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Sunday, Nov. 02, 2008

Candidates took different paths to Nov. 4

CHICAGO — It was just before midnight last November when Barack Obama stepped on stage in a darkened auditorium in Iowa, trailing in the polls, taking on one of the biggest names in Democratic politics — and facing a make-or-break moment.

His star-making turn when he had introduced himself to America at the Democratic convention in 2004 was a fading memory, his 9-month-old presidential campaign had been lackluster at times. Iowa, he knew, could be the end — or the beginning.

The Democrats, including front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, had gathered that night for the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, less than two months before the crucial first-in-the nation Iowa caucuses.

Barack Obama, savvy politician and skilled orator, was ready for his debut.

"I am not in this race to fulfill some long-held ambitions or because I believe it's somehow owed to me," he declared. "I never expected to be here. I always knew this journey was improbable. I've never been on a journey that wasn't."

The crowd of thousands stood and cheered. He was on his way to becoming the first black nominee of a major party.

Search for community

The first pages of Obama's life story are well-known by now.

His Kansas-born mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. His Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama Sr. Their meeting at the University of Hawaii, their marriage, the birth of Barack — "blessed" in Arabic — on Aug. 4, 1961. The father's departure two years later to study at Harvard. He returned just once, when his son was 10.

The exotic childhood in Indonesia, homeland of his stepfather, Lolo Soetero.

And then, after his mother's second marriage broke up, the return to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.

There was little hint then that politics was his destiny.

As a teen, Obama was smart and well-read but "he wasn't particularly driven or ambitious," says his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. "He wasn't part of student government. ... He was a young man concerned with ... hanging out with his buddies, playing basketball, body surfing and eating in excess."

For Obama — a biracial kid struggling with his identity — basketball was a refuge.

"At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own," Obama later wrote. "It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn't be a disadvantage."

After high school, Obama entered Occidental College in Los Angeles, then moved to New York to attend Columbia University.

Obama graduated with a political science degree and held a few jobs in New York. It was there he received a call from an aunt notifying him his father had been killed in an auto accident.

Later, Obama moved to Chicago. He knew no one in the city and was stepping into a low-paying job with a formidable mission: motivating poor people to participate in a political system that had traditionally shut them out.

It proved to be a much smarter move than it looked at first.

The big jump

Working for the Developing Communities Project, Obama met with black pastors and tried to mobilize people to agitate for themselves — whether it was lobbying for a job training center or cleaning up public housing.

He quickly won over skeptics, says Loretta Augustine-Herron, one of the project founders.

"He would talk about no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. He would say, 'Don't get personalities involved.' "

Chicago became the place where Obama set down roots.

He joined the Trinity United Church of Christ and became friends with its pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose incendiary comments about race and America would later raise questions about Obama's judgment and threaten to derail his presidential campaign.

Three years later, Obama went to Harvard Law School, making history as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

After his first year, Obama worked one summer at a corporate law firm in Chicago where his adviser was Michelle Robinson, another Harvard law graduate and a product of a working-class family.

They later married, and had two daughters, Malia, now 10, and Sasha, 7.

After graduating, Obama returned to Chicago and in 1996 was elected to the Illinois state senate. He won a crowded U.S. Senate primary in 2004.

He quickly emerged as a rising star, impressing Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, who tapped him for the keynote speech at the 2004 convention.

In 17 minutes, Obama jumped from obscure state lawmaker to a force in national politics.

WASHINGTON — John McCain knows what hopelessness feels like.

He attempted suicide as a Vietnam prisoner of war. His young political career took a head-on blow in the Keating Five scandal. He's gone three rounds with melanoma. His quest of the presidency has been pronounced dead more than once.

Hopelessness, McCain says on the campaign trail, is "an enemy who defeats your will."

"I felt those things once before," he says of his years in Vietnam. "I will never let them in again."

And so it is that John McCain, at 72, fights on, a battle-scarred warrior.

By the time McCain was shot out of the sky over Vietnam at age 31, he'd already crashed a plane into Corpus Christi Bay, ejected from another jet that flamed out as he was flying solo, survived an explosion aboard the carrier Forrestal that left 134 dead, and generally lived large, as he once said of his grandfather.

He'd knocked down power lines flying too low over southern Spain.

He'd romanced a Brazilian fashion model in Rio.

He'd married a beautiful divorcee, adopted the former model's two boys and had a daughter with her.

