Within the first few minutes of Barack Obama's famous address to the Democratic convention in Boston, he mentioned one word five times. "My grandfather had larger dreams"; "they, too, had big dreams"; "a common dream"; "my parents' dreams live on"; "that is the true genius of America -- a faith in simple dreams."
That speech, on July 27, 2004, lasted 15 minutes and put Obama on the map. The Chicago Herald said he "hit every note," the right-wing commentator Robert Novak called him one of the Democrats' hottest properties and the Augusta Chronicle dubbed him the party's "promising new cub."
Promising new cub. What an enormous difference three-and-a-half years can make. Obama is no longer a mere cub. With a gale now blowing in his sails after Iowa and New Hampshire, he has a real chance to become the Democratic candidate for November's presidential elections.
His potential has emerged with lightning speed; he is the political equivalent of Facebook, another phenomenon launched in 2004 that feels as though it has been around for ever.
Dreaming has played a crucial part. At crucial moments through his career he had what he calls the "audacity of hope": where others might have stepped back, he reached out, both in terms of his personal ambition and in terms of his appeal to supporters outside the natural Democratic tent.
When he made the Boston speech he was not even yet in Congress: He was a Chicago lawyer running at the time for one of two Illinois seats in the US Senate. That race was in itself a long shot: a black man, as he says in his first book Dreams from My Father, "without organizational backing or personal wealth, and with a funny name," competing to become only the third African American since the post-civil war period of Reconstruction to serve in the Senate. He won, galvanizing support in white areas as well as black.
Look further back still and the pattern is repeated. In 1990, while a second-year student at Harvard, he had the audacity to stand for election to head the Harvard Law Review, one of the country's most prestigious legal publications. He beat off 18 other candidates to become its president (savor the moment: He was elected president Obama).
REACHING OUT
David Goldberg, a civil rights lawyer who was a runner-up in that poll, recalls that Obama won by reaching out to right-wing law students, several of whom went on to become key legal advisers in the Bush administration: "We were a really polarized group of students, and he managed to span us all."
Further back still you see the dreams of his white mother from Kansas who had no money yet managed to send Barack, aged four, to an international school while they were in Indonesia. Every morning she would wake him up at 4am to give him English lessons before school.
Or go back to the very beginning and his parents' decision to pass on to him the name of his father, a black Kenyan who had come to the US to study but separated from his mother to return to Kenya when the boy was two. They gave him the name Barack ("blessed") -- an audacious act in itself in 1961, because when they married, Obama says, "miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the union."
Obama is, at least at this moment, truly blessed. But there is a long way to go before the inauguration ceremony at the White House on Jan. 20 next year.
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