Just as McCain was typical of his "Silent" generation, so Barack Obama was typical of his, the Gen-Xers.  And just what or who were/are the generation with this strange label?  The term "Generation X" itself is a borrowing from earlier analyses of various social groups, in particular British youth of the Silent generation.  But in America this term came to be applied to those who came after the Boomers, to Americans born from the early 1960s to the early 1980s (Obama was born in 1961, at the very beginning of the Gen-X generation, just as Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr were both born at the very beginning of their Boomer generation, in 1946).

The "X" part referred to the way in which this generation had no particular ideals, no particular heroes (though something of a fascination with media celebrities), and no particular sense that their lives were going anywhere special.  In general, they were content to merely "fit in," to find an acceptably comfortable place in the scheme of things, and a bit concerned that this might not happen.  Ethnically, religiously, morally they had not any particularly characteristic standards, unless one considers this lack of standards itself a key standard of the Gen-X generation. They were, in short, quite accommodating of almost anything, as long as it did not get in their way of finding a comfortable place in society.

This lack of distinct standards, distinct visions derives in great part to the lack of very inspiring family origins.  Gen-Xers were typically children of Boomers, who had a very casual sense of loyalty to the idea of family itself.  In short, a great number of the Gen-Xers were raised by single parents, typically single moms who worked hard to keep life moving forward.  Male heroics did not generally play the traditional role in the formation and life of Gen-Xers, especially as fathers were rather marginal in the growing up of many of them.  Gen-X males loved their mothers but looked more to their peers than anyone else to set whatever standards that they tried to live by.  These standards, of course, were trendy and fluid, and tended to be shaped more by celebrity standards, which they followed with great interest, than by any sense of family heritage.  This was also the first of the "wired" generation who found that their world was as much a virtual world as it was the actual physical world around them.

Lacking strong, lofty male role models, Gen-X found itself easily sympathetic to feminism and homosexuality, helping to undercut the older traditional male-led culture.  Indeed, and sadly, especially among minorities, male energy seemed to be relatively lacking.  But this was also increasingly true across the entire cultural spectrum, which is one of the key reasons why Gen-X women started to outnumber greatly Gen-X men entering colleges and universities in the 1980s and the lower ranks of the professions in the 1990s.

Barack Obama was born in 1961 to a White Kansas girl, Ann Dunham, actually a Silent rather than a Boomer, a typically enthusiastic Kennedy idealist.  His father was also "Barack Obama," a Black Luo tribesman from Kenya, who married Ann after getting her pregnant.  Both were students at the University of Hawaii, although his mother moved during the next year to the State of Washington with her son Barry (he would take the name of his African father, Barak, only later in his development) soon after he was born.  His father (who was also married to a woman back in Kenya) left Hawaii the following year (1962) to study at Harvard. The couple would eventually divorce (1964) as his father returned to Kenya.  Young Barry would see his father only once more, very briefly in 1971 when he was age ten.³

His mother went on to marry again in 1964, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student at the University of Hawaii, a Muslim, but one with rather Western attitudes (excellent tennis player, and very pleasant company at parties with alcohol) – at least as long as he was in the States.  Then the young family moved to Indonesia in 1967 when Barry was six years old, his step-father working with American companies (the oil industry) as a liaison with the Indonesian political world.  Barry would attend a Catholic school in Indonesia for three years, before entering a prestigious "public" school, where he would also study Islam.  But apparently both Catholicism and Islam were for Barry mere curiosities rather than serious sources of personal identity (his mother was neither Catholic nor Muslim, though "spiritual" in a rather non-specific way).  In fact, his own cultural (and racial) identity would always be a deeply challenging but also highly confusing matter for the boy.

Meanwhile his step-father took on a more Muslim quality in Indonesia, expecting Barry's mother to play the role of a submissive Muslim wife.  That simply was not going to happen.  Things got tense (the two would divorce in 1980).

