Barack Obama

• 1. Introduction

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  Barack Obama was born on the 4th of August 1961 at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, making him the only person to become president of the United States who was not born in the contiguous 48 states. His father was a 27-year-old Kenyan student on a scholarship; his mother was 18 years old. That unlikely beginning in the Pacific points toward a life defined by crossings: of continents, of racial categories, of what most Americans assumed was politically possible.

  By the time he was ten, Obama had lived in Honolulu, Seattle, and Jakarta. He had attended a Catholic elementary school in Indonesia under the enrolled name Barry Soetoro. He later became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, worked as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, and eventually ran for the presidency as the first African American nominee of a major party. Each of those chapters raised its own questions: What kind of politician emerges from that kind of biography? What does it mean to win the White House as the first African American president? And what does a presidency shaped by a financial collapse, two wars, and a landmark health care overhaul look like in retrospect?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and carried English, Welsh, German, Swiss, and Irish ancestry. In 2007 it was discovered that her great-great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, had emigrated from the village of Moneygall, Ireland, to the United States in 1850. In 2012, Ancestry.com found a strong likelihood that she also descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man who lived in the Colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century.

  Obama Sr. was a Luo Kenyan from Nyang'oma Kogelo. His last name derived from his Luo descent. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and married in Wailuku on the 2nd of February 1961. By March 1964 the marriage had ended. Obama Sr. returned to Kenya, worked as a senior economic analyst in the Ministry of Finance, married for a third time, and visited his son only once, at Christmas 1971. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21.

  Obama spent four years in Jakarta after his mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian geography student she met at the University of Hawaii in 1963. Those four years gave Obama fluent Indonesian as a child. His stepfather taught him, he later wrote, a hardheaded assessment of how the world works. In 1971 Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and finished his schooling at Punahou, a private college preparatory school, aided by a scholarship.

  By his own account, Obama used alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years as a way of pushing questions of identity out of his mind. He kept the nickname Barry until a trip to Kenya in 1980. His mother, who earned a PhD in anthropology in 1992, died in 1995 in Hawaii following unsuccessful treatment for ovarian and uterine cancer.

• 3. Building a Career

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  Obama's first public speech came in February 1981, when he called on Occidental College in Los Angeles to divest from South Africa in protest of apartheid. Later that year he transferred to Columbia University in New York, majoring in political science with a specialty in international relations, and graduated in 1983 with a 3.7 GPA.

  After Columbia he worked roughly a year at the Business International Corporation as a financial researcher and writer, then three months as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus in 1985. He moved to Chicago in June 1985 to direct the Developing Communities Project, a faith-based organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on the South Side. He worked there through May 1988, helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.

  Despite being offered a full scholarship to Northwestern University School of Law, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1988. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year and elected president of the journal in his second year. That election drew national media attention and led to a publishing contract; the manuscript became the memoir Dreams from My Father, published in mid-1995. He graduated from Harvard Law in 1991 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.

  Back in Chicago, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, then taught constitutional law there for twelve years: as a lecturer from 1992 to 1996 and as a senior lecturer from 1996 to 2004. From April to October 1992, he also directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration campaign with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars that registered 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state. The result earned him a spot on Crain's Chicago Business 1993 list of forty powers under forty.

• 4. The Path to the Senate

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  Obama won election to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding Democratic state senator Alice Palmer from the 13th District, which spanned South Side Chicago neighborhoods from Hyde Park-Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn. He built a record that drew bipartisan support: tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reforms, and in 2001 support for Republican Governor George Ryan's payday-loan and predatory-mortgage regulations aimed at averting foreclosures.

  In January 2003 he became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee after Democrats regained the majority. He led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained and a law making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations.

  His 2000 run for the U.S. House against four-term incumbent Bobby Rush ended in a loss by roughly two to one. He commissioned a poll in May 2002 to assess a U.S. Senate race, retained political media consultant David Axelrod by August, and formally announced his candidacy in January 2003. On the 2nd of October 2002, the same day President Bush and Congress agreed on the resolution authorizing the Iraq War, Obama addressed Chicago's first high-profile anti-Iraq War rally and publicly opposed the conflict.

  In the March 2004 primary he won by a surprise landslide, which overnight made him a rising star in the national Democratic Party. In July 2004 he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention before nine million television viewers. His general election opponent, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew in June 2004; replacement nominee Alan Keyes lost to Obama in November by 70 percent of the vote, the largest Senate victory margin in Illinois history. Obama carried 92 of the state's 102 counties.

