Obama forged path as Chicago community organizer

In a presidential campaign focused on the future, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama spend a lot of time talking about their pasts.

Both lean heavily on tales of early, formative experiences - she running a law clinic in Arkansas, he as a community organizer in Chicago - to show they understand the problems of average people.

Now the race for the Democratic nomination is coming down to its decisive contests, with Clinton locked in a do-or-die struggle to wrest that prize from an increasingly confident Obama, who appears poised to make history.

Voters in battleground states such as Ohio and Texas are still trying to take the measure of the two contenders - and for both candidates, these vignettes are a critical part of forging bonds with fellow Democrats.

Obama, for instance, grew up in Hawaii and briefly lived in New York - but returns time and again in speeches to the streets of Chicago's far South Side, where he tried to help residents of the city's forgotten neighborhoods build a better life.

He offers that time to illustrate his real-life experience - a gritty counterpoint to Clinton's time in Washington, a way to combat charges that his stints in the Illinois state legislature and the U.S. Senate don't add up to the foundation to be president.

For Clinton, her time in Arkansas is a key component of the argument that her three decades of public service have prepared her to be president on Day One.

As the first woman with a serious chance to lead the nation, it's a way for her to demonstrate how she fought to improve the lives of families and children.

CHICAGO - An unlikely visitor came calling one day in 1986 at the offices of the tony Chicago conservation group Friends of the Parks: a gangly, boyish community organizer from the rough-and-tumble far South Side named Barack Obama.

Dressed in a black leather bomber jacket, he made his pitch softly and earnestly to the group's community planner. Parents in the blighted, minority neighborhoods where he worked were desperate for safe, inviting play areas for their kids, but they lacked clout. Friends of the Parks had clout but sought ways to increase its efforts for minorities.

Together, Obama argued, the two groups could persuade Chicago's recalcitrant parks district to improve green areas on the far South Side, which had been devastated by steel-plant closings.

The meeting was scheduled to last 30 minutes but stretched to two hours, recalls Johnny Owens, the community planner. "He had an air of authority and a presence that made you want to listen," Owens said.

It was the first step in an informal partnership between Obama's constituents and Friends of the Parks that led to renovations and increased security in a handful of far South Side parks and playgrounds.

Ensuring that swings have seats and sandboxes are free of glass might not seem requisite skills for a man who could be president of the United States. But associates say Obama's approach to the unglamorous task illustrates his style as a community organizer - an experience he cites as "the best education I ever had," qualifying him to unite a racially and socially fractured nation and "create change from the bottom up."

"Barack realized that to get things done, you need to mobilize people in a collaborative way," said Gerald Kellman, the Chicago community organizer who hired Obama to work in the far South Side in 1985.

"He was a bridge-builder," recalled Friends of the Parks president Erma Tranter.

A tour of Obama's far South Side haunts and interviews with past associates paint a somewhat more complex picture.

A few critics claim Obama, now 46, exaggerates his accomplishments, particularly in spearheading asbestos cleanup at a low-income housing project. He omits from his account of that fight a longtime community activist who many people say played a significant role.

And for all his emphasis on the value of grassroots organizing, Obama eventually decided he also needed a law degree to enact lasting change, attending Harvard University. Many associates also view his seven years in the marbled halls of the Illinois State Senate and three years in the U.S. Senate to be as formative as his three years in far South Side trenches.

Further blurring the picture are his descriptions of community organizing in his youthful memoir, "Dreams From My Father," in which he admits he disguises names, creates composite characters, switches some chronologies and uses "approximations" of dialogue.

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