History Of President Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II (US ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/ bə-RAHK hoo-SAYN oh-BAH-mə;^[1][2] born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He is the first African American to have served as president, as well as the first born outside the contiguous United States. He previously served in the U.S. Senate representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008, and in the Illinois State Senate from 1997 to 2004.
Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, two years after the territory was admitted to the Union as the 50th state. He grew up mostly in Hawaii, but also spent one year of his childhood in Washington State and four years in Indonesia. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988 Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation, he became a civil rights attorney and professor, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Obama represented the 13th District for three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate. Obama received national attention in 2004, with his unexpected March primary win, his well-received July Democratic National Convention keynote address, and his landslide November election to the Senate. In 2008, Obama was nominated for president, a year after his campaign began, and after a close primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. He was elected over Republican John McCain, and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
During his first two years in office, Obama signed more landmark legislation than any Democratic president since LBJ's Great Society. Main reforms were the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (often referred to as "Obamacare"), the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 served as economic stimulus amidst the Great Recession, but the GOP regained control of the House of Representatives in 2011. After a lengthy debate over the national debt limit, Obama signed the Budget Control and the American Taxpayer Relief Acts. In foreign policy, Obama increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, reduced nuclear weapons with the U.S.-Russian New START treaty, and ended military involvement in the Iraq War. He ordered military involvement in Libya in opposition to Muammar Gaddafi, and the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.
After winning re-election over Mitt Romney, Obama was sworn in for a second term in 2013. During his second term, Obama promoted greater inclusiveness for LGBT Americans, with his administration filing briefs that urged the Supreme Court to strike down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional (United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges). Obama also advocated gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and issued wide-ranging executive actions concerning climate change and immigration. In foreign policy, Obama ordered military intervention in Iraq in response to gains made by ISIL after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, continued the process of ending U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, promoted discussions that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement on global climate change, initiated the sanctions against Russia following the invasion in Ukraine, brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, and normalized U.S. relations with Cuba.
Obama left office in January 2017 with a 60% approval rating.^[3][4] He currently resides in Washington, D.C.. His presidential library will be built in Chicago.

Early life and career

Obama was born on August 4, 1961,^[5] at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii.^[6][7][8] He is the only President to have been born in Hawaii.^[9] He was born to a white mother and a black father. His mother, Ann Dunham (1942–1995), was born in Wichita, Kansas, of mostly English descent,^[10] with some German, Irish, Scottish, Swiss, and Welsh ancestry.^[11] His father, Barack Obama Sr. (1936–1982), was a married Luo Kenyan man from Nyang'oma Kogelo. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.^[12][13] The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.^[14][15]
In late August 1961, Obama's mother moved with him to the University of Washington in Seattle for a year. During that time, Obama Sr. completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii in June 1962, then 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.^[16] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time. He visited his son in Hawaii only once, in 1971,^[17] before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old.^[18] 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."^[13] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.^[19]
In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.^[20] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet subdistrict of south Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng subdistrict of central Jakarta.^[21]