Barack Obama
Barack Obama was the 44th President of the United States and the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu in 1961 to a Kenyan economics student and a white American anthropologist from Kansas, he spent four childhood years in Indonesia and was largely raised by his grandparents in Hawaii. His father left when he was two and he met him once more. He studied at Occidental and Columbia, worked as a community organiser on Chicago's South Side for three years, and went to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He taught constitutional law at Chicago and served in the Illinois state senate from 1997. His keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention made him nationally known, and he entered the US Senate that year. He defeated Hillary Clinton for the 2008 nomination and John McCain for the presidency, inheriting the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. His first two years produced the 831-billion-dollar stimulus, the rescue of the car industry, the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and the Affordable Care Act of March 2010, which extended coverage to about twenty million people and passed without a single Republican vote. Democrats lost the House that November, and most of the rest of his agenda died in Congress. He ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, wound down Iraq, escalated and then reduced Afghanistan, expanded drone strikes considerably, negotiated the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord, and restored relations with Cuba. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, which he acknowledged was premature. He was re-elected in 2012 and left office in 2017.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: 44th President of the United States (2009-2017)
