October 3, 2004

BY SCOTT FORNEK Staff Reporter

Barack Obama is by all accounts quite the Scrabble player, a shrewd strategist who knows just how to play those little letter tiles to capture that triple-word score.

But he's also "a big trash talker" in family tournaments, his wife says. And his younger sister calls him "an indelicate winner."

"He would crow like a rooster and flap his wings and make slam-dunk motions," says Maya Soetoro, 34.

Obama, 43, admits "when it comes to Scrabble I just can't help myself. . . . I've got a competitive nature."

But the Hyde Park Democrat is quick to add that he is not in politics "just because of the sport of it.

VITAL STATS BARACK OBAMA AGE: 43 EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree from Columbia University, 1983; law degree from Harvard Law School, 1991. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: journalist, 1983-84; community organizer in Harlem and Chicago, 1985-88; executive director of Project Vote, 1991; lawyer in private practice and senior lecturer at University of Chicago, 1992-present; state senator, 1997-present. PERSONAL: Married with two daughters, 6 and 3.

"There are other ways that are less stressful to exercise your competitive bent," he says. Still, "what is true is that I like to win."

Polls on the U.S. Senate race suggest Obama is poised to do just that -- big time. Surveys put his lead over Republican Alan Keyes as high as 51 percentage points. Even if that projection is 10 points too high, Obama's victory would still be the most lopsided popular election for the U.S. Senate in Illinois history.

Obama would also become the only African American in the U.S. Senate and only the third since Reconstruction.

Despite all those historic implications, Obama says he is not crazy about the tenor of the contest, saying "I believe in -- especially in politics -- the importance of friendly and honorable competition."

That's not how he views the campaign Keyes is running. The conservative former GOP presidential candidate has compared Obama's liberal positions to that of a "Marxist socialist," accused the Democrat of being "determined to make the world safe for criminals" and declared that Jesus Christ would not vote for Obama because of his support of abortion rights.

"I could not generate the anger and name calling that Mr. Keyes seems to have generated towards me -- somebody that I don't even know," Obama says.

While Keyes has gone nuclear on Obama, national news media outlets and commentators have treated the Democrat to a bonanza of glowing profiles. Even before he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, Obama had been touted as a political "rock star," future presidential candidate and someone who can help heal the nation's racial wounds.

Trying to get beyond the hyperbole on both extremes, the Chicago Sun-Times interviewed more than two dozen people who know Obama. The picture that emerges is that of a man whom friends and relatives describe as brilliant, inclusive and generous. (Yes, one childhood pal insists Obama did indeed literally give him the shirt off his back.)

But Obama also comes across as a determined competitor who has ruffled some feathers in past campaigns and a guy who -- despite the hype -- has a few bad habits. (Think dirty socks, unmade beds and a cigarette or two.)

"Not a perfect person," his wife says. "Close, but not perfect."

'A very different world'

Obama's life has been pretty well recounted in both his keynote speech and his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which is on the New York Times best-seller list in a reissued printing.

"It was a wonderful childhood in the sense that I saw the world very early," Obama says.

He was born in Hawaii to a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. They divorced, and Obama's father left Hawaii when Obama was 2. Obama's mother remarried and took Obama to her second husband's native Indonesia.

In his memoir, Obama writes of it as a great adventure, sampling "dog meat [tough], snake meat [tougher], and roasted grasshopper [crunchy]."

"He was forced to adapt to a very different world," Soetoro, a product of that second marriage, says of her brother.

A cultural anthropologist who has since died, Obama's mother sent her son back to Honolulu to live with her parents when he was about 10 so he could attend the prestigious Punahou School, an elementary and secondary school.

"He was just a basketball-happy little boy," says his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who turns 82 this month. "I think his ambition when he was young was to be a pro basketball player, but he didn't grow tall enough."

Mike Ramos, another childhood buddy, says Obama was also generous with material possessions. He remembers admiring a Batik dyed shirt Obama brought back from a trip to Indonesia. "And he goes, 'Here, you can have it,' and just gave it to me," says Ramos, 44.

"I don't know if he was actually wearing it at the time, but you know, literally the shirt off his back," Ramos says, chuckling at the memory.

'The fear I didn't belong'

Obama experimented with recreational drugs during his teen years, using marijuana and cocaine, but says he resisted a friend's offer to shoot up heroin.

"Junkie. Pothead," Obama writes in his memoir. "That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man."

Dunham remembers suspecting her grandson was experimenting.

"I had a few hints, and I think I talked to him a little bit about it. But it didn't seem overwhelming or prolonged," she recalls.

Obama says he wrote about his past drug use as a caution to other young people not to engage in self-destructive behavior.

"In terms of the politics of it, you know, I haven't had anything stronger than a martini since," he says. "And after two beers, I fall asleep."

The young Obama was also wrestling with other uncertainties. His memoir deals with his efforts to learn more about his father, who died in Kenya in a car accident in 1982, and his own quest for acceptance and belonging, as he battled "the constant, crippling fear that I didn't belong somehow."

