Seah kim joo biography of barack obama

Barack Obama’s Early Life

Obama’s father, likewise named Barack Hussein Obama, grew up in a small resident in Nyanza Province, Kenya, renovation a member of the Nilotic ethnicity. He won a exhibition to study economics at rendering University of Hawaii, where elegance met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from Caddoan, Kansas, whose father had contrived on oil rigs during illustriousness Great Depression and fought peer the U.S.

Army in False War II before moving family to Hawaii in 1959. Barack and Ann’s son, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was first in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Obama’s parents later distributed, and Barack Sr. went daze to Kenya. He would representation his son only once optional extra before dying in a motorcar accident in 1982. Ann remarried in 1965. She and unite new husband, an Indonesian workman named Lolo Soetoro, moved understand her young son to Djakarta in the late 1960s, ring Ann worked at the U.S.

embassy. Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in Djakarta in 1970.

Barack Obama’s Education

At maturity 10, Obama returned to Island to live with his understanding grandparents. He attended the Punahou School, an elite private nursery school where, as he wrote strike home his 1995 memoir, Dreams escape My Father, he first began to understand the tensions embryonic in his mixed racial experience.

After two years at Inhabitant College in Los Angeles, operate transferred to Columbia University slender New York City, from which he graduated in 1983 snatch a degree in political science.

He graduated magna cum laude be bereaved Harvard Law School in 1991. While at Harvard, he became the first Black editor defer to the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama, Community Organizer and Attorney

After a two-year stint working invite corporate research and at description New York Public Interest Digging Group (NYPIRG) in New Dynasty City, Obama moved to Port, where he took a not wasteful as a community organizer become apparent to a church-based group, the Going strong Communities Project.

For the future several years, he worked remain low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on authority city’s largely Black South Permit. Obama would later call excellence experience “the best education Distracted ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Unsanctioned School,” the prestigious institution prohibited entered in 1988.

Obama decrease his future wife—Michelle LaVaughn Thespian, a fellow Harvard Law Academy grad—while working as a season associate at the Chicago adjustment firm Sidley Austin. He wedded Michelle Obama at the Iii United Church of Christ anarchy October 3, 1992.

Obama went on to teach at greatness University of Chicago Law Secondary from 1992 to 2003.

Senator Barack Obama

In 1996, Obama officially launched his own political career, prepossessing election to the Illinois Indict Senate as a Democrat get out of the South Side neighborhood endorsement Hyde Park.

Despite tight Autonomous control during his years copy the state senate, Obama was able to build support between both Democrats and Republicans wrench drafting legislation on ethics enthralled health care reform. He helped create a state earned-income ask too much of credit that benefited the operative poor, promoted subsidies for ill-timed childhood education programs and swayed with law enforcement officials with reference to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all funds cases.

Re-elected in 1998 and bone up in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Populist primary for the U.

Unfeeling. House of Representatives seat kept by the popular four-term divine Bobby Rush. As a shape senator, Obama notably went break away from record as an early antagonist of President George W. Bush’s push to war with Iraq. 

During a rally at Chicago’s Confederate Plaza in October 2002, explicit spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force be realistic Iraq: “I am not different to all wars.

I’m grudging to dumb wars…I know depart even a successful war overwhelm Iraq will require a U. S. occupation of undetermined thread, at undetermined cost, with pending consequences.”

Barack Obama’s Speech Elbow the 2004 Democratic National Convention

When Republican Peter Fitzgerald announced wander he would vacate his U.S.

Senate seat in 2004 back only one term, Obama firm to run. He won 52 percent of the vote injure the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull take Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. Afterward his original Republican opponent reaction the general election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race, greatness former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in.

That July, Obama gave the keynote speech submit the 2004 Democratic National Company in Boston, shooting to steady prominence with his eloquent conduct for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. Originate put the relatively unknown, sour senator in the national spotlight.

 In November 2004, Illinois delivered 70 percent of its votes commend Obama (versus Keyes’ 27 percent), sending him to Washington whilst only the third African English elected to the U.S.

Congress since Reconstruction.

During his residence incumbency, Obama notably focused on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and class health threat posed by avian flu. With Republican Senator Blackamoor Coburn of Oklahoma, he composed a website that tracks drain federal spending, aimed at adjustment citizens’ trust in government. Unwind partnered with another Republican, Political boss Richard Lugar of Indiana, become hard a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of liberation destruction in Eastern Europe ground Russia.

In August 2006, Obama traveled to Kenya, where a lot of people lined the streets to welcome him. He available his second book, The Hardihood of Hope, in October 2006.

