Barack Obama

Obama on fire
in political world

"Is his the face of a future president?"

The question is asked in this month's issue of Vanity Fair, a question that has been on the minds of most who saw the Punahou School alumnus give an electrifying keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last year.

The influential magazine profiles what it considers "The Best of the Best 2004." Under the heading of "Best Rookie," in a portrait by photographer Annie Leibovitz, is Barack Obama in a tie and dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, flanked by his wife and two daughters on one side, and photos of Muhammad Ali and Abraham Lincoln on the other in Obama's election headquarters in Chicago.

The junior senator from Illinois -- and the only black U.S. senator -- was sworn into office Tuesday and begins a political journey in the national spotlight that had its roots here in Hawaii.

Obama is the son of a Kenyan economist who was the first African to study at the East-West Center, and a student from Kansas, who met at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

The couple divorced when Obama was 2. His mother then married another EWC student, an Indonesian who moved the family to his native Jakarta. After two years there, Obama's mother sent the boy back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents in Honolulu, where he enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School. He moved to the mainland after graduating in 1979.

In Chicago he would develop a formidable career as a civil rights lawyer, as a community organizer in the city's predominantly black South Side and as a law professor at the University of Chicago. It was only a matter of time that politics would beckon.

Just before Obama visited his old school last month to address faculty and students, he was the guest of honor at a local Democratic Party fund-raiser, and he rallied the troops with his charismatic presence.

"There is no doubt that the residue of Hawaii will always stay with me ... and that's what's best in me and what's best in my message, is one that is consistent with the tradition of Hawaii."

It is that message of ethnic diversity and tolerance that he takes into his first term of office at the nation's Capitol.