Barack Obama

1. Barack Obama was born to a white American mother, Ann Dunham, and a black Kenyan father,Barack Obama Sr., who were both young college students at the University of Hawaii. When his father left for Harvard, she and Barack stayed behind, and his father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist. Baracks mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager and moved to Jakarta when Barack was six. He later recounted Indonesi .....

Synopsis

2. Born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, Barack Obama is the 44th and current president of the United States. He was a civil rights lawyer and teacher before pursuing a political career. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, serving from 1997 to 2004. He was elected to the U.S. presidency in 2008, and won re election in 2012 against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. President Obama continues to enact policy changes in response .....

Early life

3. Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where her father worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunhams father, Stanley, enlisted in the service and marched across Europe in Pattons army. Dunhams mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a ho .....

Education

4. While living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou Academy, excelling in basketball and graduating with academic honors in 1979. As one of only three black students at the school, Obama became conscious of racism and what it meant to be African American. He later described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage with his own sense of self: I began to notice there was nobody like me in t .....

Law career

5. It was during this time that Barack Obama, who said he was not raised in a religious household, joined the Trinity United Church of Christ. He also visited relatives in Kenya, which included an emotional visit to the graves of his biological father and paternal grandfather. For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept, Obama said. I saw that my life in America the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I felt as a boy, the .....

Entry into illinois politics

6. Obama published an autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, in 1995. The work received high praise from literary figures like Toni Morrison and has since been printed in 10 languages, including Chinese, Swedish and Hebrew. The book had a second printing in 2004, and was adapted for a childrens version. The 2006 audiobook version of Dreams, narrated by Obama, received a Grammy Award (best spoken word album).Obamas adv .....

U s senate career

7. Obama, encouraged by poll numbers, decided to run for the U.S. Senate open seat vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. In the 2004 Democratic primary, he won 52 percent of the vote, defeating multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. That summer, he was invited to deliver the keynote speech in support of John Kerry at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Obama emphasized the importance of unity, .....

Kenya meets kansas

8. Barack Hussein Obama was born in the two year old US state of Hawaii to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in a small Kenyan village where school was a tin roof shack. Obama Sr. married and had one son. But in 1959, Obama Sr. left his newborn son and his again pregnant wife for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. This would not be the last time ambition came before family. It was there that t .....

Muslim stepfather

9. Ann met another student, Lolo Soetoro. They married and after two years moved to Soetoros native Indonesia in 1967. From the relative affluence of Hawaii, the six year old Barack was now confronted every day on his doorstep with the extreme poverty of a Third World country. Within six months, Barack was fluent in the local language. Each day started at 4am with his mother waking him to give him additional English lessons before Catholic school. H .....

Drugs drink malcolm x

10. When Baracks mother returned to Indonesia, her parents raised him. His grandparents tried their best during his basketball playing teenage years which often saw drinking and drug use, including marijuana and blow, American slang for cocaine. Politically, he was attracted more to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King. In 1979, Barack enrolled at college in Los Angeles. His mother divorced Soetoro. .....

The student years

11. Finally based in America, Obama transferred to New York to study political science at Columbia University. In 1982, he received news of his fathers death in a car accident in Africa. After over a year in the corporate sector, in 1985, Obama moved to Chicago and did three years as a community organiser. In a place devastated by steel plant closures, he represented the unemployed and homeless. And every year there, he saw how gun violence cost the .....

First black president

12. In 1990, Obama became President. Albeit the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. For the first time, Obama made the news nationally. In 1992, he ran a voter registration campaign which secured 100,000 new voters, mostly from the African American community. It helped elect the first female African American Senator. That same year he married Michelle. They would later have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.In 1994, his mother Ann was diagn .....

Rise and defeat

13. In 1996, Obama was elected as State Senator for Illinois from the 13th district, which encompassed mostly impoverished areas of Chicagos south side. To secure the position, he had to defeat a former ally. Such actions showed he had the political muscle to take power. In 1999, unlike his father had done, Obama put his family first when his daughter became ill. In staying with her, he missed a crucial vote on gun control. Partly as a result of his .....

There is the united states of america

14. In 2003, Obama launched his campaign to be elected to the US Senate. An early opponent of the Iraq war, he impressed potential President John Kerry enough to be invited to give the keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. In it, the 42 year old Obama explicitly rejected the division of America into blue liberal and red conservative states. Instead of an America divided into Democrat and Republican states, he said he believed only that .....

