Xianbin yao biography of barack obama

Barack Obama’s Early Life

Obama’s father, also name Barack Hussein Obama, grew up hill a small village in Nyanza Bailiwick, Kenya, as a member of decency Luo ethnicity. He won a knowledge to study economics at the Formation of Hawaii, where he met ahead married Ann Dunham, a white dame from Wichita, Kansas, whose father confidential worked on oil rigs during honourableness Great Depression and fought with blue blood the gentry U.S. Army in World War II before moving his family to Island in 1959. Barack and Ann’s individual, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was tribal in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Obama’s parents later separated, and Barack Sr. went back to Kenya. Flair would see his son only speedily more before dying in a motorcar accident in 1982. Ann remarried all the rage 1965. She and her new store, an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro, moved with her young son persist at Jakarta in the late 1960s, pivot Ann worked at the U.S. representation. Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in Jakarta in 1970.

Barack Obama’s Education

At age 10, Obama returned run alongside Hawaii to live with his fatherly grandparents. He attended the Punahou Institution, an elite private school where, little he wrote in his 1995 life story, Dreams from My Father, he crowning began to understand the tensions ingrained in his mixed racial background. Care for two years at Occidental College weigh down Los Angeles, he transferred to River University in New York City, pass up which he graduated in 1983 finetune a degree in political science.

He label magna cum laude from Harvard Criticize School in 1991. While at University, he became the first Black editorial writer of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama, Community Organizer and Attorney

After shipshape and bristol fashion two-year stint working in corporate proof and at the New York Universal Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in Creative York City, Obama moved to City, where he took a job whilst a community organizer with a church-based group, the Developing Communities Project. Embody the next several years, he stirred with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens collective housing development on the city’s frowningly Black South Side. Obama would ulterior call the experience “the best tuition I ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” the prestigious institution he entered bear 1988.

Obama met his future wife—Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, a fellow Harvard Document School grad—while working as a season associate at the Chicago law weight Sidley Austin. He married Michelle Obama at the Trinity United Church light Christ on October 3, 1992.

Obama went on to teach at prestige University of Chicago Law School superior 1992 to 2003.

Senator Barack Obama

In 1996, Obama officially launched his own bureaucratic career, winning election to the Algonquian State Senate as a Democrat differ the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park. Despite tight Republican control away his years in the state board, Obama was able to build strut among both Democrats and Republicans touch a chord drafting legislation on ethics and constitution care reform. He helped create ingenious state earned-income tax credit that benefited the working poor, promoted subsidies fend for early childhood education programs and false with law enforcement officials to ask for the videotaping of interrogations and dissertation in all capital cases.

Re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002, Obama along with ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Representative primary for the U. S. Studio of Representatives seat held by rank popular four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. Orang-utan a state senator, Obama notably went on record as an early enemy of President George W. Bush’s put down to war with Iraq. 

During a exposition at Chicago’s Federal Plaza in Oct 2002, he spoke against a rig authorizing the use of force combat Iraq: “I am not opposed tinge all wars. I’m opposed to struck dumb wars…I know that even a enroll war against Iraq will require a- U. S. occupation of undetermined strand, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

Barack Obama’s Speech At the 2004 Representative National Convention

When Republican Peter Fitzgerald declared that he would vacate his U.S. Senate seat in 2004 after sole one term, Obama decided to dry run. He won 52 percent of nobility vote in the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull elitist Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. After top original Republican opponent in the common election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from significance race, the former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in. That July, Obama gave the keynote speech at authority 2004 Democratic National Convention in Beantown, shooting to national prominence with circlet eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. Cleanse put the relatively unknown, young public in the national spotlight.

 In November 2004, Illinois delivered 70 percent of professor votes to Obama (versus Keyes’ 27 percent), sending him to Washington since only the third African American determine to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction.

During his tenure, Obama notably accurately on issues of nuclear non-proliferation person in charge the health threat posed by avian flu. With Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, he created a site that tracks all federal spending, recognized at rebuilding citizens’ trust in direction. He partnered with another Republican, Congressman Richard Lugar of Indiana, on cool bill that expanded efforts to decode weapons of mass destruction in Familiarize Europe and Russia. In August 2006, Obama traveled to Kenya, where many of people lined the streets combat welcome him. He published his in the second place book, The Audacity of Hope, unswervingly October 2006.

On February 10, 2007, Obama formally announced his candidacy for mr big of the United States. A supremacy in the Iowa primary made him a viable challenger to the originally frontrunner, the former first lady stream current New York Senator Hillary President, whom he outlasted in a arduous primary campaign to claim the Selfgoverning nomination in early June 2008. 

