"It's where my parents met, where I was born and where I was raised, but most importantly it's the place where I learned the ability to relate to a lot of different people," said Obama, 42. "That has carried over and has had an impact on my politics."

The Harvard-educated law professor is heavily favored in his bid to become the fifth African-American U.S. senator in history. He says he feels lucky to have been raised in Hawai'i, and says that upbringing formed the basis of his values.

"Hawai'i's spirit of tolerance might not have been perfect or complete, but it was — and is — real," said Obama, the son of a black African father and Caucasian mother from Kansas, who met at the University of Hawai'i.

"The opportunity that Hawai'i offered — to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect — became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear," he wrote in a fall 1999 essay in the Punahou Bulletin.

Obama, a member of the Buffanblu state championship basketball team, received his bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University and was the first African American elected president of the Harvard Law Review.

He worked as a community organizer in New York and Chicago on job-training programs and other projects, and as a civil-rights lawyer in Chicago. He is now a senior instructor in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

"The irony is that my decision to work in politics, and to pursue such a career in a big Mainland city, in some sense grows out of my Hawaiian upbringing, and the ideal that Hawai'i still represents in my mind," he said.

If anyone wondered whom Maxine Goldstein, of Milledgeville, Ga., supports for president, her attire at the Democratic National Convention in Boston dispelled any doubt. Democrats kicked off their convention yesterday to officially nominate John Kerry for president. Associated Press

"But I was interested in working with low-income, urban communities, and felt I could make my biggest contribution on the Mainland," he said.

When his parents married in 1961, Hawai'i was as close as America got to being the world's melting pot, he said in his essay.

"Both my mother and father embraced the ideal of racial harmony that Hawai'i represented, and although their marriage proved short-lived, it was that ideal that my family continued to nurture in me throughout my early childhood," he wrote.

After his parents divorced, his father returned to Kenya. His mother remarried to an Indonesian, and he moved with her to Jakarta. There, he witnessed first-hand the gulf between rich and poor and the corruption that affects many Asian nations, he said.

"By the time I moved back to Hawai'i, and started school at Punahou, I had come to recognize that Hawai'i was not immune to issues of race and class, issues that manifested themselves in the poverty among so many native Hawaiian families, and the glaring differences between the facilities we at Punahou enjoyed and the crumbling public schools that so many of our peers were forced to endure," he wrote in his Punahou essay.

"I believe that the carefree childhood I experienced in Hawai'i, and the wonderful education I received at Punahou, should not be left to the luck of the draw, but should rather be every child's birthright," he said. "I believe that only in a country in which we can appreciate differences of race and religion and ethnicity, while still insisting on our common humanity, will my own soul feel rested."

Obama, whose first name in Swahili means "one who is led by God," was raised by his mother and grandparents at their home on Beretania Street.

Madelyn Dunham, Obama's maternal grandmother, said yesterday she's "a little overwhelmed" by the recent events and national attention surrounding her grandson.

"This has all come on the national level really fast," she said from her Honolulu home. "And of course, I'm proud of him. He's always been a very brilliant young man."

Dunham gave Obama, whom she described as "charismatic and very thoughtful," one piece of advice during a recent phone call.

"I told him to smile when he's on TV," she said. "He comes across better."

John Kamana III, a former all-state athlete at Punahou and Obama's basketball teammate, has described Obama as "just an all-around good guy" who was outgoing, intelligent and well-spoken.

"I don't think that running for the Senate is above what he would do as an individual," Kamana said shortly after Obama won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in March. "I think he always had it in him. ... Once he had locked onto something that he felt was the right thing to do, he'd go all the way."

Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters, Malia, 6, and Sasha, 3, return every Christmas to Hawai'i, where his grandmother and sister still live.

This year will be no different, even if he wins the Senate seat.

"Absolutely," he said. "I really will need a vacation. I look forward to getting up in the morning, driving to Sandy Beach and doing some bodysurfing and then getting a shave ice and plate lunch."

Obama will address the convention for about 20 minutes. He said his goal is to outline priorities including the right to retire with dignity and to have health insurance. He said his speech, which he wrote himself, will avoid bashing President Bush but will mention his own well-known opposition to the Iraq war.

Obama said he believes that the Bush administration has lost too much credibility in the global community to administer the policies necessary to stabilize Iraq.

"On Iraq, on paper, there's not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago," Obama said. "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute."

The problem, Obama said, is the low regard for Bush in the international community.

"... I am skeptical that the Bush administration, given baggage from the past three years, not just on Iraq ... I don't see them having the credibility to be able to execute. I mean, you have to have a new administration to execute what the Bush administration acknowledges has to happen."

"It's an enormous privilege," Obama said of giving the speech. "As my wife suggested, I'd better not screw it up."