Obama, transformative president in the making
Business Times - 02 Apr 2009 Obama, transformative president in the making By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IF you were listening to some of the criticism directed against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama last year, you might have concluded that his detractors were confusing the African-American senator from Illinois who was raised by a young single mother of modest means and who had to study and work hard before being accepted by Columbia University and Harvard Law School with the scion of a wealthy WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) family from New England, who had studied in a prestigious preparatory school before his well-connected dad helped him get into an Ivy League university. Indeed, Mr Obama was depicted by some of his rivals as a salad-eating, Chardonnay sipping, over-educated and snobbish intellectual, who was out-of-touch with the concerns and values of hard-working 'regular folks' in the small towns and rural communities of America. Republican...