Sen. Barack Obama promised Thursday afternoon that his town hall meeting was the first of many as a part of his pledge to represent his constituency to Washington rather than the other way around.

“I wake up every morning thinking about you and your concerns,” Obama told the crowd of 300 people in the Illinois Terminal in Champaign.

Obama spent most of the hour-long session listening and responding to audience concerns, such as disproportionate taxation, schools failing No Child Left Behind standards, the inaccessibility of health care, threats to retirement funds, and President Bush’s impending veto of a stem cell research bill.

The most visible concern was the continued deployment of U.S. troops to Iraq. Anti-war protesters met Obama in the Illinois Terminal parking lot with posters critical of the senator’s reluctance to endorse an immediate pullout. After a short exchange of words with Obama, the protesters followed him all the way to the fourth floor ballroom of the terminal.

As Obama delivered his opening statement from the podium, a member of the Anti-War/Anti-Racism Effort walked the aisles passing out the group’s literature. Obama attempted to align himself with the protesters’ sentiments while defending his cautiousness toward a pullout.

“As many people know, I was strongly opposed to the war,” Obama said. “But I was also of the opinion that once we were in, we had some obligation to the Iraqi people as well as to our troops to … the best possible outcome from this bad decision.”

When pressed for a specific timetable on a pullout, the senator said that next year was possible under certain conditions. Rival factions would have to complete the constitution process, elections for a new government would need to be held, and Iraqi security forces must be better trained, Obama said.

Obama underscored the current limits upon his power as a junior senator ranked “99th in seniority.” But he hinted that his influence and impact could grow in time.

“I am not the president – yet,” Obama said, prompting loud cheers.

Sasha Ceinberg, an eighteen-year-old high school graduate, applauded Obama’s hint at a presidential run.

“Since I didn’t vote in the last election, I’m looking forward to the possibility of voting for him,” Ceinberg said.

About the man who is president, Obama had plenty to say. He railed against President George W. Bush’s two biggest domestic initiatives: social security privatization and the No Child Left Behind Act.

“George Bush left the money behind for No Child Left Behind,” Obama said.

After acknowledging the merits of the 2002 law that tied federal funding to student performance on standardized tests, Obama said that public schools needed higher levels of support to meet the higher demands.

“You can’t ask school districts that are struggling to keep their doors open to do more but not give more,” Obama said.

The senator questioned the methodology of measuring school achievement by testing student achievement alone without also accounting for progress. Obama compared the child of a college professor who is likely to receive a substantial education at home to the child of a high school dropout.

Teachers might have made terrific progress with the child of the high school dropout, Obama said. But the different starting points of the two students will never factor into the evaluation of school performance under No Child Left Behind criteria.

Obama claimed that President Bush ignored other realities in his recent bid to reform Social Security. A real solution to retirement security would address private pensions and individual savings in addition to Social Security accounts, Obama said.

Obama’s retirement policy embraced plans for encouraging Americans to save a larger percentage of their income through federal matching incentives. He also spoke of legislation in the works that would automatically enroll workers in defined contribution plans such as a 401(k) plan.

“If people don’t have to take [retirement money] out of our check, they typically don’t get in the habit of it,” Obama said.

Obama further maintained that Social Security “wasn’t broken” and was therefore a less urgent issue than other troubled federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

“Healthcare is the real ticking time bomb on the horizon,” Obama said referring to hospitals that regularly turn Medicare and Medicaid patients away because federal reimbursement is sluggish and unreliable.

Alan Kurtz, a campus business owner and a local Democratic partisan, agreed.

“Healthcare is already bankrupt, not 2050 like Social Security,” Kurtz said. The Bush administration’s calculators put Social Security’s collapse at 2042.

Kurtz, who attended the town meeting to support Obama and get the latest news from inside the Capitol, predicted Bush’s plans to privatize a portion of Social Security would remove $2 trillion from the system.

“How are they going to pay retirees then?” said Kurtz, who applied for Social Security the day before the town meeting.

Even younger members of the audience left the town hall meeting talking about retirement.

Ceinberg won’t be collecting Social Security any time soon. Still, he said he was impressed by the way Obama addressed healthcare and taxation.

“He makes people our age think about decisions that may not affect us for a while,” Ceinberg said.