• 5. Winning the Presidency

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  On the 10th of February 2007, Obama announced his presidential candidacy in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, the same site where Abraham Lincoln delivered his House Divided speech in 1858. The Democratic primary narrowed to Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton after early contests. Obama built a steady lead through superior fundraising, dominant organizing in caucus states, and better exploitation of delegate-allocation rules. By the 2nd of June 2008 he had enough delegates to clinch the nomination.

  On the 23rd of August 2008, he announced Delaware senator Joe Biden as his running mate, selecting him over former Indiana governor and senator Evan Bayh and Virginia governor Tim Kaine. Obama delivered his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High stadium in Denver to a crowd of roughly 84,000; more than three million viewers worldwide watched the speech.

  On the 19th of June 2008, Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate to decline public financing in a general election since the system was created in 1976. The three presidential debates with Republican nominee John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin concluded in October. On the 4th of November, Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173 and took 52.9 percent of the popular vote to McCain's 45.7 percent. He delivered his victory speech before hundreds of thousands of supporters in Chicago's Grant Park and became only the third U.S. senator in history to move directly to the White House, alongside Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy.

  In 2012 Obama was reelected with 332 electoral votes and 51.1 percent of the popular vote over Republican Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan, becoming the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win the popular vote twice.

• 6. Domestic Policy Record

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  The first bill Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, relaxing the statute of limitations for equal-pay lawsuits. Five days later he signed the reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program to cover four million additional uninsured children.

  On the 17th of February 2009, he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion economic stimulus package. Unemployment peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2009 before falling to 7.7 percent by November 2012 and to 6.3 percent by the first quarter of 2014. The Congressional Budget Office credited the stimulus with increasing employment by 1-2.1 million jobs.

  On the 23rd of March 2010, Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which had passed the House 219 to 212. The law expanded Medicaid eligibility for people earning up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, subsidized premiums for those earning up to 400 percent of that level, and prohibited denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions. The CBO estimated the law would reduce the federal deficit by $143 billion over its first decade. The Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate 5-4 in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.

  Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor on the 26th of May 2009; she was confirmed on the 6th of August 2009 as the first Hispanic American Supreme Court justice. Elena Kagan was confirmed on the 5th of August 2010, bringing the number of women simultaneously on the Court to three for the first time.

  On same-sex marriage, Obama had stated support for legalization as a state senate candidate in 1996, reversed to opposition in 2004 and 2008, and then on the 9th of May 2012 publicly affirmed his personal support for legalization, the first sitting U.S. president to do so. During his second inaugural address on the 21st of January 2013, he became the first president to mention gay rights in an inaugural address.

• 7. Foreign Policy and Legacy

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  CIA operatives began developing intelligence in July 2010 that pointed to a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as Osama bin Laden's hideout. CIA director Leon Panetta briefed Obama in March 2011. Over the following six weeks Obama rejected a plan to bomb the compound and authorized a raid by Navy SEALs instead. On the 1st of May 2011, Operation Neptune Spear resulted in the shooting death of bin Laden; DNA testing was one of five methods used to confirm his identity, and his body was buried at sea within hours. Spontaneous celebrations broke out across the United States, including at New York City's Ground Zero and Times Square.

  In Iraq, Obama announced on the 27th of February 2009 that combat operations would end within 18 months. The last U.S. combat brigade exited on the 19th of August 2010, drawing down from 142,000 troops. When ISIL captured Mosul in June 2014, Obama sent 275 troops for embassy security and in August 2014 ordered U.S. airstrikes. By the end of that year, American forces had flown 16,000 sorties over the battlefield.

  On the 4th of June 2009, Obama delivered a speech at Cairo University calling for a new beginning in relations between the United States and the Islamic world. Beginning in the spring of 2013, secret meetings between the United States and Cuba were held in Canada and Vatican City; Pope Francis had advised both sides to exchange prisoners as a goodwill gesture. Those talks led to normalized relations between the two countries announced in December 2014.

  Obama left office in January 2017 with high approval ratings domestically and internationally. He used the Antiquities Act to create 25 new national monuments and expand four others, protecting more federal lands and waters than any previous U.S. president. He signed the Paris Agreement on climate change. Construction on his presidential library began on Chicago's South Side in 2021. Outside politics, he has published three books: Dreams from My Father in 1995, The Audacity of Hope in 2006, and A Promised Land in 2020.