However, in 1971, Barry was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents – and his mother and his younger sister Maya would join him the next year, in order for his mother to be able to complete her doctoral dissertation. That first fall back in Hawaii Barry was able to enter the highly prestigious Punahou School (5th grade), thanks to a scholarship and the earnings of Barry's hard-working grandmother (his grandfather was "retired").  In 1975 his mother and sister returned to Indonesia, but Barry would remain at Punahou until he graduated in 1979 (by that time he had dropped the name "Barry" and taken on his father's more exotic African name "Barack").

His mixed parentage caused some identity problems at Punahou, and probably contributed to his teenage venture into alcohol and drugs.  But in general, Hawaiian society was itself a blend of different races and therefore more accepting of Barack's multi-racial, multi-cultural character.

Also he found himself growing up without any strong male role models to help him shape his own life.  All the major influences in his personal development were very strong-willed women (that category would also come to include his future wife, Michelle).  And his picture of family life was very blurry ... not untypical of multitudes of other Gen-Xers.

After graduation from high school, Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, but was able to transfer two years later to the much more prestigious Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science (international emphasis).  With the Columbia campus so close to the culturally Black Harlem, Obama soon discovered a culture that seemed much easier for him to find a natural place.  He would attend Christian worship services there, finding especially the music speaking to his heart.  Thus Barack, despite his White mother and White grandparents that he had grown up with, now more easily identified himself as "Black."⁴

In 1983 he graduated from Columbia with a B.A. and went to work for a year for the Business International Corporation, a company helping businesses invest and operate abroad.  He found corporate work uninspiring, and left to go to work for the Ralph-Nader-inspired New York Public Interest Research Group, a college-campus-based political activist organization.  Then in 1985 he moved to Chicago to work for the next three years as director of the Developing Communities Project (a Catholic community organization) in the Black section of South Chicago.  Here he found his purpose in life in directing job training, college-prep tutoring, tenant-rights programs, etc.  Here he also came to understand the importance of society's legal dynamics as key to social development.

Thus in the fall of 1988, at age twenty-seven, he entered Harvard Law School, and became a very focused, hard-working law student.  Indeed, at the end of the year he was elected as an editor of The Harvard Law Review.  The next year he was even elected president and editor-in-chief of the Review.

During the next summers he returned to Chicago to intern as a summer associate with the law firms Sidley Austin (1989) and Hopkins & Sutter (1990).  During the summer of 1989, while interning at Sidley Austin he met the very serious, very talented Michelle Robinson, a Princeton University (1983) and Harvard Law School (1988) grad, who had joined the firm the previous year.  She was assigned as his adviser, and by the end of the summer they were dating.  They would marry in October of 1992.

In 1991 he graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude (with high honors) and returned to Chicago to take a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.  Here he worked on his first book (published in 1995 as Dreams from My Father), a personal memoir about growing up bi-racial.182  During this time, he directed a massive voter-registration drive to get unregistered Blacks on the voting lists, gaining him political attention nationally as well as locally.

In 1993 he went to work as an associate attorney for Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland, specializing in civil rights legislation and neighborhood economic development, promoted as counsel in 1996, serving in that capacity until 2002. During this time he also served on the board of directors for the Woods Fund of Chicago (community development), the Joyce Foundation and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (serving the last-named also as chairman, 1995-1999).  Also during this time, he continued to teach at the University of Chicago Law School (Lecturer 1992-1996 and Senior Lecturer 1996-2004), his field being constitutional law.

In the meantime, his mother, who was living and working in Indonesia as a community development organizer for various funding agencies (including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Ford Foundation), became sick and had to return to the States in early 1995, where she was diagnosed with uterine cancer.  She died that same November, leaving Obama shaken about the experience of watching his mother not only struggle with the disease, but also with all the paperwork and personal hassle to get medical insurance coverage for doctor and hospital expenses.

