Biography of U.S. President Barack Obama

NAME: BARACK OBAMA

Name at birth: Barack Hussein Obama

Born: 4 August 1961

Birth Place: Honolulu, Hawaii

Best Known as: President of the United states, 2009-present

LIFE ABOUT OBAMA

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 the University's first black student met the Kansas born, Ann Dunham. Despite the difference in their personalities, Obama Sr. was an assured intellectual whereas Ann was awkward and shy, the couple married. At the time, Ann was three months pregnant. Obama Sr. lied to her that he'd divorced his African wife and mother of four of his children. Six month later, in Honolulu, on 4 August 1961, Barack Obama was born. But Obama Sr. again put academia before his second family by leaving for a Harvard scholarship. Ann was just 20 when he left Barack was just two. Obama Sr. and Ann soon separated and in 1964, she filed for divorce.

STUDENT OBAMA

He transferred to New York to study political science at Columbia University. In 1982, he received news of his father's death in a car accident in Africa. After over a year in the corporate sector, in 1985, He 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 lives of scores of children and hundreds of others.

It was there he attended a sermon by the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It caused him to weep. At the time Obama seriously considered becoming a preacher.

He went to Harvard Law School. Obama hoped it would enable him to achieve the things that grass roots activism couldn't. Before beginning his studies, he went to Kenya to meet his father's family and better understand his African heritage. Back in America, in 1988 he met his future wife Michelle Robinson, at that time an attorney. A descendent of slaves, she was immersed in the issue of race. And as her best friend was the daughter of the civil rights Jesse Jackson, she could introduce Barack to the Democratic political classes.

FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT

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 100000 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 diagnosed with cancer. Ann moved back to Hawaii to live near Obama's now widowed grandmother. His grandmother buried her daughter in 1995. Ann's difficulty in paying her medical bills as she died directly informed her son's later attempts to reform the American health care system. That year, on the back of his rising profile, Obama published his first book, 'Dreams from My Father'.

OBAMA RISE AND DEFEAT

In 1996, Obama was elected as State Senator for Illinois from the 13th district, which encompassed mostly impoverished areas of Chicago's south side. In 1999, unlike his father had done, Obama put his family first when his daughter became ill. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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 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 there is the United States of America' Obama went on to win his Senate seat by a landslide of 70 per cent against his Republican rival. Obama was sworn in as senator in 2005.

As a senator, Obama served on the Health, Education, Labour and Pensions Committee. One of the first laws he helps pass allows voters to go online and see where their taxes are spent.

As a candidate in the Democratic Primaries in 2007, Obama went head to with Hillary Clinton. In 2008, he won. The Republican he then had to beat was the elderly war vet John McCain. McCain countered the novelty appeal of Obama by for the first time ever, making the Republican Vice President nominee a woman. But Sarah Palin was even more inexperienced than Obama. And Obama's two years in the Senate wasn't an issue for a young electorate weary of two terms of George W Bush.

AFTER GEORGE W BUSH

On 4 November 2008, He 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 Bush's ban on federal funding to foreign establishments allowing abortion.

He would also later reverse Bush's limitations on funding stem cell research and repeal a two decade old law of "Dont Ask Don't Tell" that banned openly gay people from the military. And in a country where many deny climate change, Obama championed alternative energy. But ever the politician, he saved the troubled car industry, securing jobs: And future votes.

OBAMA VS OSAMA

On May 2, 2011, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. Special Forces during an early morning (approximately mid-afternoon on May 1st in the United States) raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

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 Bush's had international support, and again unlike Bush, relied on air power rather than "boots on the ground". It directly led to the fall of Gaddafi.

But American elections are largely decided on domestic issues, not foreign. His support of gay marriage won over many of his supporters but further alienated many Republicans. And despite inheriting the worst economic crisis since the 1929 Depression, many thought it would be the stagnating economy that would lose him the 2012 election.