Sen. Barack Obama took an important formal step on Tuesday toward a Democratic presidential campaign, offering a remedy to bitter partisan divisions and marking a potential turning point in the nation’s race relations.
By filing papers to form a presidential exploratory committee, the first-term Illinois senator signaled his intent to run for the presidency, a bid he has been publicly considering for months. Obama says he’ll make a formal announcement of his decision Feb. 10 in Springfield, where barely two years ago, he served as a mere state legislator.
Obama, 45, made the official announcement of his exploratory committee Tuesday on barackobama.com, in a simple video that featured him seated, wearing a coat and no tie. He sounded a theme of change:
“I certainly didn’t expect to find myself in this position a year ago. But as I’ve spoken to many of you in my travels across the states these past months; as I’ve read your e-mails and read your letters; I’ve been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics.”
“Our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, commonsense way,” Obama said. “Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions.”
Obama’s move dramatically punctuates the extraordinary arc of a political career for a man who said he had trouble even renting a car to attend the Democratic National Convention in L.A. in 2000.
But his stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 catapulted him to a status of politician as celebrity that continued with his election to the Senate–and his status now as the first African-American candidate considered to be a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination.
Advisers said Obama and his family had made the personal commitment to a grueling two-year presidential bid, and the senator now would concentrate on assembling a campaign apparatus and testing support among financial backers and grass-roots activists.
His formal candidacy would create a historic moment, as the American public contemplates a leader of mixed-race heritage, the son of an African father and white Kansan mother. Race would be a spoken and unspoken subtext to a campaign that also would raise grave policy issues on the war in Iraq, with Obama an early and consistent critic of the continuing U.S. military intervention there.
Interviewed on the way to a vote on the Senate floor early in the evening, Obama said the response had been “very positive.” American voters, he added, “want honesty, and they want bold approaches to some of the problems we’re facing.”
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and political strategist, said, “He is a political phenomenon. But being a political phenomenon does not make you a credible candidate to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces and leader of the free world in a time of war. Normally, qualifications are the first consideration when you’re thinking about a candidate for president in a time of war.”
