The Lives of Barack ObamaAn interactive timeline by Slate.
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2008, at 5:22 PM ETThere are at least two versions of Barack Obama's life: There's his version—the story he tells in his speeches, op-eds, and books. Then there's the media's version—news articles, columns, and investigative pieces about him as he rose to prominence and since his presidential campaign began. We can learn a lot by comparing the two.
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StumbleUponTo that end, Slate has compiled Obama's speeches, his writings, contemporary news accounts of his life, and recent retrospective articles to show how Obama's life looks different depending on who's looking.
Everyone agrees on the basic facts of Obama's biography. But not everyone emphasizes the same points. In his speeches, Obama talks about his Chicago organizing days much more than his two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He mentions growing up in Hawaii more than he discusses his childhood in Indonesia. Some of that is just good storytelling. But some of it is deliberately curatorial. Obama visited his grandparents' home in Kansas during the campaign, for example, but friends from Harvard were discouraged from talking to the press. Despite his accomplishments at Harvard, Obama doesn't mention them once in the speeches archived on his Web site (although they are featured in his online biography). Likewise, the campaign rarely discusses his time working at a law firm in Chicago before entering the Illinois Senate.
The timeline below lets you examine Obama's life through various lenses. Click the tab along the top that says "Speeches" and you'll see how often he talks about each period of his life, with links to the speeches themselves. Click the "Autobiography" tab to see how much he writes about each era in his books. Click on "Recent News" to see how often newspapers and magazines dedicate to those periods. Or click "Contemporary News" to see how much coverage he got at the time. (Here's our methodology.)
We intend this to be an evolving tool. If we missed any major feature stories about Obama in Jakarta, for example, send them along. If you think there's a better way to measure the campaign's emphasis on different parts of his life, let us know. We'll update it as needed and see if the shape of Obama's life changes between now and November, and beyond.
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Remarks from the Fray:
Your editorial staff obviously has way too much time on its hands. I understand that true investigative journalism has given way to supermarket checkout "Gotcha!" stories, but surely there are more fruitful enterprises than tallying the number of self-references to various years to see what, if anything, might be lurking, unsaid. In fact, given the shrill and shallow nature of current political discourse, the mere fact that the bar graphs shows many periods with far fewer self-references than other periods is likely to be interpreted by a beetle-browed mutter of suspicion: "Huh! What is he trying to hide?"
I commend this uncharacteristically inane item in Slate to those who think that the press is devoted to supporting Obama. No, folks. The press is still reeling, 8 years later, from the most brilliant maneuver in the Rove repetoire -- accusing the media of liberal bias, which rhymes with anti-Americanism. Since then, the media have, with few exceptions, taken a hands-off approach to every jaw-droppingly blatant lie told by the Bush administration while simultaneously adopting a new policy of "Gotcha!" journalism in covering Democrats. This idiotic timeline is just part of that pattern.
--Steven Tiger
(To reply, click here.)
The lead on the front page reads: The Years of Obama's Life We Still Don't Know Enough About
Obviously that headline is a bit more sensationalist than: An interactive guide to Obama's life story.
At first I saw a conservative bias. They were obviously trying to have a gotcha moment. Then I thought, maybe it's a head fake. A liberal bias. Draw in the crowds looking to find something horrible in Obama's past and then show them that there is nothing there.
Finally, I saw it for what it probably is. A journalism bias. It is the journalistic equivalent of the freecreditreport.com commercials that advertise an amazing free service with a catchy jingle and then dump a monthly fee on the unsuspecting and uniformed.
Basically it promises something controversial and exciting and delivers neither.
--ArgusRun
(To reply, click here.)
Since this really is just an excuse to once again connect everything that Obama could have done when he was 3 to what he is doing now, Slate needs to do the same thing to McCain. That way we can get an accurate time line on his return from Viet Nam; cheating on, and then divorcing, his wife; his requesting a marriage certificate to marry Cindy while still married to his first wife; and then his marriage to Cindy. Plus the Keating 5, and his flip flops on issues so that he can get elected.
--allthingscode
(To reply, click here.)
I do not think that Slate's precis accurately summarizes Sen. Obama's years immediately after leaving Harvard. You say, "After Harvard, Obama returns to Chicago to practice civil rights law at the firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland and teach at the University of Chicago law school." But that's not quite accurate. There's a very long gap from law school graduation until Obama begins to be associated with any law firm. It would be useful to know exactly how many years actually passed between law school graduation and passing the bar/joining a firm. As Sen. Obama has acknowledged, his priorities in these years seem to have been (1) landing a large advance to write his first book (therefore avoiding the need to work at any law firm), and (2) wooing his future wife, already practicing law in Chicago. Fine goals, both of them. But markedly at odds with the experience of virtually every other Harvard Law grad who would have secured his/her offer of future employment (at the very latest) in September-November of their third year of law school. Typically, the offer comes from the prestigious law national firm that the student interned for over the previous summer. In this case, Sidley & Austin. Yet here, either Sidley made no offer of permanent employment, or else he turned it down in order to capitalize on his Time-magazine fueled national celebrity to obtain the book advance that allowed him to follow a different path.
If Sidley made no offer, that would be remarkable, and the reasons for their reluctance would be genuinely relevant to his biography.
Of course, it is likely that Obama interviewed with other national law firms and received additional offers of employment. Or did he? Did he completely eschew the traditional route of success for Harvard Law grads in order to devote himself to creating his autobiography? If so, that is VERY germane to the story of the man himself.
At least one thing we can be sure of. The scenario that Obama surrogate Bob Beckel propounded earlier this week at realclearpolitics.com did not happen, though it would have burnished the Obama bio immensely if it had. Obama did not, as Beckel wrote, turn down numerous offers from prestigious law firms in order to return to Chicago and work as a lowly-paid community organizer. Instead, as we now know, Sen. Obama cashed a large advance check and began to write his autobiography and create the larger than life figure we now know.
These years in his history have to be properly understood if we are to understand the man.
--dajhilton
(To reply, click here.)
(8/16)