Barack Obama For President

Everybody saw it coming, but when it was announced last week that one of America's most mixed personalities, US Senator Barack Obama would be seeking Democratic Party nomination for the presidency, it still sent shock waves down the political landscape.

Why is that? Is it for his mixed-racial background? His mixed-religious education? Mixed cultural pedigree? Mixed political profile? Or is he truly the new face of the Democratic Party in the United States of America?

No doubt, Obama's biography, once wrote Scott Turow, “is both intriguing and inspiring, an American story for he 21st century". The resume detail that initially caught wide attention was his election in 1990 as the first African-American president (that is editor-in-chief) of the Harvard Law Review, the premier legal academic publication in the United States.

Geffen's beef with Clintons is former president's decisions on pardons

Democratic sources believe that the harsh response by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign to criticism by Hollywood producer David Geffen stems from an overreaction by Bill Clinton to any attack on his pardon policy as president.

Geffen sniped at the Clintons in his interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd because President Clinton had pardoned financial contributor Marc Rich instead of American Indian activist Leonard Peltier. Geffen, a longtime backer of Bill Clinton, is backing Sen. Barack Obama for president.

The movie mogul's comments marked the first time Bill Clinton had been subjected to an attack from his party since the 1992 campaign. The former president was reported as infuriated, raising the question of whether he will rise to the bait in any further intraparty criticism of his wife.

Did Obama take too much credit?

LOS ANGELES -- Worried about a pending potentially negative Los Angeles Times story, Barack Obama's presidential campaign assigned its top researcher the job of tracking down people Obama worked with when he was a community organizer in Altgeld Gardens -- some the basis of composite characters in his memoir, Dreams From My Father.

Obama changed names of real people, created composite characters and re-created conversations in his best-selling memoir.

That article ended up on Page 1 of Monday's Los Angeles Times, hitting as Obama started a two-day fund-raising blitz in California, topped off this evening with a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills hosted by Hollywood's David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg.

Times staff writer Peter Wallsten raised the question in his story of whether Obama took too much credit in helping residents of Altgeld Gardens fight the Chicago Housing Authority over asbestos removal in the South Side complex in the 1980s.