In 1996 Obama was elected to complete a vacated term in the Illinois Senate, representing the Illinois 13th district (Chicago South Side).  As senator he was active in sponsoring or supporting a wide number of anti-poverty programs.  He was re-elected senator in 1998 and again in 2002.  Meanwhile in 2000 he entered the Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives but lost rather substantially.  But he then undertook a poll to see what his chances were in the U.S. Senate race coming up in 2004.  In January 2003 he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.  At the same time, when the Democrats took control of the State House in January of 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee and sponsored legislation monitoring police actions to ensure a lack of racial profiling.

In the 2004 Democratic Party primary elections Obama won a landslide victory for party candidacy for the U.S. Senate, earning him considerable national attention. During that July he was called on to deliver the keynote address of the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, gaining him even greater national attention.  Meanwhile the Republican Party's U.S. Senate candidate resigned in June over a sex scandal, throwing considerable confusion into the Republican Party's campaign for U.S. Senate.  In the November elections of that year (2004) Obama won the U.S. Senate seat with 70 percent of the vote.

Obama took office as U.S. Senator in January 2005 and was assigned to the Senate Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, and Veterans Affairs Committees, but in early 2007 he left the Environment and Public Works Committee in order to join the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.  He became chairman (that was fast!) of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on European Affairs, and traveled to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

In September 2006 Oprah Winfrey, the most-watched and most-influential woman commentator (topping Time and CNN lists of the most influential women in the world), endorsed Obama for president before he was even a declared candidate. The next month (October) she interviewed Obama and his wife Michelle on her show and repeated her previous endorsement.  This also pushed his book, The Audacity of Hope, to #1 position on both the New York Times' and Amazon.com's best-seller list.  This was followed by two more Oprah endorsements in 2007 (May and December), helping substantially to advance Obama in his effort to gain the Democratic Party's presidential candidacy.

In February 2007 Obama formally announced his candidacy for presidency.  Over the course of that year the Democratic Party field quickly narrowed down to Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton (New York) and former Senator John Edwards (North Carolina).  But in early 2008, following the allegations that Roberts was having an extra-marital affair (which turned out to be true), Roberts withdrew from the race, leaving Obama and Clinton facing each other.  And slowly but relentlessly Obama pulled ahead of Clinton in the early part of 2008 – and in June, Clinton officially dropped out of the race.

The campaign trail had some critical moments, especially during the early months of 2008. Obama's opponents picked up quickly on a comment he made in April in a speech to a very supportive audience in San Francisco about "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them..."  Actually the larger context of his speech was that his campaign workers should not be put off by the difficulties they were having reaching White workers bitter that their economic fortunes had stalled over the last 25 years, that they must show these same people that Obama was going to look out for them too, even though these voters were skeptical about "a 46-year-old Black man named Barack Obama" [laughter].

Another comment that was picked up by Obama's opponents was actually made by his wife Michelle earlier in February when she told an audience "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."  She was obviously referring to the hope she had that with her husband as President things would improve in the country, not that for the first time in her life she was proud to be an American (which is how opponents portrayed the wording).  She would learn what all participants in politics must learn: you must choose every word carefully because the press is listening closely and ready to make headlines on the smallest twist of your words.

Another controversy broke forth in March when an ABC news program produced racially explosive excerpts of a sermon delivered by Obama's Chicago pastor of 20 years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Reverend Wright's highly charged comments in which he repeatedly cursed America were a huge embarrassment to Obama, and ultimately led to Obama's abandonment of the man who had been much like a father to him for all those years.

Soon after the controversy broke forth, Obama addressed the nation with his "A More Perfect Union" speech, watched not only by millions on TV but perhaps more importantly receiving millions of YouTube hits by the young wired generation. Obama skillfully turned an embarrassment into an opportunity to explain his own views on racism in America.  In the end the controversy probably helped considerably move his candidacy ahead within the Democratic Party primary process, and likely also in the national elections in the fall as well.

