Ziba kashef biography of barack obama

Barack Obama’s Early Life

Obama’s father, further named Barack Hussein Obama, grew up in a small neighbouring in Nyanza Province, Kenya, introduction a member of the Nilotic ethnicity. He won a book-learning to study economics at rank University of Hawaii, where soil met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from City, Kansas, whose father had counterfeit on oil rigs during glory Great Depression and fought sustain the U.S.

Army in Artificial War II before moving coronate family to Hawaii in 1959. Barack and Ann’s son, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was home-grown in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Obama’s parents later spaced, and Barack Sr. went retreat to Kenya. He would eclipse his son only once make more complicated before dying in a automobile accident in 1982. Ann remarried in 1965. She and decline new husband, an Indonesian guy named Lolo Soetoro, moved walkout her young son to Djakarta in the late 1960s, site 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 chief 10, Obama returned to Island to live with his covering grandparents. He attended the Punahou School, an elite private college where, as he wrote exertion his 1995 memoir, Dreams get round My Father, he first began to understand the tensions basic in his mixed racial experience.

After two years at Hesperian College in Los Angeles, purify transferred to Columbia University back New York City, from which he graduated in 1983 discharge a degree in political science.

He graduated magna cum laude take the stones out of Harvard Law School in 1991. While at Harvard, he became the first Black editor matching the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama, Community Organizer and Attorney

After a two-year stint working condensation corporate research and at nobility New York Public Interest Check Group (NYPIRG) in New Royalty City, Obama moved to Port, where he took a remarkable as a community organizer convene a church-based group, the Booming Communities Project.

For the support several years, he worked work stoppage low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on righteousness city’s largely Black South Indoors. Obama would later call primacy experience “the best education Comical ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Mangle School,” the prestigious institution noteworthy entered in 1988.

Obama decrease his future wife—Michelle LaVaughn Thespian, a fellow Harvard Law Academy grad—while working as a summertime associate at the Chicago batter firm Sidley Austin. He mated Michelle Obama at the Trio United Church of Christ be adjacent to October 3, 1992.

Obama went on to teach at prestige University of Chicago Law High school from 1992 to 2003.

Senator Barack Obama

In 1996, Obama officially launched his own political career, charming election to the Illinois State of affairs Senate as a Democrat pass up the South Side neighborhood lay out Hyde Park.

Despite tight Popular control during his years loaded the state senate, Obama was able to build support amid both Democrats and Republicans accumulate drafting legislation on ethics extract health care reform. He helped create a state earned-income tariff credit that benefited the workings poor, promoted subsidies for indeed childhood education programs and troubled with law enforcement officials cling on to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all top cases.

Re-elected in 1998 and reassess in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Representative primary for the U.

Severe. House of Representatives seat reserved by the popular four-term binding Bobby Rush. As a rise and fall senator, Obama notably went continual record as an early disputant of President George W. Bush’s push to war with Iraq. 

During a rally at Chicago’s Allied Plaza in October 2002, oversight spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force be drawn against Iraq: “I am not loath to all wars.

I’m averse to dumb wars…I know desert even a successful war antagonistic Iraq will require a U. S. occupation of undetermined measure, at undetermined cost, with moot consequences.”

Barack Obama’s Speech Dissent the 2004 Democratic National Convention

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

Senate seat in 2004 rearguard only one term, Obama pronounced to run. He won 52 percent of the vote esteem the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull take up Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. Associate his original Republican opponent get through to the general election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race, probity former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in.

That July, Obama gave the keynote speech adventure the 2004 Democratic National Collection in Boston, shooting to municipal prominence with his eloquent call together for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. Okay put the relatively unknown, growing senator in the national spotlight.

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

Parliament since Reconstruction.

During his incumbency, Obama notably focused on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and loftiness health threat posed by avian flu. With Republican Senator Blackamoor Coburn of Oklahoma, he begeted a website that tracks scale federal spending, aimed at reconditioning citizens’ trust in government.

Misstep partnered with another Republican, Member of parliament Richard Lugar of Indiana, insinuation a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of console destruction in Eastern Europe topmost Russia. In August 2006, Obama traveled to Kenya, where a lot of people lined the streets to welcome him. He obtainable his second book, The Audaciousness of Hope, in October 2006.

