LEADERSHIP

Leadership Skills and Communication Skills

Barack Obama - The President: Leadership Skills and Communication Skills

Introduction

Leaders are thought to be the backbone from which everything is achieved. They can be described as people who guide others toward a common goal, showing the way by example, and creating an environment in which other team members feel actively involved in the entire process. A leader is not the boss of the team but, instead, the person that is committed to carrying out the mission of the Venture. President Obama is what we may term “modern day leader” and in its own right and dominion has established solid grounds for the leadership ability. In 1990, Barack Obama attended Harvard Law School and became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama returned to Chicago and married fellow Harvard Law graduate, Michelle Robinson, a native of Chicago's South Side. He practiced civil-rights law for a small public-interest firm, representing victims of employment and housing discrimination, and taught classes at the University of Chicago's law school. But Obama was waiting for an opportunity to become involved in politics. In 1992, he was a political asset to the Democratic Party, organizing a voter-registration drive and adding 150,000 voters who helped Bill Clinton carry Illinois in his presidential race against George H. W. Bush (Hoagland, 2009).

Obama ran for state senate and won in 1996, though he lost a 2000 bid for a U.S. House seat to former Black Panther Bobby Rush, who labeled Obama an opportunist, Harvard elitist, and an outsider who did not understand the challenges facing African Americans of the South Side. Yet, Obama was a popular state legislator and successfully fought for death-penalty reforms and health care for poor children. Obama won over the more-liberal wing of the Democratic Party when he gave a rousing speech at a 2002 antiwar rally, opposing U.S. intervention in Iraq. In 2003, Obama launched a campaign for the U.S. Senate for Illinois. He handily beat his opponent, millionaire Brian Hull, in the Democratic primary after the media revealed that Hull's former wife had issued a restraining order against him. Jack Ryan, Obama's Republican challenger, withdrew from the race when reporters discovered that his former wife had complained of his sexual fetishes during their divorce proceedings. Ryan's replacement, Alan Keyes, was a powerful politician, but most voters abandoned him following his strange attacks on gays, calling homosexuality “selfish hedonism,” and other bizarre antics. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama gave an electrifying opening speech, catapulting his Senate race to the national spotlight (Boeckelman, 2008).He claimed to embody the American Dream, living in a nation where a “skinny kid with a funny name” could work hard and succeed: “In no other country on earth is my story even possible.” He presented a version of America many voters wanted to see, a country that could transcend racial tensions, economic inequality, social injustice, and corruption. Both Democrats and Republicans rushed to claim Obama after the ...