Iranian papers praise president’s letter to Obama

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TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s president is attracting some support at home for his message of congratulations to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, which several newspaper commentaries said Tuesday presented an important opportunity.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s message, sent last Thursday, was the first time an Iranian leader has offered such wishes to the winner of a U.S. presidential election since the two countries broke off relations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy.

Most recently, the two nations have been deeply at odds over Iran’s nuclear program and what Washington says is Iran’s support for Shiite militias in Iraq — a charge that Iran denies.

The state-owned Khorshid newspaper said Ahmadinejad’s message “shattered America’s incorrect view” that the Iranian president is not open the world.

The independent Etemaad newspaper said, “The message could create an important opportunity for both sides.”

Another independent newspaper, Etemad-e Melli, reported that Ahmadinejad’s press adviser, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, expected Obama to give “a deserving answer to the message as soon as possible.”

The American president-elect on Friday confirmed having received Ahmadinejad’s letter and said he would review it and “respond appropriately.”

In his first news conference since last week’s election, Obama declined to say Friday what proposals he might pursue in connection with Iran, but called the country’s alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons unacceptable.

“We have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening,” Obama said.

Iran says its nuclear program is intended only for peaceful purposes such as energy production.

Ahmadinejad’s outreach to the United States’ next president did have some critics at home among hard-line newspapers and lawmakers who said it made Iran appear weak.

The Iranian president has been under fire recently over the country’s weakening economy.

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Reference:http://news.yahoo.com/

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YES,Finaly Barack Obama …

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Barack Obama made history on 4 November 2008 when he defeated Republican rival John McCain to become the first black president of the United States.

He had already broken new ground in his White House campaign, as the first black candidate to become the presidential choice of either major US party.

To many people, Mr Obama seemed to come from nowhere. Although he had served in the Illinois state senate for eight years, it was only in 2004 that he shot to national prominence, with a speech that stirred the Democratic National Convention.

And it was only in the two years leading up to the election that his name, face and story became known beyond America.

The senator clinched the Democratic nomination after a long and gruelling battle against former first lady Hillary Clinton – a contest that gripped the US from January to June 2008.

In the course of campaigning, Senator Obama broke all records for fundraising, by harnessing the internet to collect huge numbers of small donations, as well as larger sums from corporate donors.

He has also demonstrated the ability to gather crowds of 100,000 people or more to his rallies, and to generate a buzz seldom seen in US politics.

Shortly after his presidential victory was confirmed, he addressed a cheering mass in his home city of Chicago.

“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America,” he said.

Media darling

Mr Obama, 47, electrified the 2004 Democratic National Convention in a speech about self reliance and high aspiration.

The son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, he emphasised his personal history in a speech reflecting traditional American ideals of self-reliance and aspirations.

“Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place – America, which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before,” he said.

After his landslide US Senate election victory in Illinois a few months later, he became a media darling and one of the most visible figures in Washington, with two best-selling books to his name.

He won the early backing of talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, who not only urged him to declare his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on her programme but appeared on the campaign trail with him.

As a senator, Mr Obama established a firmly liberal voting record, but also worked with Republican colleagues on issues such as HIV/Aids-education and prevention.

An early critic of the Iraq war, he spoke out against the prospect of war several months before the March 2003 invasion.

His bid for the presidency was endorsed by such senior Republican figures as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesman for President George W Bush.

Mrs Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, also rallied behind Mr Obama in the months after he won the nomination and campaigned on his behalf.

International upbringing

Mr Obama is named after his father, who grew up in Kenya herding goats but gained a scholarship to study in Hawaii.

There the Kenyan met and married Mr Obama’s mother, Ann, who was living in Honolulu with her parents.

When Mr Obama was a toddler, his father got a chance to study at Harvard but there was no money for the family to go with him. He later returned to Kenya alone, where he worked as a government economist, and the couple divorced.

When Mr Obama was six, his mother married an Indonesian man and the family moved to Jakarta.

Although his father and step-father were Muslim, Mr Obama is a Christian and attended secular and Catholic schools during the four years he lived in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country.

He then moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend school.

Mr Obama went on to study political science at Columbia University in New York, and then moved to Chicago where he spent three years as a community organiser.

In 1988 he left to attend Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

After Harvard, Mr Obama returned to Chicago to practise civil rights law, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination. He served in the Illinois state senate from 1996 to 2004.

He is married to a lawyer, Michelle, and they have two young daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Race

The senator attended the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for almost two decades but broke away from it in May 2008 after controversial sermons by Trinity preachers hit the headlines.

The Rev Jeremiah Wright was quoted as saying the 9/11 attacks were like “chickens coming home to roost” and that God should damn America for treating black people as “less than human”.

Seeking to defuse the uproar, Mr Obama tackled the issue of race directly, calling on the US to move beyond its long history of racial inequality.

“The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races,” he said.

Mr Obama used to joke that people were always getting his name wrong, calling him “Alabama” or “Yo Mama”.

Now, as he waits to be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, it seems unlikely that many will continue to make such a mistake.

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Reference:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3936013.stm

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In Statehouse, Obama quietly made own way

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He kept his work close to the vest

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By Christi Parsons | Tribune correspondent
October 31, 2008
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Word around the Illinois Statehouse was that Barack Obama, a young legislator from Chicago, had been negotiating an important death penalty bill.
But when he was asked about it one day in spring 2003, the young state senator’s smiling face turned to granite, and he ended the conversation with a terse goodbye. “When there’s something to know,” he told a Tribune reporter, “I’ll let you know.”
It was an odd response for a little-known state lawmaker, a type usually all too eager to have newspapers document what they’re up to. But that’s how Obama operated in Springfield, pretty much from the time he arrived.

