文章背景介绍

●Barack Obama

Barack H. Obama

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

●Red States and blue states

Red States and Blue States refer to those states of the United States whose residents predominantly vote for the Republican Party (red) or Democratic Party (blue) presidential candidates.

This terminology came into use in the United States presidential election of 2000 on an episode of the Today show on October 30, 2000. The terms were coined by journalist Tim Russert, during his televised coverage of the 2000 presidential election. That was not the first election during which the news media used colored maps to graphically depict voter preferences in the various states, but it was the first time a standard color scheme took hold.

●John McCain

John McCain was born at the Coco Solo Naval Station in Panama on August 29, 1936. The son of an Admiral, McCain enrolled in the Naval Academy and was dispatched to Vietnam, where he was tortured as a prisoner of war between 1967 and 1973. After his release, McCain served as a Republican congressman and senator from the state of Arizona. McCain lost the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama.

●Joe Biden

Born in Pennsylvania on November 20, 1942, Joe Biden briefly worked as an attorney before turning to politics. He became the fifth-youngest U.S. senator in history as well as Delaware's longest-serving senator. His 2008 presidential campaign never gained momentum, but Democratic nominee Barack Obama later selected him as his running mate. When Obama was elected in 2008, Biden became the 47th vice president of the United States. Biden earned a second term as vice president when President Obama was re-elected to the presidency in 2012.

●Main Street

Wall Street and Main Street are metaphors now in common use to distinguish between two sharply contrasting economic models with sharply contrasting priorities, values, institutions, and interests.

Main Street refers to local economies comprised of entrepreneurial local businesses and working people engaged in producing real goods and services to provide a livelihood for themselves, their families, and communities. Main Street enterprises vary in their priorities and values. Their legal forms range from sole proprietorships and family businesses to cooperatives, worker and community owned corporations, and nonprofits.

●Ann Nixon Cooper

Ann Nixon Cooper, 106 years old, has seen presidents come and go in her lifetime and has outlived most of them. On a sunny fall morning, she left her weathered but well-kept Tudor home in Atlanta, Georgia, to vote early -- this time for Barack Obama.

The African-American centenarian remembers a time not long ago when she was barred from voting because of her race. Now she hopes to see the day that Obama is elected as the nation's first black president.

●New Deal

The New Deal was the set of federal programs launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after taking office in 1933, in response to the calamity of the Great Depression.

It had four major goals and achievements:

Economic Recovery: The New Deal stabilized the banks and cleaned up the financial mess left over from the Stock Market crash of 1929. It stabilized prices for industry and agriculture, and it aided bankrupt state and local governments. And it injected a huge amount of federal spending to bolster aggregate incomes and demand.

Job Creation: One in four Americans was out of work by 1933. The New Deal created a number of special agencies that provided jobs for millions of workers and wages that saved millions more in their desperate families. It also recognized the rights of workers to organize in unions.

Investment in Public Works: The New Deal built hundreds of thousands of highways, bridges, hospitals, schools, theaters, libraries, city halls, homes, post offices, airports, and parks across America—most of which are still in use today.

Civic Uplift: The New Deal touched every state, city, and town, improving the lives of ordinary people and reshaping the public sphere. New Dealers and the men and women who worked on New Deal programs believed they were not only serving their families and communities, but building the foundation for a great and caring society.