Barack Obama Elected US President
Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth president of the United States on 4 November 2008, the first African American to hold the office. He won 365 electoral votes to John McCain's 173 and 52.9 per cent of the popular vote, taking Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana — states no Democrat had carried in decades — on a turnout that was the highest since 1968. He had been a national figure for four years, since a keynote address at the 2004 convention, and had served less than one Senate term. He was fifteen points behind Hillary Clinton when he announced. He beat her in the primaries by building an organisation in the caucus states her campaign had written off, by raising an unprecedented sum in small online donations, and by having opposed the Iraq war in 2002 when she had voted for it. The general election turned on the financial crisis. Lehman Brothers failed in September; McCain suspended his campaign and said the fundamentals of the economy were strong; and Obama's calm through the collapse decided undecided voters. He took office with the economy losing 700,000 jobs a month, and passed an $800 billion stimulus, rescued the car industry, and signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which extended insurance to some twenty million people. The expectation that his election marked a post-racial America did not survive contact with the following decade. His party lost 63 House seats in 2010, and he governed against a hostile Congress for six years. He was re-elected in 2012 and left office with an approval rating near sixty per cent. His successor's first act of policy was to begin dismantling his.
- Year: 2008 CE
- Category: Political