From the beginning, he played the game differently from most. Other lawmakers chased the Statehouse beat reporters who could publicize their causes and their names.

In fact, few in those early days—legislators, reporters, lobbyists—pegged Obama as a star destined to explode onto the national scene. He wasn’t a party leader and he wasn’t a behind-the-scenes player; he wasn’t a journalist’s go-to person.

Yet Obama, in retrospect, handled himself as though he expected this all along. Most lawmakers focused on the events of the day, the usual route to power in the General Assembly. Obama, in contrast, quietly nurtured relationships with power brokers and influential editors, and focused on building a record that would help him far beyond.

When Obama arrived in the Illinois Senate, he was a member of the Democratic minority, laboring under the heavy-handed rule of powerful suburban Republicans. Unable to take the lead on major issues, he worked mostly in obscurity.

No matter how little power the Democrats had in those days, Obama still had the right to speak on the floor during debate. A constitutional law lecturer from the University of Chicago, Obama quickly emerged as a voice of dissent. Still, while he would spell out his opinion, he usually wasn’t interested in discussing the other side’s viewpoint.

He declined to play the game in other ways also, as though he considered himself above it or wanted to preserve appearances for some future endeavor. Even after Democrats took over the Illinois Senate and Obama achieved a little more power, for instance, he avoided slipping reporters helpful inside details.

He was at pains not to even look like he was whispering to the press. When an interview started in a quiet hallway outside a committee room, Obama would often move the conversation to the highly public cavern of the Rotunda.

It’s an unusual distinction for a politician of his current stature. Thanks to an unusual series of events that propelled him upward—messy divorce stories felled two opponents for the U.S. Senate at key moments—Obama has risen to prominence without ever having to cultivate reporters.

Instead, he invested time and energy in writing a memoir that, years down the road, would take off and spread his message.

And he will always be able to point to a few key legislative accomplishments from those early years, like his participation in an ethics reform law stringent enough to raise the ire of fellow lawmakers.

There was also the law he pushed requiring police in Illinois to record interrogations and confessions—the measure he didn’t want to talk about that day in spring 2003. The talks were sensitive, involving police, prosecutors, civil liberties groups and victims’ advocates. Obama was trying to work out a deal that brought them all on board.

He said at the time that he didn’t want to mess up the talks by discussing them. He wouldn’t even talk about it off the record with the Tribune.

It would have been a big story for the Tribune. The paper had documented numerous cases of wrongful or questionable capital convictions, work that led to the commutation of the sentences of more than 160 men on Illinois Death Row.

In the eyes of many voters, Barack Obama has come of age in the short span of two years, miraculously fired in the crucible of this presidential campaign. The fact is, he has been practicing for a very long time, learning his lessons in relative anonymity.

As he determined from the beginning, he’d let people know what he was up to on his own time.

That time, it seems, is now.

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reference:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama-legislatureoct31,0,928290.story

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Obama win preferred in world poll

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Most thought US relations would get better under a president Obama

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Some 30% of Americans expected relations to improve under Mr McCain

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People outside the US would prefer Barack Obama to become US president ahead of John McCain, a BBC World Service poll suggests.

Democrat Mr Obama was favoured by a four-to-one margin across the 22,500 people polled in 22 countries.

In 17 countries, the most common view was that US relations with the rest of the world would improve under Mr Obama.

If Republican Mr McCain were elected, the most common view was that relations would remain about the same.

The poll was conducted before the Democratic and Republican parties held their conventions and before the headline-grabbing nomination of Sarah Palin as Mr McCain’s running mate.

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says the results could therefore be a reflection of the greater media focus on Mr Obama as he competed for the presidential candidacy against Hillary Clinton.

The margin of those in favour of Mr Obama winning November’s US election ranged from 9% in India to 82% in Kenya, which is the birthplace of the Illinois senator’s father.

On average 49% preferred Mr Obama to 12% in favour of Mr McCain. Nearly four in 10 of those polled did not take a view.

On average 46% thought US relations with the world would improve with Mr Obama in the White House, 22% that ties would stay the same, while seven per cent expected relations to worsen.

Only 20% thought ties would get better if Mr McCain were in the Oval Office.

The expectation that a McCain presidency would improve US relations with the world was the most common view, by a modest margin, only in China, India and Nigeria.

But across the board, the largest number – 37% – thought relations under a president McCain would stay the same, while 16% expected them to deteriorate.

In no country did most people think that a McCain presidency would worsen relations.

Oddly, in Turkey more people thought US relations would worsen with an Obama presidency than under Mr McCain, even though most Turks polled preferred Mr Obama to win.

In Egypt, Lebanon, Russia and Singapore, the predominant expectation was that relations would remain the same if Mr Obama won the election.

The countries most optimistic that an Obama presidency would improve ties were US Nato allies – Canada (69%), Italy (64%), France (62%), Germany (61%), and the UK (54%) – as well as Australia (62%), along with Kenya (87%) and Nigeria (71%).

When asked whether the election as president of the African-American Mr Obama would “fundamentally change” their perception of the US, 46% said it would while 27% said it would not.

The US public was polled separately and Americans also believed an Obama presidency would improve US ties with the world more than a McCain presidency.

Forty-six per cent of Americans expected relations to get better if Mr Obama were elected and 30% if Mr McCain won the White House.

A similar poll conducted for BBC World Service ahead of the 2004 US presidential election found most countries would have preferred to see Democratic nominee John Kerry beat the incumbent George W Bush.

At the time, the Philippines, Nigeria and Poland were among the few countries to favour Mr Bush’s re-election. All three now favour Mr Obama over Mr McCain.

In total 22,531 citizens were polled in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Turkey, the UAE and the UK. A parallel survey was conducted with 1,000 US adults.

Polling firm GlobeScan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes carried out the survey between July and August.

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