Before winning the US Presidential election, Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was already busy making history. Obama was the third African-American to be elected into the U.S. Senate of Illinois in 2005 and according to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online in the article "United States Presidential Election of 2008," the first sitting U.S. senate to win the election to presidency since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Barack Obama gained national recognition during the first U.S. senate race in which two of the leading candidates were African-Americans. He stood apart from his competition when he delivered his address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. His speech included a personal recount of his biography with the theme that all Americans were connected in ways that surpassed political, cultural, and geographical differences (Britannica).
The address at the convention was very powerful, and it pushed Obama’s first book “Dreams from My Father,” a memoir published in 1995, onto best-sellers lists. In August 2006, Obama published a second book, “The Audacity of Hope.” The book contained Obama’s vision for change for the United States, and it immediately became a best-seller.
In February 2007, Barack Obama announced his decision to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008 at the Old State Capitol in Springfield. Obama went up against Senator Hilary Clinton in a tough battle to win the necessary delegates in order to claim the Democratic nomination.
In the end, Obama’s charismatic personality, strong composure, and campaign promise to bring about change to the current political system, was enough for Obama to win more than the required delegates in the final primaries on June 3, 2008. On August 28th, Obama became the first African-American to receive a nomination for presidency by either major party, and went up against Senator John McCain, from the Republican Party, for the highest position at the White House.
Despite ridicule from McCain about his mission for the United States and his limited political experience, Obama continued to speak strongly about the need for change in the United States and shared his vision for the states to unite in order to bring about this change. He passionately shared the stories of the Americans he met, during his campaign, who were struggling to survive under the current political system.
Throughout Obama’s campaign, he effectively passed on his vision for change and gave hope to the hearts of Americans with the use of three simple words - “Yes, we can.” The phrase was used in Obama’s speeches after he won the presidential primary in South Carolina and the primary in New Hampshire, and it was used again in Obama’s acceptance speech on Nov 4, 2008 in Chicago.
According to The Global Language Monitor, a Texas-based company which documents, analyzes, and monitors trends in language usage worldwide, Obama’s “Yes, We Can” victory speech ranked favourably in tone, tenor, and rhetorical flourishes with “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King Jr., “Tear Down His Wall” by Ronald Reagan, and the Inaugural Address made by John F. Kennedy.
Forty-five years after the famous speech was delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Barack Hussein Obama Jr. set out to fulfill that dream. According to the results in “Election Centre 2008” on CNNPolitics.Com, Obama won 53% of the electoral votes in the election. On January 20, 2009, the forty-fourth president of the United States of America will be the first African-American President of the United States of America.
"Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can." - Barack Obama
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