Obama's main assignment as an organizer was to launch the church-funded Developing Communities Project and, in particular, to organize residents of Altgeld Gardens to pressure Chicago's city hall to improve conditions in the poorly maintained public housing project. His efforts met with some success, but he concluded that, faced with a complex city bureaucracy, “I just can't get things done here without a law degree.”
In 1988, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he excelled as a student, graduating magna cum laude and winning election as president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review for the academic year 1990-1991. Although Obama was a liberal, he won the election by persuading the journal’s outnumbered conservative staffers that he would treat their views fairly, which he is widely acknowledged to have done. As the first African American president in the long history of the law review, Obama drew widespread media attention and a contract from Random House to write a book about race relations. The book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), turned out to be mostly a personal memoir, focusing in particular on his struggle to come to terms with his identity as a black man raised by whites in the absence of his African father.
During a summer internship at Chicago’s Sidley and Austin law firm after his first year at Harvard, Obama met Michelle Robinson, a South Side native and Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who supervised his work at the firm. He wooed her ardently (as memorialized in another 2016 movie, Southside with You), and after a four-year courtship they married in 1992. The Obamas settled in Chicago's racially integrated, middle-class Hyde Park neighborhood, where their first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998 and their second daughter, Natasha (called Sasha), was born in 2001.
He then moved toward the political center to wage his general election campaign against Republican nominee Jack Ryan, an attractive candidate who, after making hundreds of millions of dollars as an investor, had left the business world to teach in an inner-city Chicago school. But Ryan was forced to drop out of the race when scandalous details about his divorce were made public, and Obama coasted to an easy victory against Ryan’s replacement on the ballot, black conservative Republican Alan Keyes. Obama won by the largest margin in the history of Senate elections in Illinois, 70 percent to 27 percent.
In addition to his election, the other highlight of 2004 for Obama was his wildly successful keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” he declared. “There’s a United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s a United States of America.” Obama encapsulated his speech’s themes of optimism and unity with the phrase, “the audacity of hope,” which he borrowed from Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright was the pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, a large and influential black congregation where Obama was baptized when he became a Christian in 1988. Obama also used the phrase as the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), which became a national bestseller in the wake of his newfound national popularity. Describing his religious conversion, Obama wrote, “I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”
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