Change will not
come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve
been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
—PRESIDENT OBAMA
His story is the American story — values from
the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and
education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so
blessed should be lived in service to others.
With a father from Kenya and a mother from
Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised
with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his
grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle
management at a bank.
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 to the issues of health care and economic
crisis.
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, Dunham's father,
Stanley, enlisted in the service and marched across Europe in Patton's army.
Dunham's mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the
war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal
Housing Program and, after several moves, landed in Hawaii.
He worked his way through school—Occidental
College in Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York, and later, Harvard Law
School—with the help of scholarship money and student loans.
In 1985, Barack Obama moved to Chicago, where he got his
start in community organizing on the city’s South Side, working to help rebuild
communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.
The President called that time in his life "the best
education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School." He
has credited that experience as crucial to finding his identity—something that
shaped his path to the White House.
Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in
1996. During his time in Springfield, he passed the first major ethics reform
in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for
children and their parents. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, he reached
across the aisle to pass the farthest-reaching lobbying reform in a generation,
lock up the world’s most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to
government by tracking federal spending online.
Barack Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo
ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa,
eventually earning a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his
dreams of college in Hawaii. While studying at the University of Hawaii in
Manoa, Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham, and they married on February 2,
1961. Barack was born six months later.
Obama did not have a relationship with his father as a
child. When his son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts
to attend Harvard University, pursuing a Ph.D. Barack's parents officially
separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964, when
their son was 2. In 1965, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya.
Barack Obama was sworn in as president on
January 20th, 2009, in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression, at a time when our economy
was losing 800,000 jobs a month. He acted immediately to get our
economy back on track. Since then, the private sector has added back more than
10 million jobs during the longest, uninterrupted period of job growth in our
nation’s history.
In his first term, the President cut taxes for every
American worker—putting $3,600 back in the pockets of the typical family. He
passed historic Wall Street
reform to make sure
taxpayers never again have to bail out big banks. He passed the landmark
Affordable Care Act, helping to put quality and
affordable health care within
reach for millions of Americans. He ended the war in Iraq and is working to
responsibly end the war in Afghanistan.
In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an East–West Center
student from Indonesia. A year later, the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia,
where Barack's half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born. Several incidents in
Indonesia left Dunham afraid for her son's safety and education so, at the age
of 10, Barack was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents.
His mother and sister later joined them.
In 2004, Obama received national attention
during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United
States Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary,
his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July, and his election to the Senate in November. He
began his presidential campaign in 2007 and, after a close primary campaign against Hillary
Rodham Clinton in 2008, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his election,
Obama was named the 2009
Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
During his first two years in office, Obama
signed into law economic
stimulus legislation in response to the Great Recession in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization,
and Job Creation Act of 2010. Other major domestic initiatives in
his first term included 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. In foreign policy,
Obama ended U.S. military involvement in the Iraq War,
increased U.S. troop levels inAfghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. military involvement in Libya, and ordered the military
operation that resulted in the death
of Osama bin Laden. In January 2011, the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives as the Democratic Party lost a total of 63 seats; and,
after a lengthy debate over federal spending and whether or not to raise the
nation's debt
limit, Obama signed the Budget
Control Act of 2011 and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.
Obama was re-elected president in November 2012, defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney,
and was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2013. During his second term, Obama has
promoted domestic policies related to gun control in response to theSandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and has called for full
equality for LGBT Americans, while his administration has filed briefs
which urged the Supreme
Court to strike down the Defense
of Marriage Act of 1996 and California's Proposition 8 as unconstitutional. In foreign policy, Obama ordered U.S. military involvement in Iraq in response to gains
made by
the Islamic State inIraq after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, continued the process of ending U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, and has sought
to normalize U.S.
relations with Cuba.
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