Obama now attributes that to the normal uncertainties of adolescence magnified by the issues of coming from a multiracial and multicultural background.

"But I don't want to make it seem as if I was this constantly burdened and anguished kid," he says. "I was playing basketball and chasing girls and going to movies -- doing the things that young men do and enjoying myself a lot."

'Jordan was our metaphor'

Despite his steady change of addresses -- childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, college in Los Angeles and New York -- Obama says by 1990 he knew Chicago was home.

Obama attributes that to the "Midwestern sensibilities" he inherited from his Kansan born mother and grandparents and the community work he did in the 1980s in the Roseland neighborhood on the Far South Side.

"By the second year, I just really felt deeply connected to those people that I was working with," Obama says.

Altgeld Gardens resident Hazel Johnson, 69, worked with Obama in the Developing Communities Project on pushing the Chicago Housing Authority to remove asbestos from public housing and other issues. She remembers Obama renting a bus to take a group of residents downtown to protest at CHA headquarters.

"He even got us coffee and doughnuts," she said. "And he didn't have to do that."

Obama left in the late 1980s to attend Harvard Law School, where he made history by being chosen the first African-American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

"He certainly was outstanding and recognized as such right away at Harvard," says Rob Fisher, 50, a former Harvard classmate. "He ran circles around people in terms of his ability to absorb material and make arguments."

Fisher says Obama continued to unwind by playing and watching basketball.

"Michael Jordan was our metaphor for everything," Fisher says. "And what it meant was, you know, you might be very talented but also there's a competitive streak and a streak of focus and hard work that [Jordan] sort of epitomizes.

"So that's a big part of the story of who he is."

'Water under the bridge'

Obama's political rise over the last few months has seemed effortless, but the road has not been without a few bumps along the way. The first came in 1995.

State Sen. Alice Palmer opted to run in that year's special election to succeed convicted U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds. Palmer anointed Obama as her chosen successor, but after she lost the congressional race, she decided to seek re-election.

Obama refused to fold his campaign, saying that he only entered the race because Palmer had promised him she would not seek re-election. His supporters challenged Palmer's petitions, causing her to withdraw and essentially end her political career.

"There were those of us who felt that because she was an experienced state senator who was doing a good job, and he was a relatively young man at the time, he should step back," says Timuel Black, a veteran political activist who supported Palmer. "He just wouldn't step down, and that caused some friction that later we had to deal with. But we did."

Black, 86, a professor emeritus with the City Colleges, says he is now supporting Obama in the U.S. Senate race.

Four years after Obama was elected to the state Senate, Obama again raised eyebrows when he challenged U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary. Rush trounced Obama, but many saw Obama as a young man trying to move too quickly.

State Rep. Lovana "Lou" Jones (D-Chicago), a close friend of Palmer, says "I didn't like the way he was elected state senator. I didn't like the games that were played on Alice Palmer. I didn't like the fact that he thought he had enough pull to go after Bobby Rush."

But, like Black and Rush, Jones says she is now fully in Obama's corner. "That's all water under the bridge," she says.

Palmer declined to be interviewed for this article.

Obama called his congressional race "a humbling experience and a useful one" and credits Rush with giving him "a big spanking" at the polls. He is less eager to talk about Palmer.

"My preference would be not to revisit it too deeply," he says. "But I can tell you that it was an unfortunate situation, but one in which I operated completely aboveboard."

'Nothing for granted'

Obama lives in a first-floor condominium in a three-story walk-up in Hyde Park. He will be married 13 years this Sunday. He and his wife, Michelle, have two daughters, Malia, 6, and Sasha, 3.

When he's not campaigning, Obama likes to read, take walks and go to the movies. He takes out the garbage, and his chief household chore is grocery shopping.

But he's not so good on other chores. He leaves his dirty socks lying around. His briefcase and bags get dropped right inside the condominium's door, and his shoes could wind up anywhere.

And Obama does have one habit that drives his wife nuts. Michelle Obama says her husband smokes -- about three Marlboros a day.

"That is the dark underbelly of Barack Obama," she says laughing. "That and the sock thing."

Michelle Obama says despite all the talk about her husband running for president some day, he does not see himself that way.

"Barack is way too humble to even view himself that way," she says. "I think that's another thing that people don't realize about him. There's the boastful trash talker side of him that you can see when we're playing games, but deep down I think -- and this is one of the reasons why he worked so hard campaigning . . . he never takes anything for granted.

Obama insists his wife is exaggerating his smoking. He says he kicked the habit of being a regular smoker when their first daughter was born, but his wife worries about the occasional cigarette he bums on the campaign trail. "And I love her for being concerned," he says.

As for his competitive streak, Obama makes no apologies, saying "those of us who participate in sports seriously maybe understand the nature of healthy competition and know the boundaries and the limits of competition."

As for Scrabble, he says his wife and sister are no less obnoxious when they win.

"They just don't win as often," he says with a grin.

And if Obama does win on Nov. 2, he promises he won't take to the stage that night and crow like a rooster.

"I reserve that only for Scrabble against my sister and wife," he says.