文档介绍：Rip by XmosRips
Rip by XmosRips
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE: Republicans and Democrats
CHAPTER TWO: Values
CHAPTER THREE: Our Constitution
CHAPTER FOUR: Politics
CHAPTER FIVE: Opportunity
CHAPTER SIX: Faith
CHAPTER SEVEN: Race
CHAPTER EIGHT: The World Beyond Our Borders
CHAPTER NINE: Family
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Barack Obama
Copyright
Rip by XmosRips
Prologue
IT’S BEEN ALMOST ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at
the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with
life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I
run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a
anizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my
wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I
talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials,
beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the
street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of
the same two questions.
“Where’d you get that funny name?”
And then: “You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something
dirty and nasty like politics?”
I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier,
when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-e neighborhoods. It signaled a
cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism
that—at least in the South Side neighborhoods I sought to represent—had been
nourished by a generation of broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and
nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was—and always had
been