At the same time, he has agreed to an escalation of U.S. military force in Afghanistan, which he and his advisors considers "the real front in the war against terrorism.''

A Harvard-bred attorney and former constitutional law professor and community organizer from Chicago who has served less than one term in the Senate, the former Illinois state senator will assume office as the culmination of a dream which he himself has billed as "audacious:'' A candidate with a "funny name'' who was unknown to much of the nation just five years ago.

Obama shed his anonymity with the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004.

"I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible,'' Obama said at the Democratic convention in Boston.

"Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy,'' Obama said then. "Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: "'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'''

The upstart Democrat who captured the imagination of many of his party's leaders even as he was just beginning his own stint in the Senate remained a long-shot for the nation's highest office when he announced his candidacy in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10, 2007.

"I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness - a certain audacity - to this announcement,'' Obama told a crowd filling the square on a frigid winter day. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change. ''

He entered a contest for the Democratic Party's nomination, one of many in a crowded field of candidates. At the time, much of the party's conventional wisdom pointed toward the nomination of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, a former first lady.

Yet, starting with an upset in the opening party caucuses of Iowa in January 2008, where the Obama campaign team displayed an organizational prowess backed by formidable fundraising, the candidate turned the tables on not only the party's front-runner but also the rest of the pack. In the end, with a long-fought battle for delegates needed for nomination, Obama outran Clinton in June.

"Four years ago,'' Obama told some 80,000 people filling a football stadium in Denver on Aug. 28 for the acceptance of his party's nomination, "I stood before you and told you my story, of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren't well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to...

"We meet at one of those defining moments, a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more,'' he said. "Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can't afford to drive, credit cards, bills you can't afford to pay, and tuition that's beyond your reach.

"These challenges are not all of government's making,'' the Democratic nominee said. "But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.''

In Republican Sen. John McCain, the GOP's early-settled presidential nominee, Obama faced a much older, more seasoned senator with a military hero's story to boot. McCain, who had spent nearly 25 years in Congress from Arizona, also had served more than two decades in the Navy - including five and a half as a prisoner of war in Vietnam after his bomber was shot down over Hanoi. The Naval Academy graduate also had sought his party's presidential nomination before, in 2000, losing to George W. Bush, and this time had returned to fight the campaign of his life.

At first, the war in Iraq stood as a defining difference between the Democrats and Republicans. McCain had entered the contest as an unbowed supporter of the American military mission in Iraq - particularly the "surge'' of forces which President Bush ordered. Obama, who had spoken out against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 before he was a senator, campaigned with a pledge to bring troops home within 16 months after election.

Yet, as the campaign progress, the protracted war, unpopular among most Americans, was eclipsed by economic calamity.

And by the fall of 2008, amid signs of deepening trouble among the nation's financial institutions, the economy consumed the campaign. McCain, who had allowed early on that economic issues were not his strong suit, also had maintained, along with Bush, that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong.''

As the election neared, polls found that Americans found Obama better-suited than McCain to confront the economic crisis. And by Election Day on Nov. 4, Obama had not only waged the best-financed campaign in American history, raising close to $1 billion for the effort, but also amassed support in enough states - including states that had long voted Republican, such as Virginia and Indiana - to win an Electoral College landslide.

"It's been a long time coming,,'' Obama told tens of thousands filling Chicago's Grant Park on election, night, "but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America....

"The road ahead will be long,'' the president-elect said that night. "Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America -- I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you -- we as a people will get there.

"There will be setbacks and false starts,'' he said. "There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for 221 years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.''

Today, outside the Capitol, Obama will deliver a historic inaugural address to 240,000 attending the ceremony with tickets obtained from their congressional offices and provide by the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Then inside, Obama will join congressional leaders for lunch in Statuary Hall.

With wine from California, home state of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, they will feast on seafood stew, pheasant and duck served with sour cherry chutney and molasses sweet potatoes, apple cinnamon sponge cake and sweet cream glace.

Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden will accept flags flown over the Capitol during the ceremony, crystal bowls inscribed with their names and the date of inauguration and crystal vases etched with a depiction of a Capitol erected with slave labor.