But it seemed also to have had a very sad secondary effect: since the end of the pastoral relationship with the Reverend Wright, Obama seemed unable to find another Christian to offer him pastoral counsel, preferring to keep his and his family's Christian faith private.  This is unfortunate because not just in political matters but also even in spiritual matters, the President is a person of great significance to the nation.

A question that surely ran through the minds of Americans as Obama took office in January of 2009 was "what kind of president would this relative newcomer to national politics be?"  His campaign was clearly based on the doctrine of "change." But how much change and what kind of change would that be?  He had never been very specific about what he meant by his plan to bring "change" to the country. Certainly the mess left behind by Bush, Jr., needed to be "changed."

His brief record as a U.S. Senator definitely put him very far over to the furthest Left of the Left-wing congressional Democrats.  He certainly was clearly a champion of minority rights.  But as President would he be able to champion majority rights as well?  Where exactly did his personal loyalties lie?  Would he be able to bring the country back to some kind of renewed unity – or would he leave the country further divided than it already was?  Was his "change" designed to unite (the most important duty of any social leader) or divide the country even more deeply – by favoring one side of the social division even more?

Attending Catholic School in Indonesia for three years as a child, Obama was certainly informed, in a Catholic manner, of the major features of the Christian faith.  But of course, the Christian faith is not just a matter of theological information and liturgical habit, it is a decision to live life in a certain way.  Actually, it seems that it was not until Obama's last two years in college at Columbia University that a true interest in the Christian faith began to stir in him.  Certainly the cultural experience of church attendance in nearby Harlem helped begin his journey.  But so also did a lot of personal philosophical/theological reading of works such as those of the ancient Augustine or the contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr (teaching at the Union Theological Seminary adjacent to Columbia).  Then when he eventually went to work in South Chicago for a Christian (Catholic) community development organization, he found himself sharing his interest in this matter with the ministers of a number of Black churches in the area.  He also was deeply impressed by the key role that these Black churches played in the effort to lift local community life towards higher goals, the same ones he was pursuing as community developer.  He finally decided to put himself whole-heartedly into the Christian dynamic, by becoming a regular attender at the mega-church of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Ultimately, Wright's sermons touched deeply both the heart and the mind of young Obama.  For the first time in his life he found in the Reverend Wright a male figure to shape himself by.  Thus also, he found himself being drawn to this unfolding Christian world as "family," something that he had not experienced in a long time.  This 20-year relationship would shape Obama deeply as a Christian.

Thus Obama was indeed a Christian, a deeply committed Christian, living a Christian life shaped by one of Christianity's many different cultural perspectives, of which America has always had many.

But America's religious diversity raised an important question, of how basically Obama's near and dear Black Christianity would find a place in a largely White world.  This would be a challenge that, entering the White House, Obama would have to have to carefully make his way through.  Where exactly in that broad Christian spectrum would he, as president, ultimately place himself?

³The senior Barack Obama was killed in a car accident in Kenya in 1982.

⁴This developmental pattern would follow lines similar to Gandhi's – who after years of working hard to qualify himself as a member of the upper strata of British Imperial society (law studies in London and years of law practice in South Africa) finally found for himself a more "natural" identity … by backing away from the effort to be a good "Brit" and simply accepting the social status as mere "Indian." This in turn would sharpen Gandhi's Indian identity to the point of being the central social-cultural – and ultimately political – goal of his life: to help other Indians find their proper identities quite apart from the dominating influence of British Imperial society.  Gandhi would dedicate himself completely to "changing" (actually, "overthrowing") the Imperial racial-cultural structure governing India.  Likewise, Obama would come to dedicate himself to the same mission of "change" in America.  Both Gandhi and Obama would succeed in their intense efforts to enact such social change, each in his own way.  Not surprisingly, Gandhi was one of Obama's heroes, inspiring his own life greatly.