Barack Obama took the nation by storm when he was elected as the first African-American president Nov. 4, 2008, with nearly 53 percent of the popular vote and better than a 2-to-1 margin in the Electoral College.

But can he do it again?

Polls show roughly half of Americans believe Obama has not made enough progress during his four years in office. The president argues that, in order to deliver true change, he needs more time.

Many experts think what happens this Nov. 6 will be determined by voter turnout. It’s not necessarily demographics, they say, for it’s pretty clear which segment of the electorate – racial, ethnic, income brackets – are most likely to be voting for Obama. It’s more a matter of which candidate, the incumbent or GOP nominee Mitt Romney – can turn out their true believers in the largest numbers.

Obama has worn many hats throughout his life: student, philanthropist, lawyer, professor, best-selling author and politician. His diverse and often complicated background has created much controversy with his opponents, as well as respect from his supporters. The many places he has called home, especially his adopted hometown of Chicago, have shaped him as a political figure.

Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Aug. 4, 1961. His mother, Ann Dunham, and father, Barack Obama, Sr., an exchange student from Kenya, met while they were both attending the University of Hawaii. The couple was briefly married, but separated shortly after Obama was born and officially divorced in March 1964. That same year, Obama, Sr., moved back to Kenya and remarried, causing him to be absent for nearly all of his son’s life.

When Obama was six-years-old, his mother, having married an Indonesian she met in Hawaii, took him to Djakarta, where he spent a significant part of his childhood. At the age of 10, he moved back to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and attend the private Punahou School. His mother made many sacrifices and at one time went on food stamps to ensure he had a top-notch education.

Throughout his many years of schooling, Obama grappled intellectually with the deeply rooted racism and class prejudices that seemingly exist within American society. He also started to come to terms with his identity – a racially-mixed man who bears his absent father’s Muslim name. He began his undergraduate degree at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Obama eventually transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he graduated in 1983 with a double major in English literature and political science.

Shortly after graduating from college, Obama turned down a promising job offer at an international consulting firm and moved to Chicago to become a community organizer. He agreed to an annual salary of $10,000, plus a car allowance. In his new position, he served as lead organizer for the Developing Communities Project on the South Side.

For four years, from 1984 to 1988, he assisted residents in and around the Altgeld Gardens public housing development in the city’s far south Roseland neighborhood, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. His issues focused on job training and public health, including the removal of asbestos from Altgeld and clean-up of landfills in the surrounding area.

Obama then headed to Harvard University to pursue a law degree. While in law school he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude in 1991, he returned to Chicago and began working at a law firm as a civil rights lawyer. Beginning in 1992, he spent over a decade teaching at The University of Chicago Law School.

Obama initially got involved in politics in 1991 when he led a voter-registration campaign as the director of Project Vote. Four years later, he made his first attempt at running for political office when he successfully challenged one of his former mentors, Alice Palmer, for her Illinois Senate seat.

“I think he saw that he could be a lot more effective if he was on the inside … handing out the money, rather than on the outside as the guy asking for the money,” said Edward McClelland, a journalist and author of “Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President.”

He was reelected to the Illinois Senate again in 1998 and 2002, but when he ran in the 2000 Democratic primary race for Illinois’ 1st Congressional district, he was handed an embarrassing defeat by Congressman Bobby Rush. However, in 2004 he ran for U.S. Senate and – after his strongest potential opponents dropped out the race – he won by a landslide.

Obama’s political career was truly launched with his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, in which the Senate candidate spoke poignantly about “one America.” The speech marked him as a potential candidate in the 2008 race for the presidency, with President George Bush stepping aside to create a wide-open race in both parties.

The rest, as they say, is history.

In his book, McClelland contends Obama and Chicago were the perfect combination to formulate the first black president of the United States. The concentration of African-Americans into safe electoral districts gave him the ability – and confidence – to succeed politically within an exceptionally short period of time.

Obama has advocated always grassroots efforts to bring about community organization and his background in community work has affected his policymaking.

“He thinks communally. He thinks about what’s best for everybody,” said McClelland. “As a politician he wants to lift up the people who are least among us. I mean, and that’s what he did as a community organizer. He worked among the very poorest people on the South Side of Chicago.”

As a community organizer, Obama was trained to listen in order to bring the people of the communities he was serving together.

“(Community organizers)have to sit there, and absorb, and pay attention,” said Hank DeZutter, a journalist who has met with and written about Obama. “They are true believers in democracy (…) they really think that the people should decide.”

So, not surprisingly, the accomplishments candidate Obama frequently points to are legislation and executives order that have promoted equal rights, equal pay and more opportunity for those previously denied same, such as women and members of the LGBT community.

Both McClelland and DeZutter describe Obama as being “professorial” and “emotionally-contained” – traits that may not have worked to his advantage in his first debate with Mitt Romney. They note, however, that he can be a captivating speaker who is also capable of thinking quickly on his feet… but at the same time is very careful with his words.

He also applies community-organizing techniques when speaking both to his constituents and adversaries.

“He’s someone who comes in quietly and listens to your questions, and then explores the question,” DeZutter said.

It remains to be seen, however, whether that approach can be effective bridging the deep, often bitter, divide between today’s Democrats and Republicans.

In the epilogue of Obama’s second book, “The Audacity of Hope” he wrote, “That was the best of the American spirit, I thought – having the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control – and therefore responsibility over our own fate.”

In many respects, the 2012 presidential election is a referendum on that proposition.

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Story from DePolitics2012.com, featuring work by DePaul communications graduate students.