Barack Obama
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"Barack" and "Obama" redirect here. For other uses, see Barak (disambiguation) and Obama (disambiguation).
For the Kenyan economist, Obama's father, see Barack Obama, Sr.
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Barack Obama
A portrait shot of a serious looking middle-aged African-American male (Barack Obama) looking straight ahead. He has short black hair, and is wearing a dark navy blazer with a blue striped tie over a light blue collared shirt. In the background are two flags hanging from separate flagpoles: an American flag, and one from the Executive Office of the President.
44th President of the United States
Incumbent
Assumed office
January 20, 2009
Vice President Joe Biden
Preceded by George W. Bush
United States Senator
from Illinois
In office
January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008
Preceded by Peter Fitzgerald
Succeeded by Roland Burris
Member of the Illinois Senate
from the 13th district
In office
January 8, 1997 – November 4, 2004
Preceded by Alice Palmer
Succeeded by Kwame Raoul
Born August 4, 1961 (1961-08-04) (age 49)[1]
Honolulu, Hawaii[2]
Political party Democratic Party
Spouse(s) Michelle Robinson Obama
Children Malia, Sasha
Residence White House (official)
Chicago, Illinois (private)
Alma mater Occidental College
Columbia University (B.A.)
Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Profession Community organizer
Lawyer
Constitutional law professor
Author
Religion Christian[3]
Signature Barack Obama
Website The White House
Barack Obama
This article is part of a series on
Barack Obama
Background · Illinois Senate · U.S. Senate · Political positions · Public image · Family · 2008 primaries · Obama–Biden campaign · Transition · Inauguration · Electoral history · Presidency (Timeline '09, '10, First 100 days) · Nobel Peace Prize
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Barack Hussein Obama II (Listeni /bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States, having taken office in 2009. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.
A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Democratic primary and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.
As president, Obama signed economic stimulus legislation in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 in December 2010. Other domestic policy initiatives include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. In foreign policy, Obama gradually withdrew combat troops from Iraq, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, and signed an arms control treaty with Russia.
In October 2009, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Contents
* 1 Early life and career
o 1.1 Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School
o 1.2 University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney
* 2 Legislative career: 1997–2008
o 2.1 State Senator: 1997–2004
o 2.2 U.S. Senate campaign
o 2.3 U.S. Senator: 2005–2008
+ 2.3.1 Legislation
+ 2.3.2 Committees
* 3 Presidential campaign: 2008
* 4 Presidency
o 4.1 First days
o 4.2 Domestic policy
+ 4.2.1 Economic policy
+ 4.2.2 Health care reform
+ 4.2.3 Gulf of Mexico oil spill
o 4.3 Foreign policy
+ 4.3.1 Iraq war
+ 4.3.2 War in Afghanistan
+ 4.3.3 Israel
o 4.4 2010 midterm election
o 4.5 Cultural and political image
* 5 Family and personal life
o 5.1 Religious views
* 6 Notes
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading
* 9 External links
Early life and career
Main article: Early life and career of Barack Obama
Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now called Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,[4] the first President to have been born in Hawaii.[5] His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas.[6] Of mostly English descent, her family also traces to Germany and Ireland;[7] his great-great-great grandfather was born in County Offaly.[8] His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang'oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.[9][10] The couple married on February 2, 1961,[11] separated when Obama Sr. went to Harvard University on scholarship, and divorced in 1964.[9] Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982.[12]
After her divorce, Dunham married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country, came to power in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the Menteng neighborhood of Jakarta.[13] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, including Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School.[14]
In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, and attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from the fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.[15] Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she went back to Indonesia to work as an anthropological field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year, before dying of ovarian cancer.[11][16]
A young boy possibly in his early teens, a younger girl (about age 5), a grown woman and an elderly man, sit on a lawn wearing contemporary circa-1970 attire. The adults wear sunglasses and the boy wears sandals.
Barack Obama and half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, in Hawaii (early 1970s)
Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[17] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[18] Reflecting later on his formative years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."[19] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."[20] At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his high-school drug use as a great moral failure.[21]
Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College.[22] In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental's divestment from South Africa.[22] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in India and Pakistan for three weeks.[22]
Later in 1981 he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations[23] and graduated with a B.A. in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation,[24] then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.[25][26]
Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School
Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.[26][27] During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[28] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[29] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.[30] He returned in August 2006 for a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near Kisumu in rural western Kenya.[31]
In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,[32] and president of the journal in his second year.[28][33] During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.[34] After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude[35] from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.[32] Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention[28][33] and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,[36] which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.[36]
University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney
In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book.[36][37] He then served as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004—teaching constitutional law.[38]
From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration drive with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, and led to Crain's Chicago Business naming Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.[39] In 1993 he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.[40]
From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the boards of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and of the Joyce Foundation.[26] He served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999.[26]
Legislative career: 1997–2008
State Senator: 1997–2004
Main article: Illinois Senate career of Barack Obama
Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District, which at that time spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park – Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn.[41] Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws.[42] He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare.[43] In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.[44]
Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election, and was reelected again in 2002.[45] In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.[46]
In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority.[47] He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained, and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations.[43][48] During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms.[49] Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in November 2004 following his election to the U.S. Senate.[50]
U.S. Senate campaign
See also: United States Senate election in Illinois, 2004
In May 2002, Obama commissioned a poll to assess his prospects in a 2004 U.S. Senate race; he created a campaign committee, began raising funds and lined up political media consultant David Axelrod by August 2002, and formally announced his candidacy in January 2003.[51]
Obama was an early opponent of the George W. Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq.[52] On October 2, 2002, the day President Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War,[53] Obama addressed the first high-profile Chicago anti-Iraq War rally,[54] and spoke out against the war.[55] He addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.[56]
County results of the 2004 race
Decisions by Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald and his Democratic predecessor Carol Moseley Braun to not participate in the election resulted in wide-open Democratic and Republican primary contests involving fifteen candidates.[57] In the March 2004 primary election, Obama won in an unexpected landslide—which overnight made him a rising star within the national Democratic Party, started speculation about a presidential future, and led to the reissue of his memoir, Dreams from My Father.[58]
In July 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts,[59] and it was seen by 9.1 million viewers. His speech was well received and elevated his status within the Democratic Party.[60]
Obama's expected opponent in the general election, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race in June 2004.[61] Six weeks later, Alan Keyes accepted the Illinois Republican Party's nomination to replace Ryan.[62] In the November 2004 general election, Obama won with 70% of the vote.[63]
U.S. Senator: 2005–2008
Main article: United States Senate career of Barack Obama
Obama delivering a speech at the University of Southern California, on October 28, 2006.
Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 4, 2005,[64] becoming the only Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus.[65] CQ Weekly characterized him as a "loyal Democrat" based on analysis of all Senate votes in 2005–2007. The National Journal ranked him among the "most liberal" senators during 2005 through 2007[66] (the ranking has been criticized by liberal groups such as Media Matters for America[67][68]). He enjoyed high popularity as senator with a 72% approval in Illinois.[69] Obama announced on November 13, 2008, that he would resign his Senate seat on November 16, 2008, before the start of the lame-duck session, to focus on his transition period for the presidency.[70]
Legislation
See also: List of bills sponsored by Barack Obama in the United States Senate
A man with glasses and Obama sit and hold a sheet of paper. Obama points at the paper and talks. Both men wear dark suits and ties.
Senate bill sponsors Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Obama discussing the Coburn–Obama Transparency Act
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