Letter From America
Barack Obama's slew of firsts
BEING first comes naturally to Barack Obama. In securing the presumptive nomination of the Democratic Party, he scored a slew of firsts.
Obama is clarly the first African-American to clinch the presumptive nomination among the two major US political parties. With an African (Kenyan) father and a Caucasian American mother, Obama is a true African-American.
Obama is the first presumptive nominee whose father was not an American citizen. Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was a graduate student from Kenya in Hawaii (where he met and wed Obama's mother) and Harvard University, before returning to Kenya.
Obama is the first presumptive presidential nominee to have been born in the state of Hawaii. He is also the first candidate with more than 1.5 million small donors.
Obama is the first presumptive presidential nominee to earn an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York, and the first to have attended Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is also the first presumptive nominee to have been the president of the Harvard Law Review.
Obama is the first presumptive nominee with an Islamic heritage, from his father's side. However, there is no truth to the rumour that he also has Irish blood. (An Irish pop group has come out with a song claiming that "O'Bama" is as Irish as O'Brien or O'Sullivan or O'Neill!)
Obama is the fourth Illinois elected official to clinch a major party's presidential nomination. If elected, Obama will be the first US president from Illinois since Abraham Lincoln. Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois and was the governor of California (1966-74) before he became president in 1980. Obama is the only first-term senator to be the presumptive nominee of a major party since Warren Harding in 1920.
Harvard has been in the business of electing US presidents since the first US election in 1789. There have been seven Harvard graduates to make it to the presidency: John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Rutherford Hayes, John Kennedy and George W. Bush.
If Obama were to win, he would be the first US president from Harvard Law School since Hayes, who graduated in 1845. Presidential nominees with Harvard degrees who lost include Michael Dukakis, who graduated from the law school, and Al Gore.
Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt went to Columbia Law School. Obama will be the only nominee to have attended Columbia as an undergraduate. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was Columbia University's president after World War II and before he ran for president in 1952. Obama transferred to Columbia in 1981 from Occidental.
Through April, Obama raised money from a record 1.5 million donors, bringing in $256 million for the primary election, just behind the $262 million taken in by Bush in 2004. Obama's campaign confirmed that he has now surpassed Bush's record, becoming the biggest fundraiser in US presidential history.
The first Democratic convention Obama ever attended was Los Angeles in 2000, and his credit card bounced at the rental-car office. He also was not able to secure a floor pass, and watched most of the speeches on television screens.
Obama, who will officially be nominated at the Democratic convention on the 100th birthday of Lyndon B. Johnson, will deliver his acceptance speech 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream speech."
None of this would have happened if Hillary Clinton had followed a more sensible route in her political life. Hillary was born in Chicago. After Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, Hillary should have returned to her native Chicago and sought public office from Illinois.
Barack Obama went to Chicago by accident. As an undergraduate and graduate student, he was looking for some community work and went to Chicago responding to an ad. He decided to stay in Chicago, first as a community organiser, then as a state senator and finally as a US Senator.
When Hillary sought the Senate seat from the state of New York in 2000, that Robert Kennedy once held, she was labeled a carpetbagger with no link to the state of New York.
Had she returned to Chicago, she would have been welcomed back as the native prodigy. Chicago and the state of Illinois would have embraced her candidacy for the Senate in 2004. Hillary, rather than Barack Obama, would have been elected senator from Illinois in 2004.
Hillary, rather than Obama, would have been the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party and quite possibly been elected the president of the US in 2008.
After her magnificent concession speech on June 7, in which Hillary unequivocally endorsed Obama for president, perhaps Obama should seriously consider picking Hillary as his running mate and thus secure the votes of millions of women energised by Hillary's candidacy.
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