Shortly after his prime-time address electrified the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama (D-Ill.) steamrolled his Republican challenger in the Illinois Senate race to become only the third African American elected to the US Senate since Reconstruction.

The story of how the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a woman from Kansas became a wildly successful politician has already been bound and packaged into a hot-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, and Democrats are crossing their fingers that Obama can promote his life story just as effectively in a future presidential race.

Even before setting foot inside the Capitol, Obama, 44, was pelted with questions about the possibility that he would make a White House run. Obama maintains that he won’t consider it until completing his six-year Senate term, but bloggers and Beltway insiders alike continue to salivate at the idea that he will be on the Democratic ticket in 2012 or 2016.

Although he once joked that he’d need his first couple of months in DC just to locate the restrooms, Obama’s first six months in office have been productive. He introduced an amendment to the emergency supplemental bill that would ensure that wounded veterans didn’t have to pick up the tab for their meals at military hospitals; he helped increase the size of the Veterans Administration staff in Illinois by 27 percent; and he even attached a provision to the Senate energy bill providing $40 million for research on fuel-efficient new vehicles.