03/13/06

First-term U.S. senator Barack Obama to speak at the AP's annual luncheon

NEW YORK -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is the scheduled speaker for The Associated Press annual meeting luncheon in Chicago on April 3.

The first-term U.S. senator from Illinois is a vice chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He won a Grammy this year in the spoken word category for his readings from his autobiographical "Dreams From My Father," a memoir first published in 1995 that has become a best seller as his fame has rocketed.

Obama will be speaking at the Monday afternoon part of AP's annual meeting. The morning session will feature state-of-the-AP reports to representatives of member newspapers in the United States. AP's news presentation at the morning session is themed "The Politics of Oil."

Portions of AP's annual meeting, which will be hosted by Tom Curley, AP president and CEO, and Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, will be audiocast, including Obama's remarks to publishers and other newspaper representatives. Access details will be posted, when they become available, on the AP's corporate Internet site at www.ap.org

Obama was in the Illinois state Senate for seven years before winning the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2004. The national party took notice and selected him for his star-making turn at the Democratic convention soon after.

According to an AP-AOL poll earlier this year, Obama trailed only the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in support among blacks asked to name the nation's "most important black leader."

Read more about Sen. Obama on his Senate Web site at http://obama.senate.gov/about/

Contact: Jack Stokes, AP Corporate Communications, 212.621.1720