‘Eventually … He May Run for Office’: TIME on Obama in 1990

The word “Obama” has now appeared in print in the pages of TIME about 3,500 times, and that’s only since 1990.

That comes out to an average pace of nearly three mentions per issue, but it’s actually a vast underestimate of how regularly Barack Obama—who was elected President of the United States six years ago, on Nov. 4, 2008—has appeared in TIME during his presidency.

An average drawn from more recent years would be much higher, since it took about 14 years for him to get another mention after his very first four-sentence blurb in the Feb. 19, 1990, issue.

But, though that story was short, it managed to pack in more than its fair share of prescience:

The rest is history (or, in this case, current events). Stay tuned to TIME.com today for complete 2014 Election Day coverage.