Bye bye president bush

15. On 4 November 2008, Obama made history. He secured 52.9 per cent of the popular vote. The new President assembled his team making his old adversary, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state.Within days he ordered the military to start preparing to withdraw from Iraq, a war started by Bush. He also reversed Bushs ban on federal funding to foreign establishments allowing abortion. He would also later reverse Bushs limitations on funding stem cell resear .....

Give me your tired your poor

16. Is an extract from the poem engraved in the Statue of Liberty. But in the worlds wealthiest nation 49 million live below the poverty line. Nearly 1.5 million children are homeless. And almost one in seven Americans are without health insurance. Health reform, including the reduction in ballooning costs, was one of Obamas key election promises.In 2009, despite huge opposition, he covered an additional four million uninsured children with healthcar .....

Obama v osama

17. In his first Presidential year, Obama had been named as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. And he did indeed end the American mission in Iraq. This, however, was no pacifist President.In 2011, he ordered the revenge killing of the architect of 9 11, Osama Bin Laden. And partly through the controversial use of drone attacks, Obama would come close to strategically defeating al Qaeda. His intervention in Libya, unlike Bushs, had international support, .....

Romney who

18. Obamas Republican rival was the business millionaire, and ex Mormon missionary, Mitt Romney. It was expected to be close. It wasnt.Romneys business past proved to be a liability rather than an asset. Obamas team painted him as part of the elite that had put the country into decline and then profited from the recession. Then there were further questions over Romneys tax returns. And Romney was further damaged when it was alleged that hed been conn .....

Ill give you my gun when

19. you pry it from my cold, dead hands was a saying popularised by the hugely influential National Rifle Association. The NRA lobbies for the Second Amendments right to bear arms. In December 2012, the saying again became a grim reality after Adam Lanza shot dead 20 children, six staff, and then himself, at the suburban Sandy Hook Elementary School. The atrocity joined a long list of school spree killings.When Obama called for gun reform the NRA res .....

Extra credit

20. Barack Obama married the former Michelle Robinson in 1992. They have two daughters: Malia (b. 1998) and Sasha (b. 2001) Barack Obamas father, also named Barack Obama, was black; his mother, Ann Dunham, was white. Obamas grandmother, Madelyn Dunham (nicknamed Toot), died the day before Obama was elected in 2008 Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles before completing his undergraduate degree at Columbia Obamas Senate website described .....

Pre election career

21. After a two year stint working in corporate research and at the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he took a job as a community organizer with a church based group, the Developing Communities Project. For the next several years, he worked with low income residents in Chicagos Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the citys largely black South Side. Ob .....

2008 presidential campaign

22. On February 10, 2007, Obama formally announced his candidacy for president of the United States. A victory in the Iowa primary made him a viable challenger to the early frontrunner, the former first lady and current New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he outlasted in a grueling primary campaign to claim the Democratic nomination in early June 2008. Obama chose as his running mate Joseph R. Biden Jr. Biden had been a U.S. senator from Delaware .....

First 100 days

23. Between Inauguration Day and April 29, 2009, the Obama Administration took to the field on many fronts. Obama coaxed Congress to expand health care insurance for children and provide legal protection for women seeking equal pay. A $787 billion stimulus bill was passed to promote short term economic growth. Housing and credit markets were put on life support, with a market based plan to buy U.S. banks toxic assets. Loans were made to the auto indu .....

2010 State of the Union

24. On January 27, 2010, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union speech. During his oration, Obama addressed the challenges of the economy, proposing a fee for larger banks, announcing a possible freeze on government spending in 2010 and speaking against the Supreme Courts reversal of a law capping campaign finance spending. He also challenged politicians to stop thinking of re election and start making positive changes, criticizing Re .....

Challenges and Successes

25. In the second part of his term as president, Obama has faced a number of obstacles and scored some victories as well. He signed his health care reform plan, known as the Affordable Care Act, into law in March 2010. Obamas plan is intended to strengthen consumers rights and to provide affordable insurance coverage and greater access to medical care. His opponents, however, claim that Obamacare, as they have called it, added new costs to the countr .....

Re Election and Second Term

26. As he did in 2008, during his campaign for a second presidential term, Obama focused on grassroots initiatives. Celebrities such as Anna Wintour and Sarah Jessica Parker aided the presidents campaign by hosting fund raising events.I guarantee you, we will move this country forward, Obama stated in June 2012, at a campaign event in Maryland. We will finish what we started. And well remind the world just why it is the United States of America is th .....