The man who four short years ago addressed the Democratic party convention as a little-known state senator from Illinois will do so this August as his party’s nominee for president. It is the most rapid rise in the history of the Republic: not bad for the son of a Kenyan goat herder.
Barack Obama’s ascent is all the more remarkable for whom he has passed on the way up. Bill Clinton is the only Democratic president to have won two terms in the post-war era. Hillary Clinton has been marked out for greatness ever since her 1969 Wellesley commencement address; a speech that, in its time, received as much laudatory coverage as Obama’s one at the 2004 convention.
The Clintons had, over the years, assembled the most formidable political machine in modern Democratic politics. Obama was taking on a candidate who started with every conceivable advantage in terms of name recognition, organisation and fundraising.
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