CHICAGO - Defeated, broke, and unsure what life held next, Barack Obama lumbered aboard the Abegweit, an old ferry docked in Lake Michigan off downtown Chicago. The day, in mid-2000, was luminous, the boat offering panoramic views of the city, the lake, and beyond. But the atmosphere was funereal: Obama had just lost badly in his bid for Congress, and he had organized this small fund-raiser to help retire his campaign debt.

"I felt like they were going to bring a casket out or something," said Dan Shomon, a top aide on Obama's past political campaigns.

Obama had established himself as an up-and-coming black politician with big dreams - a conciliatory figure whose promise held redemptive power for an America eager to transcend the divisive racial politics of yesterday. But his bruising loss to US Representative Bobby Rush in the March 21, 2000, Democratic primary, along with pressure from his wife to pursue a more predictable and lucrative career, left him facing hard choices.

He was a 38-year-old second-term state senator laboring under Republican leadership in Springfield, the state capital. Yet he lacked a clear political alternative. "Is Obama dead?" one Chicago commentator asked on radio. In his soul-search ing, Obama considered what today seems unthinkable: getting out of politics.

"I think he genuinely wondered: Should he even continue to pursue a political career?" said Martha Minow, who had taught him at Harvard Law School and become a friend.

Obama tried to imagine himself in different roles. He considered becoming president of the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago organization that gives out roughly $50 million a year to initiatives on the environment, poverty, violence, and schools. The position was high-profile, well paying, close to home, and appealed to his sense of public mission. Obama knew the foundation's work because he was on its board at the time.

But there was a catch: He would have to leave the state Senate, at least temporarily putting his political ambitions on ice.

"I think he really was at a point where he had to decide whether, look, am I going to be a behind-the-scenes policy guy, or am I going to follow up on Springfield with political actions?" said Carin Clauss, a Joyce Foundation board member at the time.

The foundation job was one of several alternatives to politics Obama weighed, including a full-time teaching job at the University of Chicago Law School, returning to full-time law practice, and even joining friends in the business world. None felt right.

"I think, in my heart, I wanted to continue in public service," Obama said in an interview.

Some of Obama's friends and advisers say he was morose after the loss to Rush; others recall his resilience. The congressional campaign gave him reason to feel both: He got a glimpse of what he could be as a political leader, but he had chosen the wrong race to break into national politics and not run a strong campaign.

"Barack didn't come out of this with a whole rosy picture," said Aldophus Kindle, a field operative for Obama in 2000 and 2004 who has known him for 20 years. "He was [angry] at himself, I believe, for committing to a race he didn't go ahead and deliver, and go ahead and win. It wasn't like Obama was sitting at the dinner table saying, 'OK, what next?' "

Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, with whom he is close, said: "He sort of agonized for a time about whether to give [politics] another shot, and at the same time, I think he felt a stirring within and the sense that he was destined for something bigger."

His destiny was hardly clear that day on the ferry. But what became clear, as the sting from the 2000 loss wore off, was that Obama and those behind him knew he had some political life left in him, knew he felt called to serve. He just needed a place to do it.

A POLITICAL EDUCATION

Obama's journey has cut an unlikely path, beginning in Hawaii and taking him to Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge, and finally Chicago, his home base for much of the past two decades.

He was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961 to a black Kenyan goatherder-turned-economist, Barack Obama Sr., and a white, aspiring anthropologist from Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham, who met at the University of Hawaii. His parents soon separated, and Obama's father returned to Kenya, leaving young Barack to be raised by Dunham and her parents, whom he called Toot and Gramps.

When his mother remarried, Obama moved with her and his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, to his stepfather's native Indonesia, where he lived until he was about 10. He then returned to Hawaii to live with his mother's parents. In high school in Honolulu, Obama went by the name Barry, liked the beach, and played basketball - but he also had a depth about him, "a rich interior life," his sister said.

After graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1983, Obama moved to Chicago for a community organizing job, inspired by the election that year of the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington, and the political awakening it seemed to represent. He wanted to be a force for change, empowering poor and middle-class families to stand up to the businesses, politicians, and bureaucrats who paid them little heed.

Obama plunged into Chicago's South Side, working closely with churches and community organizations. He tasted the frustrations of trying to make change only from the bottom - frustrations that drove him to Harvard Law School in 1988, with plans to return with a bigger toolbox.

He spent his first summer of law school interning in the Chicago office of the firm Sidley Austin, where his adviser was a first-year associate and recent Harvard Law School graduate named Michelle Robinson. To her, Obama was a talented and caring dreamer; to him, Robinson was a sharp, sensible daughter of the South Side whose more traditional upbringing he envied. They soon began dating.

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