“He’s as fantastic in person as he seems,” she said. “A truly extraordinary person: brilliant, magnetic, and humble. The sky’s the limit for him.”

OBAMA IN POLITICS

Obama became a state senator in Illinois in 1997. In 2000, he had a career low point, when he lost a race against Bobby Rush for U.S. Congress. Rush, a former Black Panther, ran as the incumbent, and many in the black community didn’t find Obama’s biracial heritage appealing.

But Obama’s likely victory for the U.S. Senate this fall could push the Democrats into control of the Senate.

Obama’s parents met as students at the University of Hawaii. His father, who shares his exotic and unusual name, moved back to Kenya, where he worked as a successful economist during Obama’s childhood. His mother, who is white and from Kansas, moved the family to Honolulu, where she raised Obama with her parents. Obama’s mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager, and the family moved to Jakarta for four years.

When he was 10 years old, Obama moved back to Hawaii, where he was raised primarily by his grandparents in a small apartment. His grandfather worked as a salesman and then an insurance agent, his grandmother at a bank.

Encountering academic success early on, Obama got himself into one of Hawaii’s top private schools, the Punahou School.

And though Obama saw his father only once during his childhood—he visited when Obama was 10 years old—he wrote a memoir about the father he never knew, entitled “Dreams From My Father,” in which he discusses his hybrid background and his teenage experimentation with marijuana and cocaine.

“I guess you’d have to say I wasn’t a politician when I wrote the book,” Obama told New Yorker writer William Finnegan in May. “I wanted to show how and why some kids, maybe especially young black men, flirt with danger and self-destruction.”

—Simon W. Vozick-Levinson contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.