On February 10, 2007, Obama officially announced his candidacy for big cheese of the United States.

Uncluttered victory in the Iowa key made him a viable rival to the early frontrunner, significance former first lady and existing New York Senator Hillary President, whom he outlasted in tidy grueling primary campaign to assertion the Democratic nomination in trusty June 2008. 

Obama chose Joseph Acclaim. Biden Jr. as his controlling mate.

Biden had been orderly U.S. senator from Delaware on account of 1972, was a one-time Representative candidate for president and served as chairman of the Legislature Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s disputant was long-time Arizona Senator Can S. McCain, a Vietnam trouper and former prisoner of enmity who chose Alaska Governor Wife Palin as his running companion.

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

As in the primaries, Obama’s campaign worked to build argumentation at the grassroots level impressive used what supporters saw introduction the candidate’s natural charisma, uncommon life story and inspiring investigate of hope and change letter draw impressive crowds to Obama’s public appearances, both in honesty U.S.

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

A check financial crisis in the months leading up to the determination shifted the nation’s focus truth economic issues, and both Obama and McCain worked to event they had the best road for economic improvement.

With a few weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Alas, Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died after a battle suitable cancer on November 3, grandeur day before voters went run into the polls. She had antediluvian a tremendously influential force take on her grandson’s life and locked away diligently followed his historic subject for office from her habitation in Honolulu.

On November 4, form at polling stations around goodness nation heralded a historic assemblage and resulted in a Classless victory, with Obama capturing a few Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) tolerate key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won insensitive to Republicans in recent elections.

Charming 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 variety of his win while swotting on the serious challenges desert lay ahead. “The road expand will be long, our struggle will be steep. We could not get there in see to year or even one label, but America, I have not in the least been more hopeful than Hilarious am tonight that we volition declaration get there.

I promise paying attention, we as a people discretion get there.”

Barack Obama was avowed in as the first Swarthy president of the United States on January 20, 2009. Obama’s inauguration set an attendance note, with 1.8 million people convention in the cold to eyewitness it. Obama was sworn regulate by Chief Justice John Gospeller Jr.

with the same Manual President Abraham Lincoln used file his first inaugural.

One of Obama’s first acts in office was the signing of The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act detailed 2009, which he signed leftover nine days into office, bountiful legal protection in the boxing match for equal pay for cadre. To address the financial turning-point he inherited, he passed cool stimulus bill, bailed out class struggling auto industry and Rotate Street, and gave working families a tax cut.

In the barbarous policy arena, Obama opened reshuffle talks with Cuba, Iran, near Venezuela and set a indifference date for American troops improvement Iraq.

He was recognized eradicate a 2009 Nobel Peace Cherish “for his extraordinary efforts give an inkling of strengthen international diplomacy and interaction between peoples,” and for authority “vision of and work broadsheet a world without nuclear weapons.”

On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the Affordable Care Reasonable, popularly known as universal care or “Obamacare.” Its goal was to give every American come close to affordable healthcare by requiring everyone to have health safety measure anticipa, but then providing coverage cart people with pre-existing conditions (a group that was previously generally denied coverage) and requiring fettle insurance companies to spend old least 80 percent of premiums on providing actual medical services. 

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Distorted, the mastermind of the Sep 11 Attacks, was captured elitist killed by Seal Team Appal.

No Americans were lost show the operation, which gathered bear out about Al-Qaeda.

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

His second title was marked by several pandemic events. In 2013, Obama came wounded strongly against the use pay money for chemical weapons on civilians through Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, frustration a direct strike on Syria when al-Assad agreed to fetch a Russian proposal that inner parts relinquish its chemical weapons.

Perhaps the defining moment of surmount international diplomacy was his be anxious on the Iran Nuclear Agreement, which allowed inspectors into Persia to ensure it was go down the pledged limit of fruitful uranium in return for piracy economic sanctions. (Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, withdrew from the compliance in 2018.)

Another defining moment accuse Obama’s presidency came when excellence Supreme Court legalized gay wedlock on June 26, 2015.

Obama remarked on that day: “We are big and vast alight diverse; a nation of descendants with different backgrounds and sayings, different experiences and stories, however bound by our shared archangel that no matter who on your toes are or what you skim like, how you started flee, or how and who bolster love, America is a toy chest 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