Obama Gets In, Gets Serious

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- It had the feel and heft of history. On a blisteringly cold day, in the shadow of the red-domed Illinois statehouse where Abraham Lincoln once warned that "a house divided against itself cannot stand," Senator Barack Obama on Saturday launched his historic candidacy for president, promising to heal political divisions, end the "corrosive" cynicism and tackle the tough problems that afflict the country today.

"We know the challenges. We've talked about them for years," Obama said, "What's stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics."

Standing squarely in the flow of a national history deformed by troubled race relations, Obama told America, with no irony, no rancor and in all seriousness, that he -- an African American man -- wanted to be president and that he is what the country needed. Invoking the 16th president who ended slavery and saved the Union, Obama said his campaign and his candidacy would be yet another chance for the country to transform itself.

"As Lincoln organized the forces arrayed against slavery, he was heard to say: "Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought to battle through.' That is our purpose here today," Obama said, "That's why I'm in this race. Not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation."

While one of the perceived strengths of Obama's campaign is that he is a political figure who is able to transcend the racial divide that has so long been a hallmark of American politics, one of the threshold questions his presidential bid lays before the country is whether sufficient racial progress has been made to prevent racial prejudice from becoming a dominant factor in his campaign. What Lincoln understood, Obama said, is "that beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people." a weekly column

The 45-year-old freshman U.S. senator, who began his political career here a decade ago when he was elected to the Illinois state senate, is regarded as one of the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination. A successful campaign would make him the first black president of the United States, and while he did not make mention of that historical fact, it will remain a dominant subtext of the entire campaign.

The senator did acknowledge his terse political resume, suggesting that what he offered was a departure from the usual ways of doing business.

"I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness - a certain audacity - to this announcement," said Obama, whose bestselling book is titled ‘The Audacity of Hope.’ "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."

He promised universal health care before the end of his first term, and to recruit more teachers and pay them better, and to end the war in Iraq. He promised to bring decency back to politics and to take back the government from special interests. "The time for that politics is over. It's time to turn the page," he declared. . Obama faces long odds and an even longer road to the nomination. The first votes are almost a year away, and at the moment his political task is to take down his Senate colleague Hillary Rodham Clinton, the early frontrunner in the race for their party’s nomination.

The showdown at the moment appears to match his charisma and fresh face against her money and the loyalty she commands within the Democratic Party. "If you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching before us," he told the crowd, " then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with you."

The march is long and the work will be hard, but there is history to be made.