A predilection for what McCain describes as "quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country's uniform" was encoded in the family DNA.

His father and grandfather, the Navy's first father-and-son set of four-star admirals, had set such a low standard for good behavior at the Naval Academy that John Sidney McCain III's self-described "four-year course of insubordination and rebellion" got little more than a yawn from his family.

And yet, for all the raucous tales of misconduct, the midshipmen of the McCain family abided by the school's honor code not to lie, cheat or steal.

Losing his 'self-interest'

Tucked away in a corner of McCain's Senate office, there is a yellowed, three-page telegram hanging in a simple black frame.

The once-secret cable recounts a conversation at the Paris Peace Talks between the top negotiators for the United States and North Vietnam.

In it, Averell Harriman, the U.S. negotiator, reports: "At tea break Le Duc Tho mentioned that DRV had intended to release Admiral McCain's son as one of the three pilots freed recently, but he had refused."

The cable was written in September 1968. It would be 41/2 more years before "Admiral McCain's son" came home.

His captors had hoped to use early release of McCain — whose father was soon to become commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific — as a propaganda ploy.

When McCain refused to play along, they told him: "Now it will be very bad for you, Mac Kane." And they were true to their word.

McCain returned home from his 51/2 years as a POW on crutches and unable to lift his arms. He still can't raise them above his head.

He seems more at ease joking about his incarceration than analyzing it.

More than once he's quipped after a distasteful chore: "That's the most fun I've had since my last interrogation."

McCain tells AP that Vietnam "wasn't a turning point in me as to what type of person I am, but it was a bit of a turning point in me appreciating the value of serving a cause greater than your self-interest."

Establishing his record

McCain's experience there gave him new confidence in himself and his judgment. But it did not tame his wild side, and his marriage was a casualty. McCain blames the failure of the marriage on "my own selfishness and immaturity" and has called it "my greatest moral failing."

One month after divorcing his first wife, Carol, McCain married Cindy Hensley, 17 years his junior.

"He was everything I was looking for," Cindy McCain recalls of their first meeting, "and I wasn't looking."

McCain was lucky: Carol McCain, who had been in a crippling car accident while her husband was imprisoned in Vietnam, let him out of the marriage without theatrics or recriminations.

His 1981 marriage to Cindy, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor in Arizona, helped clear the path forward. By 1982, he'd been elected to the House and four years later to an open Senate seat. He and Cindy would have four children, to add to the three from his first marriage.

McCain set about establishing a conservative voting record and a reputation as a tightwad with taxpayer dollars. But just months into his Senate career, he made what he's called "the worst mistake of his life." He participated in two meetings with banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a friend, campaign contributor, constituent and savings and loan financier who was later convicted of securities fraud.

As the S&L industry collapsed, McCain was tagged as one of the Keating Five — five senators who, to varying degrees, were accused of trying to get regulators to ease up on Keating. McCain was cited for a lesser role than the others by the Senate Ethics Committee, which faulted his "poor judgment."

McCain spent years trying to live down the taint of Charlie Keating. Yet even in this campaign, he has been dogged by questions about the lobbying ties of his close advisers.

Over the years, he went to great lengths to prove himself. He became the standard-bearer for reforming campaign donations. He railed against pork-barrel spending for legislators' pet projects.

That helps explain why John McCain is not the most popular senator on Capitol Hill. But it is not all.

McCain is famous for expletive-laced outbursts at his colleagues: "Only an a------ would put together a budget like this," he once told the former Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. Domenici later questioned whether McCain's temperament was suited to the presidency.

Opinions differ, though, on whether McCain deploys his anger tactically to achieve his goals, lets it loose as an expression of righteous indignation, or simply loses control.

"There's nothing strategic about being passionate about something," Cindy McCain said. "You are or you aren't. He's a very straight shooter."

Quest for the presidency

His upstart bid for the presidency in 2000 took flight in New Hampshire only to get flattened by an ugly whisper campaign against his family in South Carolina.

He settled back into Senate business, helping create the Gang of 14 senators, Republicans and Democrats, who pulled the Senate back from the brink of a disastrous blowup over judicial nominations.

Cindy McCain says his desire to be president never really went away, but he bided his time through nearly eight years of George Bush.

"He always said if the opportunity arises again, 'I would love to try it again,' " she said. "But it wasn't like a dream he couldn't live without."