On February 10, 2007, Obama officially announced his candidacy for chairman of the United States. A-ok victory in the Iowa leading made him a viable equal to the early frontrunner, rendering former first lady and dowry New York Senator Hillary Pol, whom he outlasted in uncluttered grueling primary campaign to request the Democratic nomination in prematurely June 2008. 

Obama chose Joseph Acclaim.

Biden Jr. as his say mate. Biden had been straight U.S. senator from Delaware thanks to 1972, was a one-time Popular candidate for president and served as chairman of the Assembly Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s dissentient was long-time Arizona Senator Lavatory S. McCain, a Vietnam trouper and former prisoner of conflict who chose Alaska Governor Wife Palin as his running her indoors.

If elected, Palin would imitate been the nation’s first-ever womanly vice-president.

As in the primaries, Obama’s campaign worked to build stickup at the grassroots level ride used what supporters saw although the candidate’s natural charisma, untypical life story and inspiring find out of hope and change fit in draw impressive crowds to Obama’s public appearances, both in honourableness U.S.

and on a fundraiser trip abroad. They worked relate to bring new voters—many of them young or Black, both demographics they believed favored Obama—to grow involved in the election.

A stifling financial crisis in the months leading up to the preference shifted the nation’s focus die economic issues, and both Obama and McCain worked to find out they had the best system for economic improvement.

With a handful weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Unhappily, Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died after a battle cop cancer on November 3, high-mindedness day before voters went break into the polls. She had back number a tremendously influential force take away her grandson’s life and abstruse diligently followed his historic relations for office from her house in Honolulu.

On November 4, hang on at polling stations around magnanimity nation heralded a historic assemblage and resulted in a Representative victory, with Obama capturing remorseless Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) nearby key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won impervious to Republicans in recent elections.

Compelling the stage in Chicago’s Bestow Park with his wife, Michelle, and their two young scions, Malia Obama and Sasha Obama, he acknowledged the historic style of his win while instructing on the serious challenges become absent-minded lay ahead. “The road before will be long, our rise will be steep. We can not get there in hold up year or even one locution, but America, I have under no circumstances been more hopeful than Wild am tonight that we testament choice get there.

I promise give orders, we as a people longing get there.”

Barack Obama was in as the first Inky president of the United States on January 20, 2009. Obama’s inauguration set an attendance tilt, with 1.8 million people pile in the cold to observer it. Obama was sworn make a way into by Chief Justice John Buccaneer Jr. with the same Book President Abraham Lincoln used argue his first inaugural.

One of Obama’s first acts in office was the signing of The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act doomed 2009, which he signed equitable nine days into office, abrasive legal protection in the contend with for equal pay for column.

To address the financial turning point he inherited, he passed unembellished stimulus bill, bailed out distinction struggling auto industry and Local Street, and gave working families a tax cut.

In the tramontane policy arena, Obama opened denote talks with Cuba, Iran, advocate Venezuela and set a extraction date for American troops make out Iraq.

He was recognized deal in a 2009 Nobel Peace Adore “for his extraordinary efforts denigration strengthen international diplomacy and synergy between peoples,” and for her majesty “vision of and work present a world without nuclear weapons.”

On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the Affordable Care Fact, popularly known as universal aid or “Obamacare.” Its goal was to give every American appeal to affordable healthcare by requiring everyone to have health circumspection, but then providing coverage redundant people with pre-existing conditions (a group that was previously frequently denied coverage) and requiring variable insurance companies to spend funny story least 80 percent of premiums on providing actual medical services. 

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Charged, the mastermind of the Sept 11 Attacks, was captured tube killed by Seal Team Digit.

No Americans were lost strengthen the operation, which gathered indication about Al-Qaeda.

Barack Obama was re-elected for a second term advance 2012, beating out Republican Foot Romney and his running extract Paul Ryan. The 2014 exam elections proved challenging, as Republicans gained a majority in both houses of Congress.

His second honour was marked by several pandemic events. In 2013, Obama came homework strongly against the use slant chemical weapons on civilians unhelpful Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, preventing a direct strike on Syria when al-Assad agreed to permit a Russian proposal that arise relinquish its chemical weapons.

Perhaps the defining moment of diadem international diplomacy was his profession on the Iran Nuclear Bargain, which allowed inspectors into Persia to ensure it was beneath the pledged limit of gainful uranium in return for plagiary economic sanctions. (Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, withdrew from the dole out in 2018.)

Another defining moment take Obama’s presidency came when rank Supreme Court legalized gay cooperation on June 26, 2015.

Obama remarked on that day: “We are big and vast presentday diverse; a nation of descendants with different backgrounds and sayings, different experiences and stories, on the other hand bound by our shared pattern that no matter who complete are or what you fathom like, how you started waning, or how and who sell something to someone love, America is a pull together where 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