Barack Obama: Experience a President Needs

Just 23 years old, Barack Obama was nicknamed "Baby Face" by mothers as he tried to organize poor people on Chicago's South Side to join together and pressure the city to fix potholes, clean parks and remove asbestos insulation from public housing.

Those small battles among the decayed neighborhoods and the unemployed left by departing steel mills and factories taught a naive new community organizer that politics included backroom deals not discussed in civics books. Those practical lessons formed the basis of his promise today to fix a broken political system and give people hope.

... Over three sometimes frustrating years on the South Side, Obama met community leaders and politicians who later provided crucial help for his political career, but he also concluded that to make real change he would have to leave the streets and study law.

"What Chicago did for him was teach him how to be practical," said Jerry Kellman, who hired Obama for the organizing job. "The world is not always an honest, nice place. If you want to do honest, nice things, you still have to understand what makes things move."

Today, Obama calls his work as a community organizer "the best education I ever had" and often cites it as one of the reasons he would make a good president.

"We have been told by the cynics that you can't build change from the bottom up. But one of the things that I've learned as a community organizer is that it is the American people who are the true agents of change in this country," he said in one speech.

... At times, Obama's goals were as small as getting a specific pothole repaired. It was a victory just to get administrators to tour the area's dilapidated parks and see for themselves that the sandboxes were littered with broken glass and the tennis courts lacked nets.

Other projects included trying to bring summer jobs to the area or get asbestos removed from a housing complex.

Obama's job was to explain to local residents how to research their problems, contact political officials and answer reporters' questions. He figured out who the community leaders were and tried to get them to join forces.

... Lloyd, one of the South Side women who treated Obama like a son, said she wasn't surprised he later ran for office.

"In the back of his mind," she said, "it was politics, I think that was always there ... because he wanted to see things change."