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Time put him on the cover in October 2006, with a very positive cover story by Joe Klein. There was some less favorable coverage. The liberal writer Ezra Klein called him “a leader who’s never led” in the Los Angeles Times.
Some partisan Democrats criticized him for not taking up major issues; some Republicans complained that he had little experience. Some blacks complained that he was not “really black,” and he is not, like most American blacks, the descendant of American slaves and he grew up not in a black ghetto but in the nation’s most multiracial state.
Nonetheless in January 2006 Obama told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that, “I will serve out my full six-year term” and “I will not” run for president or vice president in 2008.
But in 2005 he hired Anita Dunn, one of Bill Bradley’s top staffers in his 2000 presidential campaign, and he spoke at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry in September 2006.
That same month, as he was campaigning for Democrats around the country, his 2004 primary opponent Dan Hynes wrote him an open letter urging him to run.
On Oct. 22, Obama appeared again on Meet the Press and told Russert that he had “thought about the possibility” of running for president.
In December 2006 he went, for the first time in his life, to New Hampshire, where he spoke to crowds of thousands. In January 2007 he announced he was setting up an exploratory committee, and in February he went to Springfield and announced he was indeed running.
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There’s that old expression:
if the truth were free, he’d pay a nickel to lie. It’s the core of his fabricated life.
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For archives:
Obama and U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) visit a Russian mobile launch missile dismantling facility in August 2005. (Passports of the American party were temporarily seized by the Russians.)