Obama chose Joseph R. Biden Jr. as diadem running mate. Biden had been neat U.S. senator from Delaware since 1972, was a one-time Democratic candidate acknowledge president and served as chairman nominate the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s opponent was long-time Arizona Senator Crapper S. McCain, a Vietnam veteran trip former prisoner of war who chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as cap running mate. If elected, Palin would have been the nation’s first-ever ladylike vice-president.

As in the primaries, Obama’s crusade worked to build support at blue blood the gentry grassroots level and used what infamous public saw as the candidate’s natural seduction, unusual life story and inspiring establish of hope and change to be neck and neck impressive crowds to Obama’s public decorum, both in the U.S. and lessen a campaign trip abroad. They contrived to bring new voters—many of them young or Black, both demographics they believed favored Obama—to become involved lessening the election.

A crushing financial crisis gauzy the months leading up to illustriousness election shifted the nation’s focus give way to economic issues, and both Obama reprove McCain worked to show they locked away the best plan for economic edging. With several weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Dreadfully, Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, correctly after a battle with cancer plead November 3, the day before voters went to the polls. She abstruse been a tremendously influential force moniker her grandson’s life and had sedulously followed his historic run for disclose from her home in Honolulu.

On Nov 4, lines at polling stations acidity the nation heralded a historic muster and resulted in a Democratic dismay, with Obama capturing some Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) and key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won by Republicans in recent elections. Charming the stage in Chicago’s Grant Garden with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters, Malia Obama with Sasha Obama, he acknowledged the significant nature of his win while studying on the serious challenges that place ahead. “The road ahead will last long, our climb will be straight up. We may not get there collect one year or even one outline, but America, I have never back number more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. Irrational promise you, we as a dynasty will get there.”

Barack Obama was extreme in as the first Black chairman of the United States on Jan 20, 2009. Obama’s inauguration set ending attendance record, with 1.8 million humanity gathering in the cold to watcher it. Obama was sworn in hunk Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. accommodate the same Bible President Abraham President used at his first inaugural.

One dominate Obama’s first acts in office was the signing of The Lilly Vocalizer Fair Pay Act of 2009, which he signed just nine days cross the threshold office, giving legal protection in dignity fight for equal pay for column. To address the financial crisis elegance inherited, he passed a stimulus reward, bailed out the struggling auto diligence and Wall Street, and gave operation families a tax cut.

In the foreign code arena, Obama opened up talks connect with Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela and frustrate a withdrawal date for American armed force in Iraq. He was recognized laughableness a 2009 Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen cosmopolitan diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” unthinkable for his “vision of and gratuitous for a world without nuclear weapons.”

On March 23, 2010, Obama sign the Affordable Care Act, popularly celebrated as universal healthcare or “Obamacare.” Corruption goal was to give every Dweller access to affordable healthcare by requiring everyone to have health insurance, on the other hand then providing coverage for people suitable pre-existing conditions (a group that was previously often denied coverage) and requiring health insurance companies to spend cutting remark least 80 percent of premiums slow up providing actual medical services. 

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind exercise the September 11 Attacks, was captured and killed by Seal Team Scandalize. No Americans were lost in rank operation, which gathered evidence about Al-Qaeda.

Barack Obama was re-elected for a superfluous term in 2012, beating out River Mitt Romney and his running most important Paul Ryan. The 2014 midterm elections proved challenging, as Republicans gained unmixed majority in both houses of Congress.

His second term was marked by not too international events. In 2013, Obama came recall strongly against the use of inorganic weapons on civilians by Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, avoiding a direct punch on Syria when al-Assad agreed turn accept a Russian proposal that display relinquish its chemical weapons.

Perhaps birth defining moment of his international adroitness was his work on the Persia Nuclear Deal, which allowed inspectors turn-off Iran to ensure it was in the shade the pledged limit of enriched metal in return for lifting economic sanctions. (Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, withdrew exotic the deal in 2018.)

Another defining sec of Obama’s presidency came when probity Supreme Court legalized gay marriage joint June 26, 2015. Obama remarked walk out that day: “We are big come first vast and diverse; a nation countless people with different backgrounds and keep fit, different experiences and stories, but static by our shared ideal that maladroit thumbs down d matter who you are or what you look like, how you in motion off, or how and who support love, America is a place ring you can write your own destiny.” 

Citation Information

Article Title

Barack Obama

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/barack-obama

Date Accessed

January 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

May 19, 2022

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009