Learning about Barack

GETTING TO KNOW OBAMA ... Frankly, I hope you'll do a lot of reading, research and investigate Michelle Obama, too. They're certainly my pick!

I don't support everything about Barack Obama. I do, however, think he stacks up against any other candidate currently in the running. Iowa voters may be getting a little scared - the polls are a statistical dead heat right about now. But the power of momentum can change all of that. Check bill's history - winning every early state is not necessary. Winning the minds, support, money, energy and power of those who can impact change - in the community, in business, within genders, in families, that's what we need. Barack can do the job. He needs your support. (And maybe a few swift emails to his team, to remind them, let the leader lead. I'm all for a stronger end game at this point - because I think he has come w/thunder to close this final leg of the early race.)

Did you know?

During the April 2007 Democratic debate, Obama said that he trusts women to make their own decisions about whether or not to have an abortion "in conjunction with their doctors and their families and their clergy."

Obama says the death penalty "does little to deter crime" but he supports it for cases in which "the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage." While a state senator, Obama pushed for reform of the Illinois capital punishment system and authored a bill to mandate the videotaping of interrogations and confessions.

Obama says that he believes "marriage is between a man and a woman" but he wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he remains "open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided ... I may have been infected with society's prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God."

When he formally declared his run for the presidency, Obama said his goal is to implement universal health care, or government health insurance for all Americans, by 2012 or "the end of the first term of the next president." He has called the "belief in universal health care" one of the "core values" of the Democratic party.

Obama has said that he will "not support any bill that does not provide [an] earned path to citizenship for the undocumented population."

Since Obama was not a member of the U.S. Senate in 2002, he did not vote on the authorization of the use of force in Iraq. But he was an opponent of the war effort as an Illinois state senator and campaigned against the war in his 2004 Senate bid. In January 2007, Obama introduced the non-binding Iraq War De-Escalation Act with a goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008. The bill would allow a limited number of U.S. troops to remain in Iraq for counterterrorism and the training of Iraqi security forces.

In the Illinois Senate, Obama helped author the state earned income tax credit, which provided tax cuts for low-income families. Obama has supported bills to increase the minimum wage. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes what he calls America's "empathy deficit," writing that a "stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society."