Barack Obama, The New Face Of American Politics

The roots of President Obama's politics and presidential campaign strategy are traced in this up-to-the-minute, illustrated, political biography. The story ascends from Obama's successful 1996 run to represent Chicago's South Side in the Illinois Senate, through his failed challenge to the South Side's incumbent in the U.S. House in 2000, through his partial term as the junior U.S. senator from Illinois beginning in 2005, and his landslide election to the U.S. presidency in 2008. Dupuis and Boeckelman analyze in illuminating detail the critical ways in which the political calculus so brilliantly deployed in Obama's 2007-2008 national campaign was shaped by the lessons he learned from the successes and failures of his previous local and statewide campaigns.