Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II ; born August 4, 1961 is an American politician who served as a 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He was the first African-American president of the United States. A bit of the Democratic Party, he ago served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the number one black president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating, he became a civil rights attorney & an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Turning to elective politics, he represented the 13th district in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate. Obama received national attention in 2004 with his March Senate primary win, his well-received July Democratic National Convention keynote address, and his landslide November election to the Senate. In 2008, a year after beginning his campaign, and after aprimary campaign against Hillary Clinton, he was nominated by the Democratic Party for president. Obama was elected over Republican nominee John McCain in the general election and was inaugurated alongside his running mate Joe Biden, on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, he was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a decision that drew a mixture of praise and criticism.

Obama signed many landmark bills into law during his first two Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. The military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

After winning re-election by defeating Republican opponent Mitt Romney, Obama was sworn in for aterm on January 20, 2013. During this term, he promoted inclusion for LGBT Americans. His management filed briefs that urged the Supreme Court to strike down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges; same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015 after the Court ruled so in Obergefell. He advocated for gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, indicating assist for a ban on assault weapons, and issued wide-ranging executive actions concerning global warming and immigration. In foreign policy, he ordered military interventions in Iraq and Syria in response to gains present by ISIL after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, promoted discussions that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement on global climate change, oversaw the deadly Kunduz hospital airstrike, drew down U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2016, initiated sanctions against Russia coming after or as a or situation. of. the Annexation of Crimea and again after interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, brokered the Joint Comprehensive schedule of Action nuclear deal with Iran, and normalized U.S. relations with Cuba. Obama nominated three justices to the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were confirmed as justices, while Merrick Garland was denied hearings or a vote from the Republican-majority Senate. Obama left institution on January 20, 2017, and submits to reside in Washington, D.C.

During Obama's terms as president, the United States' reputation abroad, as well as the American economy, significantly improved. Scholars and historians shape him among the upper to mid tier of American presidents. Since leaving office, Obama has remained active in Democratic politics, including campaigning for candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, appearing at the 2020 Democratic National Convention and campaigning for Biden during the 2020 presidential election. outside of politics, Obama has published three bestselling books: Dreams from My Father 1995, The Audacity of Hope 2006 and A Promised Land 2020.

Early life and career

Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Nyang'oma Kogelo. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language classes at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship. The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months ago Obama was born.

In unhurried August 1961, a few weeks after he was born, Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, Barack's father completed his undergraduate measure in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962. He left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned an M.A. in economics. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964. Obama Sr. covered to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the Senior Economic Analyst in the Ministry of Finance. He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas 1971, before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old. Recalling his early childhood, Obama said: "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." He allocated his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.

In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro at the University of Hawaii; he was an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography. The couple married on Molokai on March 15, 1965. After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966. His wife and stepson followed sixteen months later in 1967. The vintage initially lived in the Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet district of South Jakarta. From 1970, they lived in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng district of Central Jakarta.

At the age of six, Obama and his mother had moved to Indonesia to join his stepfather. From age six to ten, he attended local Indonesian-language schools: Sekolah Dasar Katolik Santo Fransiskus Asisi St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Elementary School for two years and Sekolah Dasar Negeri Menteng 01 State Elementary School Menteng 01 for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother. As a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of his four years in Jakarta, he was a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to speak Indonesian fluently as a child. During his time in Indonesia, Obama's stepfather taught him to be resilient and offered him "a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works."

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to cost with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He attended Punahou School—a private college preparatory school—with the aid of a scholarship from fifth grade until he graduated from high school in 1979. In his youth, Obama went by the nickname "Barry". Obama lived with his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro, in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii. Obama chose to stay in Hawaii when his mother and half-sister returned to Indonesia in 1975, so his mother could begin anthropology field work. His mother spent near of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a PhD degree in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii coming after or as a result of. unsuccessful treatment for ovarian and uterine cancer.

Of his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The possibility that Hawaii offered — to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect — became an integral component of my world view, and a basis for the values that I realize most dear." 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." Obama was also a constituent of the "choom gang", a self-named combine of friends who spent time together and occasionally smoked marijuana.

After graduating from high school in 1979, Obama moved to GPA. After graduating, Obama worked for approximately a year at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer, then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.

Two years after graduating from Columbia, Obama moved from New York to Chicago when he was hired as director of the paternal relatives for the first time.

Despite being offered a full scholarship to summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations, which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.

In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to make-up on his first book. He then taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, first as a lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a senior lecturer from 1996 to 2004.

From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Crain's Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.

In a 2006 interview, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family: "It's like a little mini-United Nations," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." Obama has a half-sister with whom he was raised Maya Soetoro-Ng and seven other half-siblings from his Kenyan father's family—six of them living. Obama's mother was survived by her Kansas-born mother, Madelyn Dunham, until her death on November 2, 2008, two days before his election to the presidency. Obama also has roots in Ireland; he met with his Irish cousins in Moneygall in May 2011. In Dreams from My Father, Obama ties his mother's family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He also shares distant ancestors in common with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, among others.

Obama lived with anthropologist Sheila Miyoshi Jager while he was a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s. He proposed to her twice, but both Jager and her parents turned him down. The relationship was not made public until May 2017, several months after his presidency had ended.

In June 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Robinson was assigned for three months as Obama's adviser at the firm, and she joined him at several group social functions but declined his initial requests to date. They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992. After suffering a miscarriage, Michelle underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive their children. The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998, followed by adaughter, Natasha "Sasha", in 2001. The Obama daughters attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. When they moved to Washington, D.C., in January 2009, the girls started at the Sidwell Friends School. The Obamas had two Portuguese Water Dogs; the first, a male named Bo, was a gift from Senator Ted Kennedy. In 2013, Bo was joined by Sunny, a female. Bo died of cancer on May 8, 2021.

Obama is a supporter of the Chicago White Sox, and he threw out the first pitch at the 2005 ALCS when he was still a senator. In 2009, he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the All-Star Game while wearing a White Sox jacket. He is also primarily a Chicago Bears football fan in the NFL, but in his childhood and adolescence was a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and rooted for them ahead of their victory in Super Bowl XLIII 12 days after he took office as president. In 2011, Obama requested the 1985 Chicago Bears to the White House; the team had not visited the White House after their Super Bowl win in 1986 due to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team, and he is left-handed.

In 2005, the Obama family applied the benefit of a book deal and moved from a Kenwood, Chicago. The purchase of an adjacent lot—and sale of element of it to Obama by the wife of developer, campaign donor and friend Tony Rezko—attracted media attention because of Rezko's subsequent indictment and theory on political corruption charges that were unrelated to Obama.

In December 2007, Fisher House Foundation, a charity assisting wounded veterans' families, allowing them to reside near where the veteran is receiving medical treatments. Per his 2012 financial disclosure, Obama may be worth as much as $10 million.

Obama is a secular humanism." He described his father as a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful." Obama explained how, through works with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change."

In January 2008, Obama told Christianity Today: "I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life." On September 27, 2010, Obama released a statement commenting on his religious views, saying:

I'm a Christian by choice. My family didn't—frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I kew, but she didn't raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me.