AP profile on Barack: Obama learned to adapt

[BeyondGeography]

CHICAGO -- It was a Wednesday night ritual for Barack Obama: After a day of debating taxes, the death penalty or some other divisive issue, he'd head to a meeting of "The Committee." Lawmakers and lobbyists, Democrats and Republicans alike, would put politics on hold and gather for ... their weekly poker game. It was a chance for Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, to socialize over cards and cigars (or, in his case, cigarettes). It also was a way for this son of an African goat herder, this Harvard-educated lawyer, author and professor to show he could be just one of the guys.

That was nothing new. He already had navigated the exotic corners of Hawaii and Indonesia, the halls of privilege of Cambridge, Mass., and the poverty-wracked streets of Chicago as a boy, a student and a young man.Along the way, Barack Obama -- now a freshman U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate -- set out to do the things he says will work in the White House: bridging gaps, making connections, forging alliances. "He walks between worlds," says Maya Soetoro-Ng, his half-sister. "That's what he's done his entire life."

...In Hawaii, Obama was a scholarship student at Punahou School, a private academy in Honolulu, where he was an outgoing kid with an easy laugh. Obama -- then known as Barry -- grew into a teen who listened to Earth, Wind & Fire, tooled around in his grandfather's old Ford Granada, sang in the choir and joined the literary journal. He also loved basketball and played on his school team, which won a state championship his senior year. Friends says Obama never spoke of the turmoil he revealed in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," in which he wrote about wrestling with his racial identity and using drugs -- including marijuana and cocaine -- to "push questions of who I was out of my mind." In a 1999 article written for the Punahou Bulletin, Obama said that as one of the few blacks in the school, "I probably questioned my identity a bit harder than most. As a kid from a broken home and family of relatively modest means, I nursed more resentments than my circumstances justified, and I didn't always channel those resentments in particularly constructive ways."

...After graduating from Columbia University and working in New York briefly, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He concentrated on black churches on the industrial South Side, an area crippled by the loss of steel mills and factories. "He had no trouble challenging power and challenging people on issues," says Gerald Kellman, the man who hired him to work for the Developing Communities Project. "When it came to face-to-face situations, he valued civility a great deal. When it came to negotiating conflict, he was very good." Obama befriended many of those he organized -- women his mother's age. "This man was so bright, but he didn't hit you over the head with it," recalls Loretta Augustine-Herron. "He explained things so nobody would be offended."

...After three years, Obama headed to Harvard Law School. Former classmates and professors remember him as a conciliator with sound judgment. "He wasn't someone that you simply wanted to read his class notes or hear his voice," says Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who served as a mentor to Obama and other black students. "You wanted to hear him thinking."

...Obama also made headlines when he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, perhaps the most prestigious legal journal in the nation. "He did not take that pound-on-my-chest attitude, 'Look at me, I'm the first one,'" says Earl Martin Phalen, a black classmate. "He was conscious of the historical significance but understood ... there was a responsibility." After graduation, high-powered job offers flooded in, but Obama joined a small civil rights firm in Chicago. He also lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School...==

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